Epic recruiting and what you can learn from Mark Cuban

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it―lure a top prospect to your organization while offering him/ her less money than what they are currently making all the while helping your organization cut back on the number of days critical positions remain open.  Sound like Mission Impossible right?  Not for Mark Cuban and his Dallas Mavericks, and you my instructional designer friend can employ a similar tactic to improve the performance of your HR team.

I don’t often write about recruiting practices, but I bumped into this clip earlier this week and find its use ingenious and very clever on the part of the Mavs.  Want to know the best part?  Say your organization is struggling to attract the type of hires it wants or worse, is losing out on these candidates to your competitors- you can storyboard a clip like this, fire up Camtasia, and build a short, customizable, and re-usable recruiting asset for your HR team!  And don’t limit yourself to creating a video clip either, many of you possess tools like Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, Lectora Inspire or any of a number of e-learning authoring tools out on the market.  Many of these tools can be used to very quickly build an asset like this, and one your company’s HR team should be able to measure the return on. 

Why build something like this you may be asking yourself?  And I’m going to highlight for you one of Mark’s lessons in business here:

“What I do know, at least what I think I have learned from my experiences in business is that when there is a rush for everyone to do the same thing, it becomes more difficult to do. Not easier.  Harder.  It also means that as other teams follow their lead, it creates opportunities for those who have followed a different path.” 

-Mark Cuban

And there you have it- as the labor market continues to improve, companies will have to adapt to greater competition for high-potential candidates. They will have to find ways to distinguish themselves, to stand out from the crowd.  In your instructional designer role, and with the tools at your disposal―you can make a huge contribution to your HR organization’s efforts.

- 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.

Instructional Design requires time

I think I'll add this piece to the list of required reading for prospective clients.  And yes, I purposely used the word "required". I already harp on this whenever we propose X number of design hours on a project, and almost reflexively the first thing a client wants to take a scalpel to is the design time. Anyone else have this experience?

If you want the cliff notes, the needs of the students at San Jose State were tossed on the back burner in favor of the wants of the business of education and of a company- Udacity.  

After reading about the school's experiment, one quote stood out in my mind- "The courses were also put together in a rush." I hope for the sake of the students that the University makes the most out of their pause in this relationship, and take a long hard look at their business decisions as well as some of their instructional design choices in this matter. 

The fact that the Udacity students fared significantly worse than their in-class peers is a red flag of sloppy and/ or rushed instructional design.  Indeed digging deeper into the piece you'll find the following gems- "faculty were building the courses on the fly... faculty did not have a lot of time to watch how students were doing in the courses because the faculty were busy trying to finish them." 

In other words, a rush job without much formative evaluation of the course before a final rollout.  I recall back when I was learning to design instruction there being great attention paid to conducting a formative evaluation of a course at every stage of development.  This step is crucial especially after instructional media, online interactions, and the instructional strategy are baked into a draft course. For online courses, you sit a sample of likely members of your target audience in front of a course and evaluate everything from their ability to navigate the course to how well they are able to perform the desired skills after completing the draft course.  The whole purpose of the exercise is to test the effectiveness of the instructional strategy and of the course and any associated materials.  

For the development of all of Collabor8's clients, we request a few test participants to go through our courses and provide us with invaluable feedback  using a punch list.  Many times, we create a simple spreadsheet in Google Drive, and share it with the folks who will be performing the testing.  It doesn't really need to be complicated, in fact- click here to see the format that we use.

Using this sheet, students can go in and provide us with feedback.  We ourselves use the sheet to note any observations that we find to be useful edits when doing our own internal quality reviews.  

To avoid a fiasco like this, keep your learner's interests and needs above all else.  And do yourself and your clients a favor, don't skip conducting a formative evaluation of your courses.  Also remember that online training courses are fantastic supplements to more traditional instructor-led training sessions. Investing a little time during development to evaluate might have alerted some in administration to the fact that some of the enrolled students in the online courses did not have reliable access to computers.

Additional source: Online Education Start-Up Gets 'F' From University

- 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.

10 Clues you might just be designing a job aid, not e-learning

10. Your client hands over a 150 slide PowerPoint deck riddled with bullet points worse than Bonnie & Clyde’s Ford V8 and says “put this online for me”. 

9. You’re asked to “convert” an “employee manual” to e-learning, with no access to a subject-matter expert or a clearly articulated business goal.

8. You ask to analyze an exemplary performer to observe the desired skills and are greeted by blank stares.

7. Your budget for the development of the project is about the price of a couple of iStock images, a foot-long meatball sandwich at Subway, and a 12 oz. Coke.

6. There is no time for a front-end needs analysis, “just build us the e-learning”.

5. There are no meaningful examples of the behaviors or skills to develop, much less non-examples.

4. The objectives for the “e-learning” contain the words― understand, know, become aware of, realize, familiarize yourself, etc.

3. Your client says, “No, a skills check or assessment after the learners complete the e-learning module won’t be required.”

2. There is no baseline performance data to measure the results of any e-learning intervention to speak of.

And the number one clue you just might be designing a job aid is...

1. For source material/ content, your client asked you to “go buy a book” on the subject matter!

- 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.

Is it time to Reboot eLearning, or simply boot poor clients?

