Last week, at Online Educa in Berlin, I gave a tutorial on deeper elearning as a pre-conference event. In it, I talked about getting more meaningful objectives, writing practice that actually develops meaningful outcomes, and content (concepts & examples) aligned to support effective practice. I also talked about emotional engagement and social learning, before talking about revising design processes to incorporate these deeper elements in an effective and not-too-different approach.  In short, I was talking about aligning our designs, and our design processes, to how we think and learn.

This is something that most organizations should be thinking about.  I was pleasantly surprised that the audience included folks from universities, not-for-profits, and government agencies as well as businesses.  The challenges are different in some respects, but there are shared elements.  Education tends to be about long term learning relationships (typically at least a half year to several years), versus the short-term relationships (e.g. an hour to several days) in organizational learning.  Yet the need to respect how our brains work is a continuum. Our brains learn in particular ways that are unaffected by the curricular needs.  Learning solutions for performance and for education both still need to respect our neural and cognitive architecture.

And too little of what  we do  reflects what we know.  As a recent commenter noted, there’s a conflict between the de-facto practices and what research says.  As she also noted, our tools are also focused on supporting wrong approaches.  It’s not that tools prevent doing meaningful learning, it’s just that you have to get your design right first and then make the tool conform (as opposed to the alternative). And our limitations as designers flow from the same source, our brain,  as our limitations as learners.  Thus we need to be as aware of cognition in our designing as in our design.

I’ll be talking about the problems this engenders in a special  webinar  tomorrow. There’re still a few slots left. If you’re committed to trying to improve  your learning design, and you have the resources to do so, this is an opportunity to get started.  There isn’t a lot of pressure  yet, but it’s time to be proactive  before people start asking questions about the business impact of what we’re doing. What do you think?

At the DevLearn conference, I ran a Morning Buzz on Learning Design Strategy. I’m happy to say that the participants threw in lots of ideas, and I thought they were worth capturing. I started with a set of questions to address, so I’ll go through their comments in roughly that order (though we didn’t exactly follow this structure):

What  is learning design strategy?

I had in mind the approach taken by an organization to their learning design.  Attendees suggested it’s your goals and approach, ensuring you are delivering effectively.  It’s also your review approach, and metrics.  These are all elements that indeed contribute to strategy.

What gaps are we seeing in  learning design strategy?

The participants  offered up a suite of places that were problems, including aligning with organizational goals and access to support measuring impact, both of which are indeed strategic issues.  They also raised problems with prioritization of the demands, the need to move beyond just courses, and the  lack of learning design knowledge. All are real problems.

What do we need to be able to improve?

The audience offered up a number of suggestions.  For one, there was a desire for strategies (probably more tactics) for doing beyond ‘the event’.  Support for selling changes in the way of doing things was mentioned as well.  The shift to self-learning was mentioned, leading to concern over how to support this.  Attendees also mentioned a need of awareness in designing ‘backwards‘. Finally, a culture of learning was expressly discussed.

What are possible solutions?

The participants  offered a suite of suggestions. One was adopting a learn-apply-perform model, which another termed a learn-practice-demo. Both were getting at the need for active practice and an ability to actually demonstrate performance.  There was also a mention of looking to social networks and peer recommendations to lower the demand and facilitate self-learning.  A culture shift was suggested, supported by the methods used to teach! A final solution was to move quickly to mentoring, which implicitly suggests including mentoring  in the design.

Steps to take to move forward?

I also wanted to know what how they might move forward, and what they needed.  Two clear suggestions emerged.  One was for examples, and I reckon both of better learning designs, and approaches to implement those learning designs in organizations.  The other was for tools. Here it was clear that they weren’t talking about tools to develop learning, but tools to support them doing good design, and following processes.

At the end I left with mixed feelings. It’s good to know that the problems I see are reflected in what the practitioners reports; we see the same problems  It’s also sad that these problems exist.  I do believe that the Serious eLearning Manifesto is one piece of support.  And I’ve written on practices (e.g. with SMEs), but it’s clear that some practical scaffolding would help. I’ve worked with a few organizations, but I’m struggling to find ways to help more.  (Maybe this is the topic of my next book?)  So, what ideas do  you  have?

(I’m offering a webinar next week that will address these issues, if you’re serious about making changes.)

Learning, properly, should have an impact. It’s about systematically changing behavior, developing new skills to meet ever-changing needs. That’s why we invest in learning: training or elearning.  If elearning doesn‘t make an impact,  who cares how accessible or affordable is seems? It‘s actually undermining your goals for increasing expertise, effectiveness and productivity.

Too much of what is done under this umbrella isn’t sufficient. It’s quite simply not effective. Here’re some signs that your elearning might not be working:

• Your learning unit develops courses on demand
• You work from PDFs and PPTs to develop your course
• You have a knowledge quiz at the end
• You use libraries to add graphics & interactions
• Your learners avoid the courses
• You track completion
• You evaluate impact by learner feedback

If you’re spending money to develop elearning, and it has any of the above features, there’s a strong chance you’re burning  money.

