The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Instructional Designers

Developing the best performance intervention, rather than jumping through hoops to fill every training request requires a different breed of instructional designer (ID).  These IDs are well schooled in Performance Consulting, a bedrock book for the human resources, learning and organizational development fields introduced by Dana and Jim Robinson.  But beyond that, effective IDs share some very distinct habits.  Stephen Covey’s book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, presents us with a fairly good framework for highlighting these.

1.       Laser-focused on the business goal and wields it to drive every decision.  Too many corporate training initiatives are nothing more than information dumps chock full of facts and bullet-points.  And no, a quiz or a survey at the end of an information dump does not make it interactive or useful.  Effective instructional designers know that if their interventions are going to succeed, they are going to have to eliminate the mentality of many clients and subject-matter experts to toss in every bit of information that is available- the “everything including the kitchen sink” mentality.  Instead, the great ones are OCD about the business goal behind the training need and exercise Habit #2.

2.       Educate up, down, and sideways.  Subject-matter experts need their expertise focused on the business goals, and on the learners’ performance.  Project managers need to be educated on our methodologies to the extent that they will understand the project’s milestones and time and budgetary requirements.  Client’s need to be educated on why the focus needs to be sharpened, on what works with the population of learners we are targeting, and on why we select the methodologies and interventions that we do-they are paying for it.  With all of this educating that needs to take place, effective instructional designers are first and foremost excellent teachers.  In order to educate all of the stakeholders in a project, effective designers must be at the “top of their game” and knowledgeable on the latest in educational technology, the best ones proactively keep up with the latest developments in the field. 

3.       Stays on top of their “game”.  Clients want to hire the best and brightest, and the best IDs are constantly developing and growing their skill set and knowledge of their craft.  It is imperative that you stay abreast of developments in the fields of instructional design, education, psychology (especially if your work revolves around a specific target population), and issues affecting today’s business climate.  Become disciplined in setting aside time every day to learn something new about your craft, or participate in learning something via a new delivery platform.

4.       Stays Organized.  Instructional design requires the development of objectives, assessments, strategies, graphic design assets, audio & video assets, storyboards, guides, manuals, job aids, and other tools of the trade. Used correctly these tools have the potential to transform performance and drive organizational behavior. And all of these assets must be stored in a way that they can be referenced in the future, and the organization can access them at the time of need.  Performers must be able to find the learning assets they need, when they need them, how they need them, and wherever they need them.

5.       First things first.  Effective IDs prioritize work that matters.  This is the difference between spending your time on a PowerPoint file riddled with bullet points, versus analyzing the performance of a star employee who is outperforming his peers by leaps and bounds. Focus on urgent and important business needs- not just urgent, and especially not on urgent and unimportant. Too many IDs spend their valuable time performing menial tasks rather than honing and flexing their performance consulting skillset.  Effective IDs rank and rate requests for their expertise by proximity to the organization’s business and strategic goals. They realize what belongs on the back burner, and what should be handled immediately.

6.       Advocates for the learner.  ID’s have an ethical responsibility to not bore learners with “training materials” that are ineffective and worthless. The ID is an advocate for the learner or performer who will utilize the material.  Instructions must be clear, multimedia assets should be relevant and professionally produced, test questions and distractors should objectively measure newly acquired knowledge, skills, and abilities and be well written. Time and budgetary constraints will always place limits on the instructional strategies you are able to pursue, but the best ID’s will achieve a greater “return on learning” given a project’s constraints.

7.       Collaborate.  The best instructional designers work with their clients, not for their clients.  This is really important and takes years to master.  When an ID works with a company or client, they are a partner in their success. The difference lies in in the control a client can exert over the design of any intervention when the ID is perceived as an employee whose duty is to merely follow instructions.  Working for a company or client, it becomes too easy for them to dictate the instructional strategy the designer can follow. Effective IDs know they must be on equal footing in order to drive forward with solutions that will meet real needs, and not perceived wants.

As the economy continues to improve and the hiring market picks up steam, effective instructional designers will leverage these habits to bring new hires up to speed quicker, and to develop the existing talent pool to grow into roles that will be vacated by departing staff.  It’s time to up your game, following the seven habits is a great starting point.

- 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.

Are your learners achieving as a result of your training?

@Quinnovator reminded us all during a session (co-hosted with @aaronesilvers) at last week's Learning Solutions conference that no matter what we design or build, you cannot guarantee learning will happen.  The most you can do is provide for the best opportunity for learning to take place.  That's right- you are just an enabler of the right conditions, context, and opportunity for someone to learn.  So, if your organization recognizes this and wants learning to be a competitive differentiator- it must track in its performance appraisal process how well or how poorly its people leverage these opportunities to create value and innovate.

I'm not talking about tracking attendance at instructor-led courses offered, or other "butts-in-seats" metrics of who stared at their PC monitor the longest taking some e-learning course.  You've also got to dig deeper than a few quiz items at the end of your course to signal completion or pass/fail.  The effort must look beyond simple measures of attendance and activity, and focus on assessing the performance and perfecting of newly learned skills and abilities.  The implications of this are enormous, both for instructional designers and human resources professionals alike. 

