How the Food Network can make you a better e-learning designer

I admit, I'm addicted to watching the Food Network parade celebrity chefs in to make amazing dishes, all the while giving step-by-step instructions on how you too can accomplish the same. There is a little bit to their magic that annoys me, and resonates with me as a learning professional. Recently I've begun using this little annoyance as a teaching tool with some of our more inexperienced clients with great success- and you can too!

You see, it annoys me that many of these chefs get to their "kitchens" in their little studios and all of the ingredients for their dishes are already measured, poured, or prepped for them into these cute little dishes just waiting for them to crank out their culinary masterpieces. That's not how it happens in the real world kids, and yes- I know it's all in the interest of time yada, yada, yada.

The design and development of e-learning course is very much like the preparation and cooking of a culinary masterpiece. Teaching strategies have to be created, storyboards and rough sketches developed, and multimedia assets like animations, audio files, and videos have to be built in order to include them in e-learning lessons. Much like a culinary masterpiece, except in most projects clients come to the table with rough ideas as to what the end product will teach and how.

Clients rarely have an accurate estimate of how long it will take to develop multimedia assets for inclusion in their courseware, and the rise of so many powerful rapid e-learning authoring tools promote the idea that courses can be built “in no time flat.” Much of the value in custom courseware development is added to the course during the development of custom graphics, voice narrations, animations, and videos- not in the purchase of a couple of stock photography images. finding new, innovative, and interactive ways for your learners to engage with content is how your course will distinguish itself from a lot of the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) stuff that’s out there.

Next time you find yourself planning a project with a client, rather than using percentages of the project complete, or phases in your instructional design and development process as milestones- use completion of the development of multimedia assets as milestones. This will give your client a much more refined view of how long each of the ingredients in their e-learning masterpiece is going to take to build. If they are budget-constrained, this will also help as they can elect to go with cheaper-to-develop training strategies during the planning process of the project.

---

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop and train their employees and/ or customers. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

To engage learners, make it fun!

One of the hardest things we teach our clients is that just because we are instructional designers, doesn't mean we're bound to deliver training within the confines of a "course". While many of us were trained to use all of the tools available to us that came with our instructional designers toolbox (job aids, wikis, video clips, etc.), clients assume everything we write for them will be in a course format. 

Even before the current trend to gamify learning became mainstream, every instructional model that I know of preaches that you must gain your learners attention- and then keep it. In other words, build boring training and your learners will check out even before finishing to read the bulleted list of 48 objectives for your course. 

Technology is making it easier and easier to deliver learning and instruction in more ways than ever before. Take something as exciting as copyright law. Pun intended. I know what you're thinking, sounds about as fun as passing a kidney stone, yet Duke University took on the challenge of teaching this topic in a fun and unique way and they ought to be recognized for doing so. 

The University developed a comic book which translates copyright law into an exciting and visual story, complete with a heroine who has to navigate IP law. I highly recommend you all click here and download a copy of this comic book as a sample of how to teach boring topic in a new and more interesting way. 

How can you use this example in your work? Very easily, think of all of the training courses or programs that you are tasked with developing. Think of all that exciting sales and compliance training courses, or how about information security. Rather than jumping into PowerPoint or Captivate with your favorite template, can you instead write a story demonstrating the use of the concepts you have to teach and then leverage a graphic designer- maybe one board out of his or her wits in your marketing or PR department, and have them animate your story.

Stop flexing your course building muscles, and build up your storytelling brain cells by leveraging a non-traditional delivery format. You'll find you may achieve a greater level of engagement in the material from your learners, and you may actually enjoy the process of constructing something like what Duke University has done here.
 

---

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop and train their employees and/ or customers. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

The e-learning industry is booming, what's that mean for instructional designers (IDs)?

According to this piece by Forbes, the e-learning industry is poised for a breakout $107 Billion 2015! And that's with a capital B. So, what's all that success spell for instructional designers?

I've never been more optimistic about the prospects for our profession. There are some interesting clues as to what all this success means for IDs currently in the field, and those exploring whether to jump into it. Consider the following statement by Mike Maples from Floodgate when speaking about the state of the industry:

“I think e-learning is still very compelling but very, very crowded. Companies involved with e-learning will struggle unless they have a truly disruptive idea and a structural advantage.”

