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Creating meaningful experiences

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What if the learner’s experience was ‘hard fun’: challenging, but engaging, yielding a desirable experience, not just an event to be tolerated, OR what is learning experience design?

Can you imagine creating a ‘course’ that wins raving fans?   It’s about designing learning that is not only effective but seriously engaging.   I believe that this is not only doable, but doable under real world constraints.

Let me start with this bit of the wikipedia definition of experience design:

the practice of designing…with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience…, with less emphasis placed on increasing and improving functionality

That is, experience design is about creating a user experience, not just focusing on their goals, but thinking about the process as well.     And that’s, to me, what is largely ignored in creating elearning is thinking about process from the learner’s perspective. There are really two components: what we need to accomplish, and what we’d like the learner to experience.

Our first goal still has to look at the learning need, and identify an objective that we’d like learners to meet, but even that we need to rethink.   We may have constraints on delivery environment, resources, and more that we have to address as well, but that’s not the barrier.   The barrier is the mistake of focusing on knowledge-level objectives, not on meaningful skill change.   Let me be very clear: one of the real components of creating a learning experience is ensuring that we develop, and communicate, a learning objective that the learner will ‘get’ is important and meaningful to them.   And we have to take on the responsibility for making that happen.

Then, we need to design an experience that accomplishes that goal, but in a way that yields a worthwhile experience.   I’ve talked before about the emotional trajectory we might want the learner to go through.   It should start with a (potentially wry) recognition that this is needed, some initial anxiety but a cautious optimism, etc.   We want the learner to gradually develop confidence in their ability, and even some excitement about the experience and the outcome.   We’d like them to leave with no anxiety about the learning, and a sense of accomplishment.   There are a lot of components I’ve talked about along the way, but at core it’s about addressing motivation, expectations, and concerns.

Actually, we might even shoot for more: a transformative experience, where the learner leaves with an awareness of a fundamental shift in their understanding of the world, with new perspectives and attitudes to accompany their changed vocabulary and capabilities.   People look for those in many ways in their life; we should deliver.

This does not come from applying traditional instructional design to an interview with a SME (or even a Subject Matter Network, as I’m increasingly hearing and inclined to agree).   As I defined it before, learning design is the intersection of learning, information, and experience design.   It takes a broad awareness of how we learn, incorporating viewpoints behavior, cognitive, constructive, connective, and more.   It takes an awareness of how we experience: media effects on cognition and emotion, and of the dramatic arts.   And most of all, it takes creativity and vision.

However, that does not mean it can’t be developed reliably and repeatably, on a pragmatic basis.     It just means you have to approach it anew.   It take expertise, and a team with the requisite complementary skill sets, and organizational support. And commitment.   What will work will depend on the context and goals (best principles, not best practices), but I will suggest that with good content development processes, a sound design approach, and a will to achieve more than the ordinary.   This is doable on a scalable basis, but we have to be willing to take the necessary steps.   Are you ready to take your learning to the next level, and create experiences?

Blurring boundaries

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I just downloaded a couple of new apps onto my iPhone. Okay, so one was a free trial of a game, but the other was a really interesting offering, and it led to some thoughts about organizational silos and new functionality.

The app was a new release by ATT called Mark the Spot, that lets you report the occurrence and location of a problem with your coverage.   This is a new way to interact with customers, allowing them to serve as a agent of “can you hear me now”-style coverage evaluation.   Given that they’ve just turned up as the lowest rated carrier of the major four here in the US, according to leading consumer champion Consumer Reports, it’s a step in the right direction.

Now this is an instance of considering a broader reach of engagement in our conversations tapping into collective intelligence. As I’ve been learning with my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance, tapping into collective intelligence goes beyond conversations internally to include partners and customers.     It’s also a broader interpretation of learning, in the senses that I argue we need to consider, including problem-solving, innovation, etc.   And it’s mobile.

