I’ve had my head down on a major project, a bunch of upcoming speaking engagements, some writing I’ve agreed to do, and…(hence the relative paucity of blog posts).  That project, however, has been interesting for a variety of reasons, and one really is worth sharing: ID isn’t easy.  We’ve been given some content, and it’s not just about being good little IDs and taking what they give us and designing instruction from it.  We could do it, but it would be a disaster (in this case, that’s what we’re working from, a too-rote too-knowledge-dump course).  And it’s too often what I’ve seen done, and it’s wrong.

SMEs don’t know how they do what they do.  Part of the process of becoming expert is compiling away the underlying thinking that goes on, so it moves from conscious to subconscious.  So when the time comes to work with SMEs about what’s needed, they a) make up stories about what they do, or b) resort to what they’ve learned (e.g. knowledge). It’s up to the ID to push back and unpack the models that guide performance.  Yet that’s hard, particularly when they’re not domain experts, and SMEs have issues.

It takes a fair bit of common sense (remarkable by how uncommon it is), and willingness to continually reframe what the expert says and twist it until it’s focused on how they make decisions. There’re formal processes call Cognitive Task Analysis when you need them, but a ‘discount CTA’ approach (analogous to Nielsen’s ‘discount usability‘) would be appropriate in many cases.Such an approach includes getting some really good examples of both successes and failures of the task under consideration, and working hard to extract the principles that guide success.  But SMEs can’t be order takers; they have to be willing to fight to understand what decisions do learners need to make that they can’t make now, and how to make those decisions.

It really helps to either have a deep background in the field, or a broad background.  You can get the former by teaching ID to  a SME, or having an ID work in a particular field for a long time.  The latter works if you’re more in the ‘gun for hire’ mode. You then need, however, a broad knowledge that you can draw upon to make some reasonable inferences. That’s what I typically do, as my deep expertise is in learning design, but fortunately I’m eternally curious (used to lie on the floor with a volume of the World Book spread out in front of me). Model-based and systems thinking help immensely.

You really have to work hard, use your brain, draw upon real world knowledge  and  go to the mat with the material.  If you’re not willing to do this, you’re not cut out to be a learning designer. There’s much more, understanding the way we learn, experience design, and more, but this is part of the full picture.

In looking across several instances of training in official procedures, I regularly see that, despite bunches of regulations and guidelines, that things are not black and white, but that there are myriad shades of grey.  And I think that there is probably a very reasonable way to deal with it.  (Surely you didn’t think I was talking about a book!)

In these situations, there are typically cases that are very white, others that are very black, but most end up somewhere in the middle, with a fair degree of ambiguity.  And the concerns of the governing body are various.  In one instance, the body was more concerned that you’d done due diligence and could show a trail of the thinking that led to the decision. If you did that, you were ok, even if you ended up making the wrong decision. In another case, the concern was more about consistency and repeatability. You didn’t want to show bias.

However, the training doesn’t really reflect that. In many cases, they point out the law (in the official verbiage), you work through some examples, and you’re quizzed on the knowledge.  You might even workshop a few examples.  Typically, you are to get the ‘right answer’.

I’d suggest that a better approach would be to give the learners a series of examples that are first workshopped by small groups, with their work brought back to the class.  The important things are the ways the discussion is facilitated, supported, and the choice of problems.  First, I think they’re given the problems and the associated requirements, guidelines, or regulations.  Period.  No presentation beforehand, nothing except reactivating the relevance of this material to their real work.

I’m  suggesting that the first problem they face be, essentially, ‘white’, and the second is ‘black’ (or vice versa). The point is for them to see what the situation looks like when it’s very clear,  and for them to get used to using the materials to make a determination. (This is likely what they’re going to be doing in real practice anyway!)  At this point, the discussion facilitation is focused on helping them understand how the rules play out in the clear cases.

Then they start getting grayer cases, ones where there’s more ambiguity.  Here, the focus of discussion facilitation is to start emphasizing the subtext: either ‘document your work’, or ‘be consistent’, or whatever.  The amount of these will depend on how much practice they need.  If the decisions are complex, they’re relatively infrequent, or the decisions are really important, they’ll need more practice.

This way, the learners are a) getting comfortable with the decisions, b) getting used to using the materials to make the decisions, and c) recognizing what’s really important.

I’m relatively certain that this may be problematic for some of the SMEs, who may prefer to argue for right/wrong answers, but I think it reflects the reality when you unpack the thinking behind the way it plays out in practice.  And I think that’s more important for the learners, and the training organization, to recognize.

Of course, as they work in groups, the most valuable way to support them may be for them to have the coordinates of other members of their group to call on when they face really  tough decisions. That sort of collaboration may trump formal instruction anyway ;).

 

Of late, I’ve been both reviewing eLearning, and designing processes & templates. As I’ve said before, the nuances between well-designed and well produced eLearning  are subtle, but important. Reading a forthcoming book that outlines the future but recounts the past, it occurs to me that it may be worthwhile to look at a continuum of possibilities.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that the work is well-produced, and explore some levels of differentiation in quality of the learning design. So let’s talk about a lack of worthwhile objectives, lack of models, insufficient examples, insufficient practice, and lack of emotional connection.  These combine into several levels of quality.