— Mike Maples

Now I ask you, who better to drive said innovation and help subject matter experts develop that truly disruptive idea for how to teach something in a new way leveraging today's technological advances than instructional designers? 

Of note as well is that the article mentions many sites developing online learning for people to develop their own skills such as Lynda.com and General Assembly; the "consumer online learning space". Not much is mentioned about how many organizations are struggling to figure out how to turn this new world of online learning into a competitive advantage in how they develop their in-house talent. This "corporate online learning space" is a huge area of opportunity for IDs. 

There is so much innovation in this space that opportunities for instructional designers who continue to develop their skill sets will continue to abound. The online learning industry is far from a zero sum game, the pie is already large and growing. If you're not getting your share, you've really got no one else to blame but yourself.

What other opportunities for the online learning industry do you see that could lead to even greater growth rate than what was forecast in the Forbes piece? 

---

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop and train their employees and/ or customers. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

What do instructional designers have in common with professional translators?

I read this piece on Thomas Piketty's translator by David Gura, and was intrigued. And not just because c'mon, how many translators and their work break through the "mediasphere" and into our collective public discourse? Always reading with an eye towards what lessons I can learn from the piece, something caught my eye about how their work shares of quality with that of us instructional designers. While discussing how most translators are not very well-paid and describing their work, there is this gem:

...“capturing the flavor and the feeling and the context.”

You see we all-knowing preach how performance doesn't our current a vacuum, and neither should training- regardless of whether we're talking about instructor-led training or e-learning. In order for your learners to best practice the skills you are trying to teach, it helps to visualize and put those skills in the context in which they will need to perform them back on the job. This not only helps with retention, but with skills transfer.

Skill transfer refers to any tactics or strategies that you employee in your training to enable learners better recall of information learned well training- after said training has occurred. As it turns out, translators face similar challenges in capturing the flavor, feeling, and the context behind the words they are translating to a second language- at least the best ones do. 

How can you apply this principle of capturing the context to your e-learningHere's one way you can apply this. Many designers are concerned with a lot of elements of the user interface for the courses. Not just the navigation or what functionality to include in the course player, but what reusable screen design templates can they build to then speed up their course development. Rather than relying on abstract graphic designs or PowerPoint slide templates, ask your client or subject matter experts if they can supply you pictures of the environment where your target population typically performs. These images can be of workspaces your target audience would recognize. Then simply cover the image with a semi transparent color layer of your choice to match your course player template.

If you've got more than one of these images, you can actually create different slide templates based on these workspaces which hopefully your learners will recognize. Now your instruction will literally take place in the context of where it occurs in the physical world- in your online course. 

You can do this for practically any workspace, and its a cheap way to create a slide template. Here are a few examples for you to check out:

View fullsize

View fullsize

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.

How closely should your e-learning simulate the performance of a skill?

Our advice to clients— within your budgetary and other constraints your e-learning should allow for skill performance and practice that very closely resembles the real-world environment.  No picture that I’ve come across recently exemplifies this principle more than that of Patrick below, the virtual patient used to train medical students entering the field of proctology. You can track Patrick’s very existence to this line in the article—

“Currently, students receive minimal practice and interaction in intimate exams due to the high cost for training and high anxiety nature of the exams.”

Feel free to read more about Patrick and the team that developed him by clicking here. When selecting a delivery medium for instruction, never forget e-learning is most effective when:

1.        Practicing the skills to be taught is too dangerous, risky or costly to allow for practice in the real world (think of the military’s use of flight simulators, or Patrick in the article above),

2.       Your learners are very geographically dispersed, or

3.       The skills you need to teach lend themselves to online delivery (i.e. software training).

Unfortunately, decisions are sometimes made at the beginning of the instructional design process with thinking that goes something like this, “because we have all these PowerPoint’s already built and e-learning development software is so inexpensive,” or “it has been decided this will be an e-learning project.” In many of these situations where the medium does not fit the learning situation, the results are often very unfortunate but irreversible after construction of the learning materials has begun.

- Alex Santos

Alex is a co-founder and Managing Member of Collabor8 Learning, LLC, an instructional design and performance management consultancy. His firm collaborates with organizations to enhance the way they develop  and train their people. To learn more about Collabor8 Learning, click here.

Alex can be reached at 786-512-1069, alex@collabor8learning.com or via Twitter@collabor8alex.