So here’s the question I pondered: is this tech support?   Marketing?   And what occurred to me is that it just isn’t really easy to categorize.   It’s a dialog with the customer, gathering data about coverage, which could be seen as market research.   They can also extend it via a call into a issue resolution exercise (ok, so the app doesn’t really make the call for you but could and should: “click to send the data and be connected to a representative”) .   You could even bake in some trouble-shooting support as a performance support exercise.

The approach, and the potential, crosses boundaries in terms of the benefits and how it must be supported organizationally.   We’re beginning to see a new notion of mashup that combines functionalities that might normally be seen in separate organizational areas, but from a customer perspective, they’re linked. And   we’re seeing a hybrid of communication capabilities, linking the data capabilities of an app with voice, and even media files (e.g. some trouble-shooting information).

Around 1999, the CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, opined that elearning was going to be so big that email would seem like a rounding error.   I think that it’s not just about education over the internet, but it’s really about the broader picture of learning including performance support, social learning, and it’s not just the desktop internet, but it’s mobile apps, and more.   The full performance ecosystem isn’t just within the organization, but it’s external as well. It’s what your company builds for you, what your ‘providers’ build for you (device, service, etc), and, ultimately, how you integrate that into your personal learning network.

The implications are huge.   How to organizations realign to make meaningful information environments for their employees, partners, and customers?   How do we skill up society to take advantage and shape this environment for the benefit of all?   And how do we develop ourselves to manage and optimize the environment to help us achieve our goals?

I think we are seeing an inflection point that will trump email, but it’s not about education, it’s about the broad intersection between people’s goals and our technology infrastructure.   And our role in that, as designers of learning experiences and performance ecosystems.   We have a fair bit of understanding of cognition and social interaction, and increasing experience with different technology capabilities.   Now it’s time to put that all to work to start creating meaningful new opportunities. Who’s game?

Who authorizes the authority?

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As a reaction to my eLearnMag editorial on the changing nature of the educational publishing market, Publish or Perish, a colleague said: “There is a tremendous opportunity in the higher ed publishing market for a company that understands what it means to design and deliver engaging, valuable, and authentic customer experiences–from content to services to customer service and training.”

I agree, but it triggered a further thought. When we go beyond delivering content as a component of a learning experience, and start delivering learning experiences, are we moving from publisher to education provider?   And if so, what are the certification processes?

Currently, institutions are accredited by accrediting bodies.   Different bodies accredit different things.   There are special accrediting bodies (a.g. AACSB or ACBSP for business[2?], ABET for applied science).   In some cases, there are just regional accreditation bodies (e.g. WASC).     There’s overlap, in that a computer science school might want to align with ABET, and yet the institution has to be accredited by, say, WASC.

And I think this is good, in that having groups working to oversee specific domains can be responsive to changing demands, and general accreditation to oversee ongoing process.   I recall in the past, this latter was largely about ensuring that there were regular reviews and specific improvement processes, almost an ISO 9001 approach. However, are they really able to keep up?   Are they in touch with new directions?   The recent scandals around business school curricula seem to indicate some flaws.

On the other hand, who needs accreditation?   We still have corporate universities, they don’t seem to need to be accredited except by their organization, though sometimes they partner with institutions to deliver accredited programs. And many people provide coaching services, and workshops.   There are even certificates for workshops which presumably depend on the quality of the presenter, and sometimes some rigor around the process to ensure that there’s feedback going on so that continuing education credits can be earned.

My point is, the standards vary considerably, but when do you cross the line? Presumably, you can’t claim outcomes that aren’t legitimate (“we’ll raise your IQ 30 points” or somesuch), but otherwise, you can sell whatever the market will bear.   And you can arrange to be vetted by an independent body, but that’s problematic from a cost and scale perspective.