Read this article upon waking up today, and I'm not so sure our industry needs a reboot.  As instructional designers at heart, we work closely with our clients to educate them on the potential uses for their content in an online environment.  I've had that conversation dozens of times, where using the sleight of hand techniques we learned back from Performance Consulting we shift the conversation away from all of the facts our client wants his/ her learners to "learn" (more like "memorize" or "keep in mind" while performing) to the outcomes of desired performance.  You know the one.  It typically starts out with, "we have these PowerPoint files".  The author, Carol Leaman, does recognize this when she states-

"...especially businesses implementing eLearning all need to ask, not “what are we doing?” or even “why we're doing this?” but “how are we doing it?”

However, just two sentences below she falls into an all too familiar trap of asking "How do you deliver specifically what an employee needs to know..." -completely the wrong question.  Many of us in the field continue to hammer the point that what an employee needs to know should be the last thing you ask.  First and foremost, we should be asking-

1. What is the business goal?

2. What behaviors must learners perform to help us meet our business goal?

3. Why aren't learners performing this way?

4. What learning activities can we design that fall within the client's budget that will allow learners to practice these behaviors in an online environment, and receive feedback on their performance?

5. And lastly, the author's question- How do you deliver specifically what an employee needs to know?

In summary, I know I'm not alone in having these conversations with our prospective clients.  I speak to other designers on a daily basis, many outside of our sphere of influence, and some in other countries as well.  I had one know-it-all former attorney tell me that "lawyers learn via bullet points".  The challenge I see is not to completely reboot our industry because of prospects or clients that are relics from a previous era, but to boot prospects who insist on merely putting content online. 

Reminds me of the old proverb- you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.  I say boot these poor prospects, and work with those that will allow you to make a lasting difference and add value to their efforts.  Just like dating, you should have standards and choose clients wisely.  

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, You'll know when you find it."

-Steve Jobs

Let's talk about e-learning

- 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.

One Tin Can E-learning designers shouldn’t kick down the road

Getting started with the Tin Can API, Part 1

The e-learning development standard SCORM, or Sharable Content Object Reference Model, is nearing the end of its useful life. Many in the e-learning development community, from designers to trainers alike, would agree it is way past its prime.   In case you haven’t heard, its replacement – the Tin Can API, is here and slowly but surely making its way into the marketplace.  If you’d like to learn more about the API and the changes it brings with it, there’s no better explanation in my book than this short clip by Tim Martin from Rustici software.   

What does this mean for your training courses, and how can you leverage the Tin Can API for the benefit of your end users?  Additionally, what should you be doing now to prepare?  I’d like to explore these questions with you in a series of posts, and encourage you to chime in on the discussion. 

Built on the philosophy that learning is taking place everywhere, and not simply through an active browser session inside of your learning management system you can now track all types of learning and development activities.  Keep in mind that simply tracking learning activities is not in and of itself evidence of improved performance due to the use of your learning assets.  The Tin Can API will however allow you to track all kinds of learning activities from reading a book to highlighting the sentence on your Kindle and attending an industry conference. These are all activities that due to SCORM’s limitations, you could not easily track.

There are several things that you can be doing out here for this monumental change first and foremost is educating yourself.  I’m a very tactile learner, and require engaging and tinkering with things in order to learn. One of the things you can do is to open up a learning record store and learning about all of the statements that you will be able to track in the cloud.  My recommendation is to checkout the Wax LRS by SaLTBOX.  Open up and account for yourself, it is currently free.  Having an account will allow you to test learning experiences from your own experiences in an actual cloud-based learning record store.  Additionally, if you have old courses are lessons created using articulate storyline you can republish these activities for the tin can API. Again this is simply for testing purposes, so that you can gain experience into working with tin can statements.

From a more strategic vantage point, say you’re a Director of Training, instructional designer, or Manager of Learning and Development in your organization or institution of higher learning. Odds are that many of the learning and development opportunities you’ve been providing your clients have not been tracked via your LMS using SCORM.  Thanks to the Tin Can API you can now begin defining statements of achievement for all of these L&D activities, and brainstorming ways you can track them in a learning record store.  You can learn more about tin can statements from the sites of one of the cloud-based LRS vendors, I have found this one particularly useful.  Additionally, you can experiment with validating your Tin Can statements here.

Steve Flowers over at e-learning heroes also provided me with several very useful sites you may also want to check out if you’re just getting started. 

For "less technical explanations" of Tin Can API in general, here are a few resources. The cartoon sequence is pretty clever.
http://floatlearning.com/2012/11/the-tin-can-api-a-non-technical-analysis/

http://floatlearning.com/tincancartoon/

My explanation and use-case descriptions for senior leadership of my org isn't really that technical but contains org specific contexts and language so it might be tough to follow:

http://androidgogy.com/2012/12/11/tech-people-and-systems/

Kevin Thorn and David Kelly gave a presentation at ASTD's TK13 last week in San Jose. Here's a description of that session and the slides:

http://davidkelly.me/2013/01/what-is-tin-can-and-why-should-i-care-resources-shared-at-astdtk13/

We’ll continue to discuss this topic in future posts, but as the title of this post suggests―I highly recommend for you to begin getting your feet wet with the Tin Can API. 

- 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.