A colleague who I like and respect recently tweeted: “I can’t be the only L&D person who shudders when I hear the word ‘template'”, and I felt vulnerable because I’ve recently been talking about templates.   To be fair, I have a different meaning than most of what’s called a ‘template’, so I thought perhaps I should explain.

Let’s be clear: what’s typically referred to as a template is usually a simple screen type for a rapid authoring tool.  That is, it allows you to easily fill in the information and generate a particular type of interaction: drag-and-drop, multiple-choice, etc.  And this can be useful when you’ve got well-designed activities but want to easily develop them.  But they’re not a substitute for good design, and can make it easy to do bad design too. Worse are those skins that add gratuitous visual elements (e.g. a ‘racing’ theme) to a series of questions in some deluded view that such window dressing has any impact on anything.

So what  am  I talking about?  I’m talking about templates that help reinforce the depth of learning science around the elements. I’m talking about templates for: introductions that ask for the emotional opener, the drill-down from the larger context, etc; practices that are contextualized, meaningful to learner, differentiated response options and specific feedback, etc; etc.  This could be done in other ways, such as a checklist, but putting it into the place where you’re developing strikes me as a better driver ;).  Particularly if it is embedded in the house ‘style’, so that the look and feel is tightly coupled to learner experience.

Atul Gawande, in his brilliant  The Checklist Manifesto, points out how there are gaps in our mental processing that means we can skip steps and forget to coordinate.  Whether the guidelines are in a template or a process tool like a checklist, it helps to have cognitive facilitation.  So what I’m talking about is  not a template that says how it’s to look, but instead what it should contain. There are ways to combine intrinsic motivation openings with initial practice, for instance.

Templates don’t have to stifle creativity, they can serve to improve quality instead.  As big a fan as I am of creativity, I also recognize that we can end up less than optimal if there isn’t some rigor  in our approach.  (Systematic creativity is  not an oxymoron!)  In fact, systematicity in the creative process can help optimize the outcomes. So however you want to scaffold quality and creativity, whether through templates or other tools, I do implore you to put in place support to ensure the best outcomes for you and  your audience.

As mentioned before, I’ve become a member of my local Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), as in the case of disaster, the official first-responders (police, fire, and paramedics) will be overwhelmed.  And it’s a good group, with a lot of excellent  efforts in processes and tools as well as drills.  Still, of course, there’s  room for improvement.  I encountered one such at our last meeting, and I think it’s an interesting case study.

So one of the things you’re supposed to do in conducting search and rescue is to go from building to building assessing damage and looking for people to help.  And one of the useful things to do is to mark the status of the search and the outcomes, so no one wastes effort on an already explored building. While the marking is  covered in training and there’re support tools to help you remember,  ideally it’d be memorable, so that you  can regenerate the information and  don’t have to look it up.

The design for the marking is pretty clear: you first make a diagonal slash when you start investigating a building, and then you make a crossing slash  when you’ve made your assessment. And  specific information is to be recorded in each quarter of the resulting X: left, right, top, and bottom.  (Note that the US standard set by FEMA doesn’t correspond to the international standard from the  International Search & Rescue Advisory Group, interestingly).

However, when we brought it up in a recent meeting (and they’re very good about revisiting things that quickly fade from memory), it was obvious that most people couldn’t recall what goes where. And when I heard what the standard was, I realized it didn’t have a memorable structure.  So, here are the four things to record:

• the group who goes in
• when the group completes
• what hazards may exist
• and how many people and what condition they’re in*

So how would  you  map these to the quadrants?  And in one sense it doesn’t matter  if there’s a sensible rationale behind them. One sign that there’s not?  You can’t remember what goes where.

Our  local team leader was able to recall that the order is: left – group, top – completion, right – hazards, and bottom – people.  However, this seems to me to be less than  memorable, so let me explain.

To me, wherever you put the in, left or top, the coming out ought to be opposite. And given our natural flow, group going in makes sense to the left, and coming out ought to go on the right.  In – out.  Then, it’s relatively arbitrary where hazards and people go.  I’d make a case that top-of-mind should be the hazards found to warn others, but that the people are the bottom line (see what I did there?).  I could easily make a case for the reverse, but either would be a mnemonic to support remembering.  Instead, as far as I can tell, it’s completely arbitrary. Now, if it’s not arbitrary and there is a rationale,  it’d help to share  that!

The point being, to help people remember things that are in some sense arbitrary, make a story that makes it memorable. Sure, I can look it up, assuming that the lookup book they handed out stays in the pocket in my special backpack.  (And I’m likely to remember now, because of all this additional processing, but that’s  not what happens in the training.)  However,  making it regenerable from some structure gives you a much better chance of having it to hand. Either a model or a story is better than arbitrary, and one’s possible with a rewrite, but as it is, there’s neither.

So there’s a lesson in design to be had, I reckon, and I hope you’ll put it to use.