Several issues arise from this for me.   Say you wanted to develop some content (e.g. deeper instructional design, if you’re concerned like me about the lack of quality in elearning).   You could just put it out there, and make it available for free, if you’ve the resources.   Otherwise, you could try to attach a pricetag, and see if anyone would pay.   However, what if you really felt it was a definitive suite of content, the equivalent of a Master’s course in Instructional Technology?   You could sell it, but you couldn’t award a degree even if you had the background and expertise to make a strong claim that it’s a more rigorous degree than some of those offered by accredited institutions, and more worthwhile.

The broader question, to me, is what is the ongoing role of accreditation?   I’ve argued that the role of universities, going forward, will likely be to develop learning to learn skills. So, post your higher ed experience (which really should be accomplished K12, but that’s another rant), you should be capable of developing your own skills.   If you’ve developed your own learning abilities, and believe you’ve mastered an area, I guess you really only need to satisfy your current or prospective employer.

On the other hand, an external validation certainly makes it easier to evaluate someone rather than the time-intensive process of evaluation by yourself.   Maybe there’s a market for much more focused evaluations, and associated content?

So, will we see broader diversity of acceptable evaluations, more evaluation of the authorial voice of any particular learning experience, a lifting of the game by educational institutions, or a growing   market of diverse accreditation (“get credit for your life experience” from the Fly By Night School of Chicanery)?

Presenting in a networked age

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The Learning Circuit’s Big Question this month has to do with the increasing prevalence of internet access during presentations.   The context is that during presentations it’s certainly possible that your audience is multi-tasking, and the question is; what are the implications?   In live presentations, the increasing prevalence of wi-fi or phone data means laptops and/or smartphones can be online, and in virtual ones there’s typically a number of other applications available at the same time.

The audience can be doing things related to the presentation, like live-blogging it, tweeting it, or taking notes (I’ve been known to mindmap a keynote a time or two).   They could even be looking up words or phrases mentioned by the speaker, or the speaker’s bio, or related material.   Alternatively, they can be doing other things, like checking email, surfing the web, or other, unrelated, activities.   Particularly in online presentations, there could   actually be live chatting going on in a side-channel.

Are these activities valuable to the listener? Are they valuable to the presenter?   Certainly, note taking is (though it doesn’t take connectivity).   There’re results on this, particularly if you’re re-representing the material in different ways (mind maps, or paraphrasing).   Blogging is, effectively, note-taking so should be valuable too, and tweeting may also be valuable (any studies?   Research topic!).   Certainly looking up things you don’t know so you process the rest of the material could also be valuable if it doesn’t take too long.   And the reprocessing and seeing others’ thoughts from chat could be valuable.   Even playing solitaire can be an advantage to listening, if you’re taking up some extra cognitive cycles that might otherwise lead you off into related thoughts but away from the presentation (likely only true if it’s just audio).

On the other hand, it might also add an intrusive overhead. Multi-tasking has been shown to provide a performance decrement.   Related activities help, but unrelated activities will hinder the ability to process. It may be that you can get so caught up in the chat, or the search to comprehend a term, that you lose the thread of the discussion.   And if it’s complex, the cognitive overhead might prevent you from actually being unable to make the necessary links.   Certainly the tasks that aren’t content related are an intrusion.

So what’s to do?   There are possible actions on both the part of the presenter/organizer, and on the part of the audience. For the audience, it’s got to be a personal responsibility to know how you learn best, and take appropriate steps. If note-taking helps you focus and elaborate, do so.   If tweeting, blogging, or mind-mapping does so, rock on.   If you really need to focus: put away the laptop and phone and focus!   It’s for your benefit!   Really, the same is for students.   Now, individuals may not be as self-aware as we may desire, but that’s a separate topic that needs to be taken care of in the appropriate context.

For the presenters or organizers, as the most onerous step they could prevent wi-fi access.   However, increasingly others are benefitting from the tweets from conferences and the blogging as well.   I think that’s overly draconian, an implicit sign of distrust.   If the presentation doesn’t match the audience interests, they should be able to vote with their feet or their minds.   As I told a medical school faculty years ago, you can’t force them to attend, taking away the internet might make them resort to doodling or daydreaming but while you can lead a learner to learning you can’t make them think.   It’s up to the presenter to present relevant material in an engaging manner.

