Search Results for: top tools

As mentioned before, I’ve become a member of my local Community Emergency Response Team (CERT), as in the case of disaster, the official first-responders (police, fire, and paramedics) will be overwhelmed.  And it’s a good group, with a lot of excellent efforts in processes and tools as well as drills.  Still, of course, there’s  room for improvement.  I encountered one such at our last meeting, and I think it’s an interesting case study.

So one of the things you’re supposed to do in conducting search and rescue is to go from building to building assessing damage and looking for people to help.  And one of the useful things to do is to mark the status of the search and the outcomes, so no one wastes effort on an already explored building. While the marking is covered in training and there’re support tools to help you remember,  ideally it’d be memorable, so that you  can regenerate the information and don’t have to look it up.

The design for the marking is pretty clear: you first make a diagonal slash when you start investigating a building, and then you make a crossing slash when you’ve made your assessment. And specific information is to be recorded in each quarter of the resulting X: left, right, top, and bottom.  (Note that the US standard set by FEMA doesn’t correspond to the international standard from the International Search & Rescue Advisory Group, interestingly).

However, when we brought it up in a recent meeting (and they’re very good about revisiting things that quickly fade from memory), it was obvious that most people couldn’t recall what goes where. And when I heard what the standard was, I realized it didn’t have a memorable structure.  So, here are the four things to record:

• the group who goes in
• when the group completes
• what hazards may exist
• and how many people and what condition they’re in*

So how would you map these to the quadrants?  And in one sense it doesn’t matter if there’s a sensible rationale behind them. One sign that there’s not?  You can’t remember what goes where.

Our local team leader was able to recall that the order is: left – group, top – completion, right – hazards, and bottom – people.  However, this seems to me to be less than  memorable, so let me explain.

To me, wherever you put the in, left or top, the coming out ought to be opposite. And given our natural flow, group going in makes sense to the left, and coming out ought to go on the right.  In – out.  Then, it’s relatively arbitrary where hazards and people go.  I’d make a case that top-of-mind should be the hazards found to warn others, but that the people are the bottom line (see what I did there?).  I could easily make a case for the reverse, but either would be a mnemonic to support remembering.  Instead, as far as I can tell, it’s completely arbitrary. Now, if it’s not arbitrary and there is a rationale,  it’d help to share that!

The point being, to help people remember things that are in some sense arbitrary, make a story that makes it memorable. Sure, I can look it up, assuming that the lookup book they handed out stays in the pocket in my special backpack.  (And I’m likely to remember now, because of all this additional processing, but that’s not what happens in the training.)  However, making it regenerable from some structure gives you a much better chance of having it to hand. Either a model or a story is better than arbitrary, and one’s possible with a rewrite, but as it is, there’s neither.

So there’s a lesson in design to be had, I reckon, and I hope you’ll put it to use.

* (black or dead, red or needing immediate treatment for life-threatening issues, yellow or needing non-urgent treatment, and green or ok)

In the process of looking at ways to improve the design of courses, the starting point is good objectives. And as a consequence, I’ve been enthused about the notion of competencies, as a way to put the focus on what people do, not what they know. So how do we do this, systematically, reliably, and repeatably?

Let’s be clear, there are times we need knowledge level objectives. In medicine or any other field where responses need to be quick and accurate, we need a very constrained vocabulary. SO drilling in the exact meanings of words is valuable, as an example. Though ideally, that’s coupled with using that language to set context or make decisions. So “we know it’s the right medial collateral ligament, prep for the surgery” could serve as a context, or we could have a choice to operate on the left or right atrial ventricle as a decision point. As Van Merriënboer’s 4 Component Instructional Design talks about, we need to separate out the knowledge from the complex problems we apply it to. Still, I suggest that what’s likely to make a difference to individuals and organizations is the ability to make better decisions, not recite rote knowledge.

So how do we get competencies when we want them? The problem, as I’ve talked about before, is that SMEs don’t have access to 70% of what they actually do, it’s compiled away. We then need good processes, so I’ve talked to a couple of educational institutions doing competencies, to see what could be learned. And it’s clear that while there’s no turnkey approach, what’s emerging is a process with some specific elements.

One thing is that if you’re trying to cover a whole college level course, you’ve got to break it up. Break down the top level into a handful of competencies. Then you continue to take each of those apart, and perhaps another level, ‘til you have a reasonable scope. This is heuristic, of course, but with a focus on ‘do’, you have a good likelihood to get here.

