In last night’s #lrnchat on instructional design,there was some discussion of the term ‘learning facilitator’ versus ‘trainer’ (which now I can’t find!?!), and it got me wondering.   I’ve also been thinking about a set of talks I may be giving, and how to break them up.   There was also a discussion on ITFORUM that expanded to discuss how experts are losing the problem-solving skills and how to develop them.   It leads me to think about what is learning, and why we are arguing that the new role in the organization will be for learning facilitation, not for ‘instruction’ or ‘training’.

How do we learn?   Not how do we believe we should be instructed, but how do we learn? If we look at anthropology, empirical studies, psychology and more, the ideal learning happens when learners get why they’re learning, are working on meaningful tasks, have support around, are given time to reflect, and more.   Recourse to knowledge resources like tapes, videos, texts, etc, is driven by need, not pre-determined.   It happens best when the task has a level of ambiguity where learners collaborate to understand. There’s problem-solving, experimentation and evaluation, and more.

This happens naturally among communities of practice, and so for much of organizational learning, creating an environment where this can happen around organizational goals is really the ‘informal learning’ Jay Cross talked about in his book on the topic.   Whether you want to call the actual deliberate support of informal learning ‘non-formal’ or not (I’m not hot on the idea, but can see how it might help some folks get their mind around it).   However, I do strongly want to suggest that supporting informal learning in systematic ways is one of the highest value investments an organization can make in being nimble, agile, innovative, and consequently successful.

Then, we go back and look at situations where we have new folks, including folks moving to new areas (practitioners promoted to managers, where they’re new to management), new processes are introduced (whether in sales approach, new technology in a product, or new service), and people wanting to reskill.   This is more about execution, and is formal learning, where we need to support motivation and manage anxiety as well as develop new skills.   The point is, for the novice to practitioner transition, we need the formal treatment, whereas practitioner to expert transition is more informal, and even information can be instruction and sufficient.

When we have this formal situation, we often do the information, example, practice routine, that’s been shown to work.   However, newer pedagogies, where we put meaningful tasks up front, and organize the learning around it, making it structurally closer to the more natural learning model, is proving valuable.   Call it a social constructivist, or connectivist, or any other pedagogical framework.   What you do is carefully structure the task to be meaningful and obviously important to the learner, carefully control the challenge, and scaffold support   for the knowledge and resources.   This, really, is taking instructional design in a new direction, still requiring design, but using a new pedagogy that’s more learning facilitation than ‘training’. It may be that that’s not what folks think of as training, and ideally training is more learning facilitation, but I find the relabelling to help convey the necessary approach as ‘trainer’ can unfortunately be ‘spray and pray’ or ‘show up and throw up’, at least in practice.

Note that this facilitation needs to address something more, both formally and informally.   You have to develop the ability to learn in this way – the problem representation, information access, and experimentation skills – not take it for granted.   Not everyone is a good self- or group-learner, and yet you want them to get better at this for the informal learning to really be optimal.   Make those skills explicit, and scaffold that development as well!

No one said it’s easy, but it seems to me a more robust, important, and valuable contribution to make, a task to be proud of.   That’s why many of us are now suggesting that the learning role in an organization will move to facilitation from an information presentation and testing role.   Knowledge is not what’s going to be useful going forward, but skills in applying that knowledge.   So my suggestion is to start thinking about facilitating learning, and abandon a focus on knowledge development. That’s where I think instructional design has to go, and I think others are seeing and saying it too.   Are you?

A tweet from Joshua Kerievsky (@JoshuaKerievsky) led me to the concept of design debt in programming.   The idea is (quoting from Ward Cunningham):

Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite…. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load of an unconsolidated implementation, object-oriented or otherwise.

I started wondering what the equivalent in learning design would be. Obviously, software design isn’t the same as learning design, though learning design could stand to benefit from what software engineers know about process and quality.   For example, the Personal Software Process‘ focus on quality review and data-driven improvement could do wonders for improving individual and team learning design.

Similarly, refactoring to remove typical bad practices in programming could easily analogize to the reliable patterns we see in Broken ID.   There are mistakes reliably made, and yet we don’t identify them nor have processes to systematically remedy them.

What are the consequences of these mistakes?   It’s clear we often take shortcuts in our learning design, and let’s be honest, we seldom go back. For big projects, we might create iterative representations (outlines, finished storyboards), and ideally we tune them once developed, but seldom do we launch, and then reengineer based upon feedback, unless it’s heinous.   Heck, we scandalously seldom even measure the outcomes with more than smile sheets!

For software engineering, the debt accrues as you continue to patch the bad code, rather than fixing it properly (paying off the principal).   In learning design, the cost is in continuing to use the bad learning design.   You’ve minimized the effectiveness, and consequently wasted the money it cost and the time of the learners.   Another way we accrue debt is transfer learning designed for one mode, e.g. F2F delivery, and then re-implement it as elearning, synchronous or asynchronous.

In software engineering, you’re supposed to design your code in small, functional units with testable inputs and outputs, and there might be different ways of accomplishing it inside, but the important component are the testable results.   Our learning equivalent would be how we address learning objectives, and of course first we have to get the objectives right, and how they build to achieve the necessary outcome, but then it shifts to getting the proper approach to meeting objectives. If we focus on the latter, it’s clear we can think about refactoring to improve the design of each component.