As a presenter, you can actually use these channels to your advantage.   As a webinar presenter, I like having a live chat tool.   I monitor it, and use it to ask questions. In the last presentation I gave, it was awkward when a moderator had to read me the questions from the audience, and I couldn’t ask a general question an just survey the stream.     I realize it’s difficult to both present and monitor a chat stream, and not all presenters can do it, so having a moderator can be a benefit. But stifling that flow of discussion could be a bane to those who learn better that way.

I haven’t had a tweet stream monitor in a live presentation yet, and it could be harder to pay attention to it, so again a moderator could help.   In smaller sessions you can have interaction with the audience, but in larger presentations, it might take someone to follow it and summarize, though having a monitor that the presenter could see easily could also work.

However, it seems to me that you can’t force people to pay attention with or without technology, providing a rich suite of ways for people to process the information is valuable, and it can be a valuable source of feedback during the presentation.

Which leads to the new skills: for audiences, to know how you best process presentations and take responsibility for getting the most out of it; for presenters to improve their presentation skills to ensure value to the audience and support richer forms of interaction with the audiences; for moderators to track and summarize audience feedback in various forms; and for organizers to support these new channels.

There’s no point in trying to stifle technology affordances, the real key is to take advantage of them. If we have to learn, adjust, and accommodate, it’d be awful boring otherwise!   :)

Mobile Learning

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In addition to speaking on mobile design with David Metcal at the Mobile Learning Jam at DevLearn, and with Richard Clark on pragmatic mobile development, I’ve got a contract with Pfeiffer for a mobile learning book.   Yep, I’m writing another book.   Flat learning curve, eh?

Seriously, I’m excited about the opportunity, because I’ve been on the stump for mobile for years, and think the market is right for mobile to finally contribute to organizational performance like I’ve believed since I wrote an article on the topic back in 2001.   Consequently, I’m glad that Pfeiffer thinks the time is right for a practical book on the subject.

To make it a practical book, however, I need input. I hope to talk to some of the experts in the field, but I also want to hear from you. What do you think should be covered? What are your concerns?   What are your hot-button issues?   In short, what would be required to make the mlearning book for those of you charged with designing learning solutions?   I don’t want to write a book for the sake of writing a book, I want to provide a useful guide.   Please, let me know.   Comments here are welcome, or other forms of contact, are welcome as well.   Thanks!

Ignoring Informal

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I received in the mail an offer for a 3 book set titled Improving Performance in the Workplace.   It’s associated with ISPI, and greatly reflects their Human Performance Technology approach, which I generally laud as going beyond instructional design.   It’s also by Pfeiffer, who is my own publisher, and they’re pretty good as publishers go.   However, I noticed something that really struck me, based upon the work I’ve been doing with my colleagues in the Internet Time Alliance (formerly TogetherLearn).

The first volume is really about assessing needs, and design, and it includes behavioral task analysis and cognitive task analysis, and even talkes about engagement strategies in simulation and gaming, video gaming.   The second volume includes performance interventions, and includes elaerning, coaching, knowledge management, and more (as well as things like incentives, culture, EPSS, feedback, etc.   The third volume’s on measurement and evaluation.

All this is good: these are important topics, and having a definitive handbook about them is a valuable contribution (and priced equivalently, the whole set is bargain-priced at $400).   However, while I don’t have the book to hand to truly evaluate it, it appears that there are some gaps.

In my experience, some issues are not behavioral or cognitive but attitudinal.   Consequently, I’d have thought there might be some coverage.   There was a chapter in Jonassen’s old Handbook on Research in Ed Tech on the topic, and I’ve derived my own approach from that and some other readings. When they get into tools, they seem to miss virtual worlds, and they seem to have a repeat of the straw-man case against discovery environments (many years ago it was recognized that pure discovery wasn’t the go, and guided discovery was developed).   It bugs me that I can’t find the individual authors, but I do recognize the names of one of the editors.     But these aren’t the biggest misses, to me.