For designers, look to learning management systems (or HRIS systems) that can assist you in tracking metrics relevant to the performance of newly acquired skills.  Also look to measure the motivation of your learners to partake in development opportunities and to try new skills and abilities.  Work with Managers in your organization to identify metrics they can observe on-the-job and away from the training department's observing eyes.  Also work with managers on strategies to motivate your learners to use new skills and to not punish failure, but to reinforce and correct performance back on-the-line.  And finally, ask yourself- can you tie some of the performance metrics you are developing directly to the organization's strategic goals and priorities? 

Human resources professionals also need to recalibrate their performance development systems and processes to reward those that proactively leverage learning opportunities afforded to them by the organization.  Rather than simply accounting for training courses taken, identify the goals and objectives of said learning and development opportunities and then interview peers and/ or supervisors seeking input into the performance of newly acquired skills.  How have employees performed new skills in advancement of the organization's strategic initiatives?  Did the employee actively seek out the opportunity, or was the employee a passive (or worse, reluctant) recipient of the learning opportunity? 

While it’s not easy to measure initiative and drive to learn (and grow), identifying those individuals within your organization who are striving to better themselves and improve their value to the company is critical to your success.

- 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.

Using QR codes to record learning experiences in an LRS

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This quick video by Walter Duncan reminded me of some of my initial thoughts when I first read of the development of the Tin Can API. I can see a not-too-distant future where learners scan a QR code after completing an activity, and their experience gets logged to their cloud-based Learning Record Store (LRS).  In fact, I think I’ll drop that suggestion to Power-2-Teach as a future enhancement for their Quick Key app.  While the app solves the issue of grading for teachers, I can see a use case for not just teachers― but for tracking learner experiences in the corporate sector as well.

- 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.

History of E-learning

The word “E-learning” seems so general and common today, especially the speed with which it is becoming a learning norm nowadays, labels it as one of the widely practiced concept all over the world. But, till 1999, no one could even imagine that learning would be possible without meeting at a physical location and there had never been a term like “E-learning” till then. The word “E-learning” and its concept first emerged in October 1999, in a seminar at Los Angeles, organized by CBT systems. In this seminar, the origin and usage of this word in a professional field, was never thought to be the most admiring and adopted idea in just few coming years. It implies that the concept of E-learning is not that old.

The world “E-learning” is also associated with the expressions like “virtual learning” or “online learning”. Experts define E-learning as a mean to gain learning that is based on the utilization of new advanced technologies that permit access to interactive, online and sometime tailored training via Internet and other media like interactive TV, Intranet, CD-ROM, extranet etc so as to expand competencies while the course of learning is self-determining from place and time.

The growth of the e-Learning concept has derived from so many other ‘educational revolutions’. Some of such revolutions are quoted by Billings and Moursund (1988) as:

• The development of writing and reading
• The emergence of the teacher/scholar profession
• The development of portable technology
• The advancement of electronic technology

It seems that the basic ideas, didactical grounds and methodologies are not so new!

The history of E-learning has been a gradual evolution since long.

In the beginning of 1960s, Psychology professors from Stanford University, named Richard C. Atkinson and Patrick Suppes tested computers to be used to teach math to kids in elementary schools in East Palo Alto, California. These experiments gave birth to Stanford’s Education Program for Gifted Youth.

In the year 1963, Bernard Luskin set up the earliest computer in a community college for teaching. At that time he was working with Stanford along with others and made progress in computer assisted training. Luskin finished his milestone UCLA thesis while working with the Rand Corporation in examining the problems to computer assisted education in 1970.

Initially the e-learning systems, that are based on Computer-Based Training frequently tried to replicate conventional teaching methods whereby the function of the e-learning system was assumed to be for conveying knowledge, as contrasting to systems that were developed afterward. These were designed on the basis of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), which initiated the idea of shared growth of knowledge.

In 1993, William D. Graziadei introduced an online computer-conveyed lecture, seminar and evaluation project via electronic mail. The first most online high school was founded by 1994. Till now the e-learning has become the hot norm of societies at large, all over the world. The global e-learning industry is anticipated to have value over $48 billion as per some conservative estimates.(Nagy, A., 2005, pp. 79-96). From 1994 till 2006 i.e. just within 12 years, over 3.5 million students had been reported to participate in on-line learning environment at various higher education institutions in US.

E-Learning is now being adopted widely and used by a number of companies to update and educate both their customers and employees. Companies with big and spread out division chains employ it to teach their staff even for the newest product advancements without the requirement of arranging physical courses.

Reference:

1. Nagy, A. (2005). The Impact of E-Learning, in: Bruck, P.A.; Buchholz, A.; Karssen, Z.; Zerfass, A. (Eds). E-Content: Technologies and Perspectives for the European Market. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 79–96

-Jay Chun

Jay is an elearning developer and instructional designer, as well as a valuable contributor to the Collabor8 Learning team.  He has worked on eLearning projects for fortune 500 companies and in industries ranging from Healthcare, Military, and Education and Scholastic.  

To read more about his past work and experience, click here.  Jay can be reached at 949-407-6460, or at jay@jpchun.com.