The opening session for the eLearning Guild’s Performance Support Symposium was an insightful panel moderated by Allison Rossett, with panelists Rose Lawyer of Huntington, John Low of Carney, and Matthew Henzel of American Express on their experiences with performance support (PS) initiatives. Interesting points included taking a holistic perspective, emphasizing change management, and future directions. I note that in some cases my interpretation is not their words :).

I continue to have a problem with the term content as a component of what our field does.  I think there are potential problems with the label, so let me make them clear.

What we do is create content.  In elearning, we create introductions and concept presentations, we portray examples, and we make interactivities that provide practice.  Even in F2F training, we have content and structure around actions we ask our learners to take.  At the end of the day, much of what we’re working on is content that is communicated or triggered by learner actions.

However, I think there’s a problem with thinking of it that way. I believe we need to focus on the activity, not on the content. What’s important is the learner’s experience that is created by sequencing content and learner actions, not the content itself.  You could present content in different ways (for instance, labeled slides, narrated slideshow, or video) and it’s be semantically equivalent (and please don’t bring up Clark & Kozma), at least for our purposes here.

The problem is that if we focus on content, it becomes too easy to think that content presentation is equivalent to learning. Even if we test knowledge of the content afterwards, it’s not going to lead to meaningful outcomes.  Thinking about producing content makes it easy to go astray.

The alternative, however, is still uncertain. Technologically, it makes sense to talk about content management systems, but learning management systems above that is the wrong language.  While ‘course management systems’ addresses the real function of such systems, ideally we’d instead be thinking about ‘experience management systems’. Except I don’t think we really have those right now.  You might say that trainers or mentors or coaches are that, and I might agree in the latter sense, certainly, though I’m looking for a better branding for the technology infrastructure.

There’s now an Experience API that provides some infrastructure for creating such an experience management system, but there’re still some intermediate steps needed. Fingers crossed.

Ok, so I’m  thinking out loud about our language and what the implications are, but I’m a big fan of reflection and I think it’s useful to stop once in a while and think about where we’re at and how we’re doing.  I welcome your thoughts.

One of the things I’m wrestling with right now is the transition from where we’re at to where we should be. I’ve already said we  have to change, the question is how.  A number of us have talked about what the future could and should look like (including but not limited to my ITA colleagues), but how do you get there from here?  Whether it’s 70:20:10 or some other model, there simply  has to be a better way.

Right now, many organizations have training operations going on: people traveling to a location to sit down and have knowledge dumped on them, perhaps including a knowledge check: show up and throw up.  With smile sheets to evaluate the outcome.  And/or we have elearning: knowledge dump and test, or virtual classrooms where we do the same spray and pray.  And it doesn’t work; it can’t.  Well, it certainly is not going to lead to any meaningful outcome.

Granted, this is a gross stereotype, and in particular situations the training is hands on, there’s lots of practice, and maybe blended so the knowledge necessary is learned beforehand.  Yes, this can lead to some real skill acquisition.

And don’t even bring up ‘compliance’.  Sure, I know you have to do it, and until we get government to stop thinking seat time and  content presentation is the same as behavior change, and lawyers to only care about CYA,  we’ll be stuck with it.  That, apparently, is just the cost of doing business.  I’m talking about the things that matter to your company. Your skills, your ability to do.

And we need to stop it.  I think the first step is to kill all training.  When you raise your head up and start talking about “but how are we going to meet this need”, then you start thinking anew: how can we go ‘world first‘, performance support 2nd, and meaningful practice last?  Once you find you’ve exhausted all other options, then you might realize that formal training is needed, but it could and should be focused on  doing, not telling.

This is only part of the picture, and perhaps I’m being deliberately controversial (who, me?), but it’s one way to be forced to think anew about what we’re doing and how we can help.  We have to change, and we need to start figuring out how to get there.  I’m open to ideas.  I’ve heard some others, but that’s another post.  What are your ideas?

 

At lunch last week with my colleague Jay Cross, we riffed on the most important word was for learning in the organization. I chose ‘meaningful’, he went with ‘experiential’.  They’re both important, but I thought I’d tease them out a bit.

I take meaningful in two senses: what you’re doing (read: learning) is directly related to what your goals are, and it’s something you care about.  So, for example, in designing serious games, you want to focus on key skills, not on irrelevant material. And, to work as engagingly as possible, you also are also choosing a context that the learner cares about. Taking something relatively abstract like coaching, you could be providing support for developing a coaching model (rather than using an existing one), or you could be figuring out how to help a person separate out person from behavior (commenting on the latter is to be preferred).  Similarly, it could be in the context of being a better accountant (uninteresting  except to accountants), or it could be for sports (which might be of interest to a broader segment).  The point is to be focusing on relevant skills in interesting contexts.

Now, I take experiential to have some overlap, but to be addressing two senses as well: both the context you are learning in, and the nature of the learning experience.  That is, you can be learning away from work, or in the work process, the latter being more ‘experiential’. And you can be learning by doing in either context, learning ‘how’, as opposed to learning ‘about’.  I think there’s overlap here in being contextually relevant , but separate in the sense of personally interesting and the learning being applied.

I mapped it out, with lack of experiential and meaningful being disconnected content (which I see far too much of in workplace learning), or where we start providing knowledge how (not about) to be meaningful, providing activity-based learning to be experiential, and of course the ultimate being the intersection of both.

I’m sure Jay would argue that if it’s experiential, learning through real work experience, it’s inherently meaningful.  And I’d argue that if it’s suitably meaningful, it naturally has to be experiential.  Yet overall I’m happy take either one or both versus neither!