Overall, there seems to be no awareness of the whole thrust of social and informal learning.   Ok, so Jay’s book on Informal Learning is relatively new, and the concrete steps may still be being sorted out, but there’s a lot there.   Or perhaps it’s covered in Knowledge Management (after all, Marc Rosenberg’s been deeply involved in ISPI and wrote the Beyond e-Learning book).   Yet it seems a bit buried and muddled, and here’s why:

I’m working with a client now, and one of my tasks is surveying how they’re using social media.   A group responsible for technical training (and they’re an engineering organization) recognized that they weren’t able to keep up with the increasing quantity and quality of changes that were coming.   Rather than do a performance improvement intervention, they realized that another opportunity would be to start putting up information and inviting others to contribute.   They put up a wiki, and first maintained it internally, and then gradually devolved some of the responsibility out to their ‘customers’.

The point is, how does that fit into the traditional paradigm?   And yet, increasingly, we’re seeing and recommending approaches that go beyond the categories that fit here.   I wonder if their metrics include the outputs of enabling innovation.   I wonder if their interventions include expertise finders and collaboration tools. I wonder if their analyses include the benefits of ‘presence’.

Times are changing, faster and faster.   I think these books would’ve been the ideal thing, maybe 5 years ago.   Now, I think they’re emblematic of a training mindset when a larger perspective is needed.   These come into play after you’ve identified that a formal approach is needed.   They use a phrase of a ‘performance landscape’, but their picture doesn’t seem to include the concepts that Jay includes in his ‘learnscape’ and I as the ‘performance ecosystem’.

Virtual Worlds: Affordances and Learning

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Two days ago I attended the 3D Teaching, Learning, & Collaboration conference, organized by Tony O’Driscoll.   I’ve previously posted my thoughts on virtual worlds, but I had a wee bit of a revelation that I want to get clear in my head, and it ties into several things that went on at the conference.

First, let me say that the day of the conference I got to attend was great, with lots of the really involved folks there, and every evidence (including the tweet stream) that the second day was every bit as good.   Tony talked about his new book with Karl Kapp, Chuck Hamilton spoke on lessons learned through IBM’s invovlement in Virtual Worlds, Koreen Olbrish chaired a panel with a number of great case studies, to name just a few of the great opportunities.

Chuck listed 10 ‘affordances‘ of virtual worlds, expanding a list Tony had previously started.   There was some debate about whether affordance is a good term, since not everyone knows it, but I maintain that for people who need it, it’s the right term and that we can use some term like ‘inherent capability’ for those who don’t.   I had some quibbles with Chuck’s list, as it seemed that several confounded some issues, and I hope to talk with him more about it.

Tony also presented, in particular, some principles about designing learning for virtual worlds (see slide 17 here).   Interestingly, they aren’t specific to virtual worlds, and mirror the principles for designing engaging learning experiences that come from the alignment of educational practice and engaging experiences I talk about in my book.   Glad to see folks honing in on principles for creating meaningful virtual world experiences!

The revelation for me, however, was linking the social informal learning with virtual worlds.   Virtual worlds can be used for both formal and informal learning, they’re platforms for social action.   I’ve had the formal and informal separated in my mind, but needn’t.   I’ve been quite active in social learning to meet informal learning needs with   my togetherLearn colleagues, but have always written off virtual worlds as still having too much technical and learning overhead to be worth it unless you have a long-term intention where those overheads get amortized.

What’s clear is that, increasingly, organizations are creating and leveraging those long term relationships.   ProtonMedia even announced integration of both Sharepoint and their own social media system with their virtual world platform, so either can be accessed in world or from the desktop. There were a suite of examples across both formal and informal learning where organizations were seeing real, measurable, value.

The underlying opportunities of virtual presence are clear, it’s just not been clear that it’s significantly better than a non-immersive social networking system.   Certainly if what your people need to formally learn, or informally network on is inherently 3D, but the contextualization is having some benefits.

