BJ Fogg, known from his work on persuasive technology, talked about making persistent behavior change via tiny habits. Very interesting research with important implications both personally and commercially.
The Wedge in the Door
When I started talking about mobile, I thought it was interesting adjunct to desktop computing. In fact, in my early (2000) article on mobile learning, I said “Soon there will be essentially no distinction between mLearning and elearning.” And I admit that I was wrong. At least partly. Let me explain.
It depends on how you define elearning. If you mean courses on the web, period, then I would be dead wrong. If, however, you believe elearning encompasses performance support, social, and informal learning, then I was right. And I can fortunately say that I saw at least part of the vision: “accessible resources wherever you are, strong search capabilities, rich interaction, powerful support”. Of course, I missed cameras, and GPS.
The reason I bring this up, however, is I now see, as Google has exclaimed, “Mobile first”. I think that mobile is a wedge to open the door to much more. It indeed may well be the first solution you should be looking to!
If you view mobile as a platform, you start bringing in all the platform capability perspective you see with the desktop (it’s used for everything). And this perspective lets you view the role of mobile as more than learning, but instead impacting everything the organization is doing. You should be thinking this way anyway, but I see it too infrequently. Which is why mobile may be a wedge to open up change.
This is important for the L&D group to get their mind around: mobile isn’t about courses, it’s about supporting performance in all ways. With this perspective comes several things: the opportunity to take a bigger role in the organization, the requirement to break down the silos, and a necessity to start thinking differently. Are you ready?
Jane Hart #iel12 Keynote Mindmap
Jane Hart, in her personable style, told a compelling story of the what, why, and how of informal learning. She suggested it was about self-directed learning, that it’s already happening, but that there are valuable ways the L&D group can assist and support.
Mitch Kapor #iel12 Keynote Mindmap
Mitch Kapor shared his passion for and belief in the need for computers to help address the problems in education. He was clearly concerned about the low ranking of the US in STEM, and talked about the promise of tech when used appropriately. He cited two examples he’s invested in.
George Siemens #iel12 Keynote Mindmap
George Siemens delivered an enlightening talk contextualizing analytics, tying the need for more effective coupling in decision making with new types of data.
Tony O’Driscoll #iel12 Keynote Mindmap
Tony O’Driscoll kicked off the Innovations in eLearning Symposium with an entertaining and apt tour of the changes in business owing to information change, and the need to adapt. My take was that organizations have to become in a more organic relationship with their ecosystem by empowering their people to engage and act. His final message was that the learning community are the folks who have to figure this out and engage.
Taking the step
A while ago, I wrote an article in eLearnMag, stating that better design doesn’t take longer. In it, I suggested that while there would be an initial hiccup, eventually better design doesn’t take longer: the analysis process is different, but no less involved, the design process is deeper but results in less overall writing, and of course the development is largely the same. And I’m interested in exposing what I mean by the hiccup.
What surprised me is that I haven’t seen more movement. Of course, if you’re a one-person shop, the best you could probably do is attend a ‘Deeper ID’ workshop. But if you’re producing content on a reasonable scale, you should realize that there are several reasons you should be taking this on.
Most importantly, it’s for effectiveness. The learning I see coming out of not only training shops and custom content houses, but also internal units, is just not going to make a difference. If you’re providing knowledge and a knowledge test, I don’t care how well produced it is, it’s not going to make a difference. This is core to a unit’s mission, it seems to me.
It’s also a case of “not if, but when” when someone is going to come in with an effective competing approach. If you can’t do better, you’re going to be irrelevant. If you’re producing for others, your market will be eaten. If you’re producing internally, your job will be outsourced.
Overall, it’s about not just surviving, but thriving.
Yes, the nuances are subtle, and it’s still possible to sell well-produced but not well-designed material, but that can’t last. People are beginning to wake up to the business importance of effective investments in learning, and the emergence of alternate models (Khan Academy, MOOCs, the list goes on) is showing new ways that will have people debating approaches. It may take a while, but why not get the jump on it?
And it’s not about just running a workshop. I do those, and like to do them, but I never pretend that they’re going to make as big a difference as could be achieved. They can’t, because of the forgetting curve. What would make a big difference isn’t much more, however. It’s about reactivating that knowledge and reapplying.
What I envision (and excuse me if I make this personal, but hey, it’s what I do and have done successfully) is getting to know the design processes beforehand, and customizing the workshop to your workflow: your business, your processes of working with SMEs, your design process, your tools, and representative samples of existing work. Then we run a workshop where we use your examples. Working through the process, exploring the deeper concepts, putting them into practice, and reflecting to cement the learning. Probably a day. People have found this valuable in an of itself.