The good news is that it’s not as  hard to change as you think!  The design processes you are using now, the ones that reflect the above issues, are not that far removed from ones that offer real outcomes.  Yes, there are changes, but they’re changes within the process, not fundamental. You can be making changes that will make a marginal impact on the development measures, but a real impact on the learning outcomes.  It’s not trivial, but it is doable.

If this is of interest, I’m offering a free webinar to talk through the issues. It’s not for everyone: if you don’t have the authority or the resources to make a change, there are other posts that talk through the opportunities.  This webinar is for those who really want to explore the possibilities. If that’s something you want to be thinking about, if you’d really like to consider consider how you get from here to there, I encourage you to  keep reading.

Webinar: 7 Unbelievable eLearning Mistakes

Date: December 7

Time: 10 AM to 11AM Pacific

Via: Zoom Conference Service

Have you been concerned about your learning design: whether your designs are actually producing results? Ultimately, is your elearning changing behaviors, developing skills, and increasing capacity? And how do you know?  There are a lot of reasons to believe that most elearning is not delivering on the promise. And yet elearning has the potential to be a powerful tool for organizational excellence. The barriers are not unsurmountable; we know the problems, and steps to change.  However, as has been said: “When all is said and done, more is said than done.” I want to give you the chance to take the steps. In this complimentary webinar we‘ll explore barriers to getting measurable results from elearning.

This isn’t your usual webinar, however. Here we are specifically talking to organizations that want their elearning to actually have an impact. If you don’t have the resources and position to make a change, this really isn’t for you. If you want your organization to take it more seriously, invite your boss ;).

This is for you, if:

• You’re ready to look at your elearning with a serious eye
• You want to ensure that you are getting value for your investment
• You need to operate in the real world, under real constraints
• You’re willing to invest for a real change that has impact

This isn’t for you if:

• You are happy with the status quo
• You haven’t the authority or the resources to make a change

If you are ready to take a serious look at your elearning,  I invite you to sign up.   There’s a limit to how many can attend, so please register early. When you register I’ll send you the necessary details. Hope to see you!

The webinar was run on schedule, and signups are now closed.

It’s a continual bane of a consultant’s existence that there are people who want to ‘pick your brain’.  It’s really asking for free consulting, and as such, it’s insulting. If you google the phrase, you’ll see how many people have indicated their problems with this! However, there are quite legitimate ways to  pick  my brain  and I thought I’d mention a couple.  In both cases,  I think were great engagements on both sides, high value for a reasonable investment.

Both in this case were for folks who develop content. In one case a not-for-profit, the other in the higher-ed space.  One  had heard me speak about learning design, and one had heard about a workshop I’d given, but both contacted me. It is clear they realized that there’s value to them for having a scrutable learning design.

Content Review

So for the first one, they wanted some feedback on their design, and we arranged that I’d investigate a representative sample and provide feedback.  I went through systematically, taking notes, and compiled my observations into a report I sent them.  This didn’t take any investment in travel, but of course this feedback  only points out what’s wrong, and doesn’t really provide mechanisms to improve.

I think they were surprised at the outcome, as the feedback was fairly robust.  They had a good design, largely, under the constraints, but there were some systematic design problems.  There were also  some places where they’d managed to have some errors that had passed editorial (and this was only a small sample of a replicated model across a broad curriculum). To be fair, some of my complaints came from situations that were appropriate given some aspect of their  context that I hadn’t known, but there were still a set of specific improvements I could recommend:

“We found his comments insightful, and  we look forward to implementing his expert suggestions to further improve of our product…“

Learning Design Workshop

In this case, they’d heard about a workshop that I’d run on behalf of a client, and were interested in getting a similar experience. They had been designing content and had a great ability to track the results of their design and tweak, but really wanted a grounding in the underlying learning science.  I did review some sample content, but I also traveled to their site for a day and presented learning science details and workshopped the implications to their design process.

I went through details such as:

• the importance and format for  objectives,
• SME limitations and tips how to work with  them,
• what makes effective practice,
• the role and characteristics of concepts,
• the details behind examples,
• introduction and the role of emotions in the learning experience,
• and more.

We went through examples of their content, and workshopped how they could adjust their design processes in pragmatic ways to instill the important details into their approach.  We also talked about ways to followup to not lose the momentum, but it was clear that this first visit was viewed favorable:

“…a walking encyclopedia of learning science… was able to respond to our inquiries with one well-researched perspective after another”.

So, there are ways to pick my brain  that provide high value with mutual benefit on each side.  Sure, you can read my blog or books, but sometimes you may want assistance in contextualizing it to your situation.  I encourage you to think of making an investment in quality.  These are about learning design, but I have some examples in strategy that I intend to share soon.  And more.  Stay tuned for more    ‘adventures in  consulting’ tales that talk about ways in which a variety of needs are met.  Maybe one will resonate with you.  Of course, they’ll be mixed in with the regular reflections you’ve come to expect.