Some issues remain. At lunch I was talking to some gents who have a system that streams your face via webcam onto your avatar, so your real expressions are represented.   That’s counter to some of the possibilities I see to represent yourself in virtual worlds as you prefer to be seen, not as how nature commands, but there are some trust issues (and parental safety concerns as well).

Still, as technical barriers are surpassed, and audiences become more familiar with and comfortable in virtual worlds, the segue between formal and social networking can be accomplished in world making a virtual business office increasingly viable.   It may be time to dust off my avatar and get traveling.

Driving formal & informal from the same place

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There’s been such a division between formal and informal; the fight for resources, mindspace, and the ability for people to get their mind around making informal concrete.   However, I’ve been preparing a presentation from another way of looking at it, and I want to suggest that, at core, both are being driven from the same point: how humans learn.

I was looking at the history of society, and it’s getting more and more complex. Organizationally, we started from a village, to a city, and started getting hierarchical.   Businesses are now retreating from that point of view, and trying to get flatter, and more networked.

Organizational learning, however, seems to have done almost the opposite. From networks of apprenticeship through most of history, through the dialectical approach of the Greeks that started imposing a hierarchy, to classrooms which really treat each person as an independent node, the same, and autonomous with no connections.

Certainly, we’re trying to improve our pedagogy (to more of an andragogy), by looking at how people really learn.   In natural settings, we learn by being engaged in meaningful tasks, where there’re resources to assist us, and others to help us learn. We’re developed in communities of practice, with our learning distributed across time and across resources.

That’s what we’re trying to support through informal approaches to learning. We’re going beyond just making people ready for what we can anticipate, and supporting them in working together to go beyond what’s known, and be able to problem-solve, to innovate, to create new products, services, and solutions.   We provide resources, and communication channels, and meaning representation tools.

And that’s what we should be shooting for in our formal learning, too. Not an artificial event, but presented with meaningful activity, that learners get as important, with resources to support, and ideally, collaboration to help disambiguate and co-create understanding.   The task may be artificial, the resources structured for success, but there’s much less gap between what they do for learning and what they do in practice.

In both cases, the learning is facilitated. Don’t assume self-learning skills, but support both task-oriented behaviors, and the development of self-monitoring, self learning.

The goal is to remove the artificial divide between formal and informal, and recognize the continuum of developing skills from foundational abilities into new areas, developing learners from novices to experts in both domains, and in learning..

This is the perspective that drives the vision of moving the learning organization role from ‘training’ to learning facilitator. Across all organizational knowledge activities, you may still design and develop, but you nurture as much, or more.   So, nurture your understanding, and your learners.   The outcome should be better learning for all.

Learning Experience Creation Systems

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Where do the problems lie in getting good learning experiences? We need them, as it’s becoming increasingly important to get the important skills really nailed, not just ‘addressed’.   It’s not about dumping knowledge on someone, or the other myriad ways learning can be badly designed.   It’s about making learning experiences that really deliver.   So, where does the process of creating a learning experience go wrong?

There’s been a intriguing debate over at Aaron (@mrch0mp3rs) Silver’s blog about where the responsibility lies between clients and vendors for knowledge to ensure a productive relationship.   One of the issues raised (who, me?) is understanding design, but it’s clearly more than that, and the debate has raged.

Then, a post in ITFORUM asked about how to redo instructor training for a group where the instructors are SMEs, not trainers, and identified barriers around curriculum, time, etc.   What crystallized for me is that it’s not a particular flaw or issue, but it’s a system that can have multiple flaws or multiple points of breakdown.

LearningExperienceDesignSystemThe point is, we have to quit looking at it as design, development, etc; and view it not just as a process, but as a system. A system with lots of inputs, processes, and places to go wrong.   I tried to capture a stereotypical system in this picture, with lots of caveats: clients or vendors may be internal or external, there may be more than one talent, etc, it really is a simplified stereotype, with all the negative connotations that entails.