The first level is where there aren’t any, or aren’t good learning objectives. Here we’re talking about waffly objectives like ‘understand’, ‘know’, etc. Look, I’m not a behaviorist, but I think *when* you have formal learning goals (and that’s not as often as we deliver), you bloody well ought to have some pretty meaningful description around it.  Instead what we see is the all-to-frequently observed knowledge dump and knowledge test.

Which, by the way, is  a colossal waste of time and money.  Seriously, you are, er, throwing away money if that’s your learning solution. Rote knowledge dump and test reliably lead to no meaningful behavior change.  We even have a label for it in cognitive science: “inert knowledge”.

So let’s go beyond meaningless objectives, and say we are focused on outcomes that will make a difference. We’re ok from here, right? Er, no.  Turns out there are several different ways we can go wrong.  The first is to focus on rote procedures. You may want execution, but increasingly the situation is such that the decisions are too complex to trust a completely prescribed response. If it’s totally predictable, you automate it!

Otherwise, you have two options; you provide sufficient practice, as they do with airline plots and heart surgeons. If lives aren’t on the line and failure isn’t as expensive as training, you should focus on providing model-based instruction where you develop the performer’s understanding of what’s underlying the decisions of how to respond.  That latter gives you a basis for reconstructing an appropriate response even if you forget the rote approach.   I recommend this in general, of course.

Which brings up another way learning designs go wrong.  Sufficient practice as mentioned above would suggest repeating until you can’t get it wrong.  What we tend to see, however, is practice until you get it right. And that isn’t sufficient.  Of course, I’m talking real practice, not knowledge test ala multiple choice questions. Learners need to perform!

We don’t see sufficient examples, either. While we don’t want to overwhelm our learners, we do need sufficient contexts to abstract across. And it does not have to occur in just one day, indeed, it shouldn’t!  We need to space the learning out for anything more than the most trivial of learning. Yet the ‘event’ model of learning crammed into one session is much of what we see.

The final way many designs fails is to ignore the emotional side of the equation.  This manifests itself in several ways, including introductions, examples, and practice.  Too often, introductions let you know what you’re about to endure, without considering why you should care.  If you’re not communicating the value to the learner, why should they care? I reckon that if you don’t convey the WIIFM, you better not expect any meaningful outcomes.  There are more nuances here (e.g. activating relevant knowledge, etc), but this is the most egregious.

In examples and practice, too, the learner should see the relevance of what is being covered to what they know is important and they care about.  These are two important and separate things.  What they see should be real situations where the knowledge being addressed plays a real role. Then they should also care about the examples personally.

It’s hard to be able to address all the elements, but aligning them is critical to achieving well-designed, not just well-produced learning. Are you really making the necessary distinctions?

Really?  Yes.  Let me explain:

I’ve been reviewing some content for a government agency. This is exciting stuff, evaluating whether contract changes are valid.  Ok, it’s not exciting to me, but to the audience it’s important.  And there’s a reliable pattern to the slide deck that the instructor is supposed to use: it’s  large  amounts of text.

Again, exciting stuff, right from the regulations.  But that’s important to this audience; I actually don’t have a problem with it. The problem is that it’s all crammed on one screen!  Why is this a problem?

It’s  not a problem for printing.  You wouldn’t want to waste paper, and trees, printing it out. So being dense in this way isn’t bad. No, it’s bad when it’s presented.

When it’s presented, there is some highlighting of the important things. But if you were to hear someone go over the three wordy bullet points on one screen, you’d be hard pressed to follow.  However, if you spaced the same screen out three times, one for each bullet point, , you’d support cognitive load more appropriately.  You’re using more screens, but covering the same material in the same time, you’re just switching between screens emphasizing the separate points.  And you don’t have to put each bullet point on a separate screen; to help maintain context you  could have the same text but only the relevant one clear and the others greyed out or blurred.

Hey, screens are cheap. In fact, they’re essentially  free!  Using more screens when presenting doesn’t cost any more.  Really!  You can address each point clearly, maintaining context but helping focus attention.  It’ll help the instructor too, not just the students.

Ok, so there is  one cost.  Maintaining a separate deck for printing and projecting could be some extra management overhead.  But for one, who’s better at policies and procedures than the government?  More seriously, I often will have a slide in my deck that’s a prose version of something I convey graphically, e.g. the five slides I use to present Brent Schlenker’s five-ables of social media (findable, feedable, linkable, taggable, editable).  In the presentation I have a slide with an image for each. For print, I hide those five and show the one text one.  It’s not that hard.  The same principle could be used here, the full slide for printing, the three equivalents for presenting.

There are times when you want more slides. They’re simpler, more focused, and better support maintaining context and focus. Don’t scrimp on the slides.  It’s better to have slides with not so much text, but if you must, space it out.