Frankly, our focus on process is still too much on a waterfall model that’s been debunked as an approach elsewhere.   We don’t have quality controls in a meaningful way, and we don’t check to see what reliable mistakes we’re making.   Maybe we need a quality process for design. I see standards, but I don’t see review.   We have better and better processes (e.g. Merrill’s Ripple in a Pond), but still not seeing how we bake review and quality process into it.   Seems to me we’ve still a ways to go.

I regularly rail against cookie-cutter learning design, boring elearning, etc.   I like to blame it on designers who don’t know the depths of learning behind the elements of design, and perhaps also on managers who don’t work to ensure that the learning objectives are tied closely to meaningful business outcome.   And I think that’s true, but of course there’s another culprit as well: clients who just ask for the same old thing!

I regularly work with a couple of partners who use me when there’s a need to go to the ‘next level’, whether it’s to mobile, pushing the engagement envelope, or working more strategically (that’s one of the way I help clients, too).   However, too often they’re just asked to turn content into courses, and the clients don’t care that the learning objectives in that content are too low-level, too knowledge-focused, completely abstract or de-contextualized, and generally not meaningful.   Now, my partners generally push back a bit, trying to help the client realize the value of a deeper design, but many times the client doesn’t want to put any more money in, doesn’t want to think about it, they just want that course up with a quiz (even with a pre-test!, *shudder*).   And my partners will go along, because creating elearning is their business and they can’t just turn away work.

And I’ve heard that from in-h0use departments as well.   As one of the attendees at my strategic elearning workshop a couple of months ago said, the managers from other business units say “just do that stuff you do” and don’t want any deeper thought into it.   They want it fast, based upon the content, and apparently don’t care that it isn’t going to lead to any meaningful change.   Or don’t know the difference. Hey, they learned that way, so it must be OK, right?

However, I think we owe it to the learners, to those clients, and to ourselves to start educating those clients, internal or external, about good learning.   You’ve got to know it yourself first, of course, but once you’re doing it anyway, there’s really no extra overhead at the first level.   But you want to start pushing back: “what’s the behavior that needs to change/”, or “what decisions do they need to be able to make that they can’t make correctly now?”   And, we need to ask “how will you know that it’s changed? What are the metrics that you’re trying to impact?”   Once you’ve got them thinking about measurable change, you have the opportunity to start talking about meaningful impact and good design to achieve outcomes.

Frankly, you can’t complain about relevance to the organization if you’re not fighting to achieve better outcomes, ones that matter.   So, educate yourselves, improve your processes, and then fight to be doing more meaningful stuff.   Hey, we’re supposed to be about learning, and marketing our services is really about good customer education! Get them educated, and get to be doing more meaningful and consequently rewarding design.

On my last post, I got a comment that really made me think.   The problem was content coming as PPTs from SMEs, and the question was poignant: “Given limited time and resources on a project how can you plan in advance to ensure that your learning is engaging and creates effective outcomes?”   I commented a reply, but I’d like to elaborate on that.

I like the focus on the ‘planning’ part: what can you do up front to increase the quality of your learning outcomes?   It’s a recursive design problem: people need to be able to design better, what training, job aids, tools, and/or social learning can we develop to make this work?   Having just done this on a project where a team I was a member of   were responsible for generating a whole curriculum around the domain, I can speak with some confidence about how to make this work.

First, are the tools.   Too often, the templates enforce rigor around having the elements, rather than about what makes those elements really work.   So, on the project, I not only guided the design of the templates, but the definitions associated with the elements that helped ensure they accomplished the necessary learning activities.   For example, it’s no good to have an introduction that doesn’t activate the relevant prior experience and knowledge, doesn’t help the learner comprehend why this learning is important, or even accomplishes this in an aversive way (can you say: “pre-test“?   :).   This is the performance support component, that helps make it easy to do things well and more difficult to do the wrong thing.   Similarly with ensuring meaningful activity in the first place, etc.

Next is the understanding.   This comes both by creating a shared understanding in the team, and then refining the process, making the outcome a ‘habit’.   First, I’d worked with some of the team before, so they shared my design principles, then I presented and co-developed with the client that understanding.   Then, as first draft content came out, I’d critique it and used that to tune the template, and the understanding amongst the content developers.

The involvement in refining the design process took some time, but really paid off as the quality of the resulting output took a steep increase and then stabilized as good quality learning experience yet reproducible in a cost-effective way and sustainable and manageable way.

As I’ve mentioned before, the nuances between bad elearning and really effective and engaging content are subtle to the untrained eye, but the outcomes are not, both subjectively from the learner’s experience, and objectively from the outcomes.   You should be collecting both those metrics, and reviewing the outcomes, as they both provide useful information about how your design is working (or not) and how to improve it.

If it matters, and it should, you really should be reviewing and tuning your processes to achieve engagement and learning outcomes.   It’s not more expensive, in the long term, though it does take more work.   But otherwise, it’s just a waste of money and that is expensive!   You’ll end up in the situation Charles Jenning’s cites, when”you might as well throw the money spent on these activities out the window.”   Don’t waste money, spend the time assuring that your learning design processes achieve what they need to.   Your organization, and your learners, will thank you.