* (black or dead, red or needing immediate treatment for life-threatening issues, yellow or needing non-urgent treatment, and green or ok)

In a recent conversation, we were talking  about the Kirkpatrick model, and a colleague  had an interesting perspective that hadn‘t really struck me overtly. Kirkpatrick is widely (not widely enough, and wrongly) used as an evaluation tool, but he talked about using it as a design tool, and that perspective made clear for me a problem with our approaches.

So, there‘s a lot of debate about the Kirkpatrick model, whether it helps or hinders the movement towards good learning. I think it‘s misrepresented (including by its own progenitors, though they‘re working on that ;), and while I‘m open to new tools I think it does a nice job of framing a fairly simple but important idea. The goal is to start with the end in mind.

And the evidence is that it‘s not being used well. The largest implementation of the model is level 1, which isn‘t of use (correlation between learner reaction and actual impact is .09, essentially zero with a rounding error). Level 2 drops to a third of orgs, and it drops from there. And this is broken.

The point, and this is emphasized by the ‘design‘ perspective, is that you are supposed to start with level 4, and work back. What‘s the measurable indicator in the organization that isn‘t up to snuff, and what behavior (level 3) would likely impact that? And how do we change that behavior (Level 2)? And here‘s where it can go beyond training: that intervention might be a job aid, or access to a network (which hasn‘t been much in the promotion of the model).

To be fair, the proponents do argue you should be starting at Level 4, but with the numbering (which Don admits he might have got wrong) and the emphasis on evaluation, it doesn‘t hit you up front. Using it as a design tool, however, would emphasize the point.

So here‘s to thinking of learning design as working backwards from a problem, not forwards from a request. And, of course, to better learning design overall.

In the process of looking at ways to improve the design of courses, the starting point is good objectives. And as a consequence, I‘ve been enthused about the notion of competencies, as a way to put the focus on what people do, not what they know. So how do we do this, systematically, reliably, and repeatably?

Let‘s be clear, there are times we need knowledge level objectives. In medicine or any other field where responses need to be quick and accurate, we need a very constrained vocabulary. SO drilling in the exact meanings of words is valuable, as an example. Though ideally, that‘s coupled with using that language to set context or make decisions. So “we know it‘s the right medial collateral ligament, prep for the surgery” could serve as a context, or we could have a choice to operate on the left or right atrial ventricle as a decision point. As Van Merriënboer‘s 4 Component Instructional Design talks about, we need to separate out the knowledge from the complex problems we apply it to. Still, I suggest that what‘s likely to make a difference to individuals and organizations is the ability to make better decisions, not recite rote knowledge.

So how do we get competencies when we want them? The problem, as I‘ve talked about before, is that SMEs don‘t have access to 70% of what they actually do, it‘s compiled away. We then need good processes, so I‘ve talked to a couple of educational institutions doing competencies, to see what could be learned. And it‘s clear that while there‘s no turnkey approach, what‘s emerging is a process with some specific elements.

One thing is that if you‘re trying to cover a whole college level course, you‘ve got to break it up. Break down the top level into a handful of competencies. Then you continue to take each of those apart, and perhaps another level, ‘til you have a reasonable scope. This is heuristic, of course, but with a focus on ‘do‘, you have a good likelihood to get here.

One of the things I‘ve heard across various entities trying to get meaningful objectives is working with more than one SME. If you can get several, you have a better chance of triangulating on the right outcomes and objectives. They may well disagree about the knowledge, but if you manage the process right (emphasize ‘do‘, lather, rinse, repeat), you should be able to get them to converge. It may take some education, and you may have to let them get the

Not just any SMEs will do. Two things are really valuable: on the ground experience to know what needs to be done (and doesn‘t), and the ability to identify and articulate the models that guide the performance. Some instructors, for instance, can teach to a text but really aren‘t truly masters of the content nor are experienced practitioners. Multiple helps, but the better the SME, the better the outcome.

I believe you want to ensure that you‘re getting both the right things, and all the things. I‘ve recommended to a client about triangulating not just with SMEs, but with practitioners (or, rather, the managers of the roles the learners will be engaged in), and any other reliable stakeholders. The point is to get input from the practice as well as the theory, identifying the models that support proper behavior, and the misconceptions that underpin where they go wrong.

Once you have a clear idea of the things people need to be able to do, you can then identify the language for the competencies. I‘m not a fan of Bloom‘s (unwieldy, hard to reliably apply), but I am a fan of Mager-style definitions (action, context, metric).

After this is done, you can identify the knowledge needed, and perhaps created objectives for that, but to me the focus is on the ‘do‘, the competencies. This is very much aligned with an activity-based learning model, whereby you immediately design the activities that align with the competencies before you decide the content.

So, this is what I‘m inferring. There would be good tools and templates you could design to go with this, identifying competencies, misconceptions, and at the same time also getting stories and motivations. (An exercise left for the reader. ;) The overall goal, however, of getting meaningful objectives is key to getting good learning design. Any nuances I‘m missing?