I’ve been interested in process, so I attended this month’s Bay Area Learning Design Meetup that showcased LinkedIn’s work on Agile using Scrum for learning design. It was very nice of them to share the specifics of their process, and while there were more details than time permitted to cover, it was a great beginning to understand the differences.

Basically, a backlog is kept of potential new projects.  They’re prioritized and a subset is chosen as the basis of the sprint and put on the board.  Then for two weeks they work on hitting the elements on the board, with a daily standup meeting to present where they’re at and synchronize.  At the end they demo to the stakeholders and reflect.  As part of the reflection, they’re supposed to change something for the next iteration.

There’re different roles: a project owner who’s the ‘client’ in a sense (and a relation to who may be the end client).  There is a Scrum master who’s responsible for facilitating the group through the steps, and then the team, which should be small but at least represent all the necessary roles to execute whatever is being accomplished.

When I asked about scope, they said that they’ve found they can do about 100 story points (which are empirical) in a sprint, and they may distribute that across some elearning, some job aids, whatever.  They didn’t seem too eager to try to quantify that relative to other known metrics, and I understand it’s hard, particularly in the time they had.  Here’s the Mindmap:

Allen Interactions also discussed their SAM project (which I know and like), but the mind map didn’t match too well to their usual diagram (only briefly shown at the end), and I ran out of time trying to remedy. It’s better just to look at the diagram ;).

So yesterday, I went off on some of the subtleties in elearning that are being missed.  This is tied to last weeks posts about how we’re not treating elearning seriously enough.  And part of it is in the knowledge and skills of the designers, but it’s also in the process. Or, to put it another way, we should be using steps and tools that align with the type of learning we need. And I don’t mean ADDIE, though not inherently.

So what  do I mean?  For one, I’m a fan of Michael Allen’s Successive Approximation Model (SAM), which iterates several times (tho’ heuristically, and it could be better tied to a criterion).  Given that people are far less predictable than, say, concrete, fields like interface design have long known that testing and refinement need to be included.  ADDIE isn’t inherently linear, certainly as it has evolved, but in many ways it makes it easy to make it a one-pass process.

Another issue, to me, is to structure the format for your intermediate representations so that make it hard to do aught but come up with useful information.  So, for instance, in recent work I’ve emphasized that a preliminary output  is a competency doc that includes (among other things)  the objectives (and measures), models, and common misconceptions.  This has evolved from a similar document I use in (learning) game design.

You then need to capture your initial learning flow. This is what Dick &  Carey call your instructional strategy, but to me it’s the overall experience of the learner, including addressing the anxieties learners may feel, raising their interest and motivation, and systematically building their confidence.  The anxieties or emotional barriers to learning may well be worth capturing at the same time as the competencies, it occurs to me (learning out loud ;).

It also helps if your tools don’t interfere with your goals.  It should be easy to create animations that help illustrate models (for the concept) and tell stories (for examples).  These can be any media tools, of course. The most important tools are the ones you use to create meaningful practice. These should allow you to create mini-, linear-, and branching-scenarios (at least).  They should have alternative feedback for every wrong answer. And they should support contextualizing the practice activity. Note that this does  not mean tarted up drill and kill with gratuitous ‘themes’ (race cars, game shows).  It means having learners make meaningful decisions and act on them in ways like they’d act in the real world (click on buttons for tech, choose dialog alternatives for interpersonal interactions, drag tools to a workbench or adjust controls for lab stuff, etc).

Putting in place processes that only use formal learning when it makes sense,  and then doing it right when it does make sense, is key to putting L&D on a path to relevancy.   Cranking out courses on demand, focusing on measures like cost/butt/seat, adding rote knowledge quizzes to SME knowledge dumps, etc are instead continuing down the garden path to oblivion. Are you ready to get scientific and strategic about your learning  design?

I’ve been working on moving a team to deeper learning design.  The goal is to practice what I preach, and make sure that the learning design is competency-aligned, activity-based, and model-driven.  Yet, doing it in a pragmatic way.

And this hasn’t been without it’s challenges.  I  presented to the team my vision, we worked out a process, and started coaching the team during development.  In retrospect, this wasn’t proactive enough.  There were a few other hiccups.

We’re currently engaged in a much tighter cycle of development and revision, and now feel we’re getting close to the level of effectiveness  and  engagement we need.  Whether a) it’s really better, and b) whether we can replicate it yet scale it as well is an open question.

At core are a few elements. For one, a rabid focus on what learners are  doing is key.  What do they need to be able to do, and what contexts do they need to do it in?

The competency-alignment focus is on the key tasks that they have to do in the workplace, and making sure we’re preparing them across pre-class, in-class, and post-class activities to develop that ability.  A key focus is having them make the decision in the learning experience that they’ll have to make afterward.

I’m also pushing very hard on making sure that there are models behind the decisions.  I’m trying hard to avoid arbitrary categorizations, and find the principles that drove those categorizations.

Note that all this is  not easy.  Getting the models is hard when the resources  provided don’t include that information.  Avoiding presenting just knowledge and definitions is hard work.  The tools we use make certain interactions easy, and other ones not so easy.  We have to map meaningful decisions into what the tools support.  We end up making  tradeoffs, as do we all.  It’s good, but not as good as it could be.  We’ll get better, but we do want to run in a practical fashion as well.

There are more elements to weave in: layering on some general biz skills is embryonic.  Our use of examples needs to get more systematic.  As does our alignment of learning goal to practice activity.    And we’re struggling to have a slightly less didactic and earnest tone;  I haven’t worked hard enough on pushing a bit of humor in, tho’ we are ramping up some exaggeration.  There’s only so much you can focus on at one time.

We’ll be running some student tests next week before presenting to the founder.  Feeling mildly confident that we’ve gotten a decent take on quality learning design with suitable production value, but there is the barrier that the nuances of learning design are  subtle. Fingers crossed.

I still believe that, with practice, this becomes habit and easier.  We’ll see.

I’ve had the pleasure last  week of keynoting  Charles Sturt University’s annual Education conference.  They’re in the process of rethinking what their learning experience should be, and I talked about the changes we’re trying to make at the Wadhwani Foundation.

I was reminded of previous conversations about learning experience design and the transformative experience.   And I have argued in the past that what would make an optimal value proposition (yes, I used that phrase) in a learning market would be to offer a transformative learning experience.  Note that this is not just about the formal learning experience, but has two additional components.

Now, it does start with a killer learning experience.  That is, activity-based,  competency-driven, model-guided, with lean and compelling content.  Learners need role-plays and simulations to be immersed in practice, and scaffolded with reflection to develop their flexible ability to apply these abilities going forward.  But wait, there’s more!

As a complement, there needs to be a focus on developing the learner as well as their skills. That is, layering on the 21st Century skills: the ability to communicate, lead, problem-solve, analyze, learn, and more.  These need to be included and developed  across the learning experience.  So learners not only get the skills they need to succeed now, but to adapt as things change.

The third element is to be a partner in their success.  That is, don’t give them a chance to sink or swim on the basis of the content, but to look for ways in which learners might be struggling with other issues, and work hard to ensure they succeed.

I reckon that anyone capable of developing and delivering on this model provides a model that others can only emulate, not improve upon.  We’re working on the first two initially at the Foundation, and hopefully we’ll get to the latter soon.  But I reckon it’d be great if this were the model all were aspiring to.  Here’s hoping!