However, I want to take it just a step further. I’ve found that being sent samples of subsequent work and commenting on it in several joint sessions is what makes the real difference. This reactivates the knowledge, identifies the ongoing mistakes, and gives a chance to remediate them. This is what makes it stick, and leads to meaningful change. You have to manage this in a non-threatening way, but that’s doable.
There are more intrusive, higher-overhead ways, but I’m trying to strike a balance between high value and minimal intensiveness to make a pragmatic but successful change. I’d bet that 90% of the learning being developed could be improved by this approach (which means that 90% of the learning being developed really isn’t a worthwhile investment!). It seems so obvious, but I’m not seeing the interest in change. So, what am I missing?
Getting Pragmatic About Informal
In my post on reconciling informal and informal, I suggested that there are practical things L&D groups can do about informal learning. I’ve detected a fair bit of concern amongst L&D folks that this threatens their jobs, and I think that’s misplaced. Consequently, I want to get a wee bit more specific than what I said then:
- they can make courses about how to use social media better (not everyone knows how to communicate and collaborate well)
- share best practices
- work social media into formal learning to make it easier to facilitate the segue into the workplace
- provide performance support for social media
- be facilitating the use of social media
- unearth good practices in the organization and share them
- foster discussion
I also noted “And, yes, L&D interventions there will be formal in the sense that they‘re applying rigor, but they‘re facilitating emergent behaviors that they don‘t own“. And that’s an important point. It’s wrapping support around activities that aren’t content generated by the L&D group. Two things:
- the expertise for much doesn’t reside in the L&D group and it’s time to stop thinking that it all can pass through the L&D group (there’s too much, too fast, and the L&D group has to find ways to get more efficient)
- there is expertise in the L&D group (or should be) that’s more about process than product and can and should be put into practice.
So, the L&D group has to start facilitating the sharing of information between folks. How can they represent and share their understandings in ways the L&D group can facilitate, not own? How about ensuring the availability of tools like blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, discussion forums, media file creating/sharing, and profiles, and helping communities learn to use them? Here’s a way that L&D groups can partner with IT and add real value via a synergy that benefits the company.
That latter bit, helping them learn to use them is also important. Not everyone is naturally a good coach or mentor, yet these are valuable roles. It’s not just producing a course about it, but facilitating a community around these roles. There are a lot of myths about what makes brainstorming work, but just putting people in a room isn’t it. If you don’t know, find out and disseminate it! How about even just knowing how to work and play well with others, how to ask for help in ways that will actually get useful responses, supporting needs for blogging, etc.
There are a whole host of valuable activities that L&D groups can engage in besides developing content, and increasingly the resources are likely to be more valuable addressing the facilitation than the design and development. It’s going to be just too much (by the time it’s codified, it’s irrelevant). Yes, there’ll still be a role for fixed content (e.g. compliance), but hopefully more and more curricula and content will be crowd-sourced, which increases the likelihood of it’s relevance, timeliness, and accuracy.
Start supporting activity, not controlling it, and you will likely find it liberating, not threatening.
Help? Two questions on mobile for you
In the process of writing a chapter on mobile for an elearning book, the editor took my suggestion for structure and then improved upon it. I’d suggested that we have two additional sections: one on hints and tips, and the others on common mistakes. His suggestion was to crowd-source the answers. And I think it’s a good idea, so let me ask for you help, and ask you to respond via comments or to me personally:
- What are the hints and tips you’ve found valuable for mlearning?
- What are the mlearning mistakes you’ve seen or experienced that you’d recommend others avoid?
I welcome seeing what you come up with!
Design Readings
Another book on design crossed my radar when I was at a retreat and in the stack of one of the other guests was Julie Dirksen’s book Design for How People Learn and Susan Weinschenk’s 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People. This book provides a nice complement to Julie’s, focusing on straight facts about how we process the world.
Dr. Weinschenk’s book systematically goes through categories of important design considerations:
- How People See
- How People Read
- How People Remember
- How People Think
- How People Focus Their Attention
- What Motivates People
- People Are Social Animals
- How People Feel
- People Make Mistakes
- How People Decide
Under each category are important points, described, buttressed by research, and boiled down into useful guidelines. This includes much of the research I talk about when I discuss deeper Instructional Design, and more. While it’s written for UI designers mostly, it’s extremely relevant to learning design as well. And it’s easy reading and reference, illustrated and to-the-point.
There are some really definitive books that people who design for people need to have read or have to hand. This fits into the latter category as does Dirksen’s book, while Don Norman’s books, e.g. Design of Everyday Things fit into the former. Must knows and must haves.