Note that there are many places for the system to break even in this simplified representation.   How do you get alignment between all the elements?   I think you need a meta-level, learning experience creation system design. That is, you need to look at the system with a view towards optimizing it as a system, not as a process.

I realize that’s one of the things I do (working with organizations to improve their templates, processes, content models, learning systems, etc), trying to tie these together into a working coherent whole. And while I’m talking formal learning here, by and large, I believe it holds true for performance support and informal learning environments as well, the whole performance ecosystem.   And that’s the way you’ve got to look at it, systemically, to see what needs to be augmented to be producing not content, not dry and dull learning, not well-produced but ineffective experiences, but the real deal: efficient, effective, and engaging learning experiences. Learning, done right, isn’t a ‘spray and pray’ situation, but a carefully designed intervention that facilitates learning.   And to get that design, you need to address the overall system that creates that experience.

The client has to ‘get’ that they need good learning outcomes, the vendor has to know what that means.   The designer/SME relationship has to ensure that the real outcomes emerge.   The designer has to understand what will achieve these outcomes.   The ‘talent’ (read graphic design, audio, video, etc) needs to align with the learning outcomes, and appropriate practices, the developer(s) need to use the right tools, and so on.   There are lots of ways it can go wrong, in lack of understanding, in mis-communication, in the wrong tools, etc.   Only by looking at it all holistically can you look at the flows, the inputs, the processes, and optimize forward while backtracking from flaws.

So, look at your system.   Diagnose it, remedy it, tune it, and turn it into a real learning experience creation system.   Face it, if you’re not creating a real solution, you’re really wasting your time (and money!).

Complicit Clients

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I regularly rail against cookie-cutter learning design, boring elearning, etc.   I like to blame it on designers who don’t know the depths of learning behind the elements of design, and perhaps also on managers who don’t work to ensure that the learning objectives are tied closely to meaningful business outcome.   And I think that’s true, but of course there’s another culprit as well: clients who just ask for the same old thing!

I regularly work with a couple of partners who use me when there’s a need to go to the ‘next level’, whether it’s to mobile, pushing the engagement envelope, or working more strategically (that’s one of the way I help clients, too).   However, too often they’re just asked to turn content into courses, and the clients don’t care that the learning objectives in that content are too low-level, too knowledge-focused, completely abstract or de-contextualized, and generally not meaningful.   Now, my partners generally push back a bit, trying to help the client realize the value of a deeper design, but many times the client doesn’t want to put any more money in, doesn’t want to think about it, they just want that course up with a quiz (even with a pre-test!, *shudder*).   And my partners will go along, because creating elearning is their business and they can’t just turn away work.

And I’ve heard that from in-h0use departments as well.   As one of the attendees at my strategic elearning workshop a couple of months ago said, the managers from other business units say “just do that stuff you do” and don’t want any deeper thought into it.   They want it fast, based upon the content, and apparently don’t care that it isn’t going to lead to any meaningful change.   Or don’t know the difference. Hey, they learned that way, so it must be OK, right?

However, I think we owe it to the learners, to those clients, and to ourselves to start educating those clients, internal or external, about good learning.   You’ve got to know it yourself first, of course, but once you’re doing it anyway, there’s really no extra overhead at the first level.   But you want to start pushing back: “what’s the behavior that needs to change/”, or “what decisions do they need to be able to make that they can’t make correctly now?”   And, we need to ask “how will you know that it’s changed? What are the metrics that you’re trying to impact?”   Once you’ve got them thinking about measurable change, you have the opportunity to start talking about meaningful impact and good design to achieve outcomes.

Frankly, you can’t complain about relevance to the organization if you’re not fighting to achieve better outcomes, ones that matter.   So, educate yourselves, improve your processes, and then fight to be doing more meaningful stuff.   Hey, we’re supposed to be about learning, and marketing our services is really about good customer education! Get them educated, and get to be doing more meaningful and consequently rewarding design.