One of the things I’ve heard across various entities trying to get meaningful objectives is working with more than one SME. If you can get several, you have a better chance of triangulating on the right outcomes and objectives. They may well disagree about the knowledge, but if you manage the process right (emphasize ‘do’, lather, rinse, repeat), you should be able to get them to converge. It may take some education, and you may have to let them get the

Not just any SMEs will do. Two things are really valuable: on the ground experience to know what needs to be done (and doesn’t), and the ability to identify and articulate the models that guide the performance. Some instructors, for instance, can teach to a text but really aren’t truly masters of the content nor are experienced practitioners. Multiple helps, but the better the SME, the better the outcome.

I believe you want to ensure that you’re getting both the right things, and all the things. I’ve recommended to a client about triangulating not just with SMEs, but with practitioners (or, rather, the managers of the roles the learners will be engaged in), and any other reliable stakeholders. The point is to get input from the practice as well as the theory, identifying the models that support proper behavior, and the misconceptions that underpin where they go wrong.

Once you have a clear idea of the things people need to be able to do, you can then identify the language for the competencies. I’m not a fan of Bloom’s (unwieldy, hard to reliably apply), but I am a fan of Mager-style definitions (action, context, metric).

After this is done, you can identify the knowledge needed, and perhaps created objectives for that, but to me the focus is on the ‘do’, the competencies. This is very much aligned with an activity-based learning model, whereby you immediately design the activities that align with the competencies before you decide the content.

So, this is what I’m inferring. There would be good tools and templates you could design to go with this, identifying competencies, misconceptions, and at the same time also getting stories and motivations. (An exercise left for the reader. ;) The overall goal, however, of getting meaningful objectives is key to getting good learning design. Any nuances I’m missing?

Last Friday’s #GuildChat was on Agile Development.  The topic is interesting to me, because like with Design Thinking, it seems like well-known practices with a new branding. So as I did then, I’ll lay out what I see and hope others will enlighten me.

As context, during grad school I was in a research group focused on user-centered system design, which included design, processes, and more. I subsequently taught interface design (aka Human Computer Interaction or HCI) for a number of years (while continuing to research learning technology), and made a practice of advocating the best practices from HCI to the ed tech community.  What was current at the time were iterative, situated, collaborative, and participatory design processes, so I was pretty  familiar with the principles and a fan. That is, really understand the context, design and test frequently, working in teams with your customers.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and the Agile Manifesto puts a stake in the ground for software engineering. And we see a focus on releasable code, but again with principles of iteration and testing, team work, and tight customer involvement.  Michael Allen was enthused enough to use it as a spark that led to the Serious eLearning Manifesto.

That inspiration has clearly (and finally) now moved to learning design. Whether it’s Allen’s SAM or Ger Driesen’s Agile Learning Manifesto, we’re seeing a call for rethinking the old waterfall model of design.  And this is a good thing (only decades late ;).  Certainly we know that working together is better than working alone (if you manage the process right ;), so the collaboration part is a win.

And we certainly need change.  The existing approaches we too often see involve a designer being given some documents, access to a SME (if lucky), and told to create a course on X.  Sure, there’re tools and templates, but they are focused on making particular interactions easier, not on ensuring better learning design. And the person works alone and does the design and development in one pass. There are likely to be review checkpoints, but there’s little testing.  There are variations on this, including perhaps an initial collaboration meeting, some SME review, or a storyboard before development commences, but too often it’s largely an independent one way flow, and this isn’t good.

The underlying issue is that waterfall models, where you specify the requirements in advance and then design, develop, and implement just don’t work. The problem is that the human brain is pretty much the most complex thing in existence, and when we determine a priori what will work, we don’t take into account the fact that like Heisenberg what we implement will change the system. Iterative development and testing allows the specs to change after initial experience.  Several issues arise with this, however.

For one, there’s a question about what is the right size and scope of a deliverable.  Learning experiences, while typically overwritten, do have some stricture that keeps them from having intermediately useful results. I was curious about what made sense, though to me it seemed that you could develop your final practice first as a deliverable, and then fill in with the required earlier practice, and content resources, and this seemed similar to what was offered up during the chat to my question.

The other one is scoping and budgeting the process. I often ask, when talking about game design, how to know when to stop iterating. The usual (and wrong answer) is when you run out of time or money. The right answer would be when you’ve hit your metrics, the ones you should set before you begin that determine the parameters of a solution (and they can be consciously reconsidered as part of the process).  The typical answer, particularly for those concerned with controlling costs, is something like a heuristic choice of 3 iterations.  Drawing on some other work in software process, I’d recommend creating estimates, but then reviewing them after. In the software case, people got much better at estimates, and that could be a valuable extension.  But it shouldn’t be any more difficult to estimate, certainly with some experience, than existing methods.

Ok, so I may be a bit jaded about new brandings on what should already be good practice, but I think anything that helps us focus on developing in ways that lead to quality outcomes is a good thing.  I encourage you to work more collaboratively, develop and test more iteratively, and work on discrete chunks. Your stakeholders should be glad you did.