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.

Who moved my corporate training cheese?

Technology and the demands of digital natives are disrupting the corporate training market as never before.  I had this belief further crystallized this morning upon reading this article in the HBR blog network. I highly recommend if you are in the learning and development field, you devote a few minutes today to reading it.  Kinda reminded me of that oldie but goodie Spencer Johnson book for some reason, maybe because- "if you do not change, you will become extinct!"

Though the piece mentions massive, open, online courses (or, MOOCs) as the technology driving the disruption in the educational market, it’s not just MOOCs that are disrupting the corporate training sector.  The advancement in cloud technologies, collaboration software, and the advent of easily available social networking and learning management tools are all changing the business of corporate training.  Technology is fundamentally altering the way we receive information.  Everything from how we receive information, who or what delivers it, and how we measure and track what information was exchanged is changing.  With the release of the Tin Can API, you could even argue that “big data” is finally coming to corporate training.  Think about it, integrated with your HR and talent management systems, you can build a pretty complete picture of all of the learning and development experiences of your best performers.

Speaking of your best performers, many of them are what Marc Prensky described as digital natives.  These new workers and their demands are having a huge impact not just in HR, but throughout your organization.  They are servicing your clients via social networking channels – maybe even collaborating with them after hours, driving your IT department to open up your network to their devices, and altering how your HR people attract, recruit, hire, train and develop them.  The nerve!  You must get a grip on this one fact- your workers are networked, connected, and mobile. 

If you’re a corporate training executive, this is a curve you want to get ahead of before you find yourself unemployed and with a skill set that could best be described as “expired”.  What can you do, you ask?  Start by taking an online course; there are literally thousands available for free that you can take at your own leisure.  Don’t know her start, visit the Khan  Academy, Lynda.com, or Coursera.  Take this revolution out for a spin.  You’ll be surprised at how much you can learn.   

The idea of ‘digital mentors’ has been used successfully by many organizations, if not within the confines of your own organization – reach out to other training professionals via local chapters of organizations such as the e-Learning Guild, the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD),  the Society for Applied Learning Technology (SALT), and the International Society for Performance Improvement ( ISPI) and discuss with your peers how these technologies are being used in their corporate environments. 

Ready to 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.

Who’s going to pay for your Learning Record Store?

Jane Hart recently released interim results for her Learning in the Workplace Survey and though it is still open, has found evidence that show how workers continue to organize and manage their own learning in the workplace. 

Interestingly enough, shortly after I was reading Jane's interim results I bumped into this great infographic by Catalin Zorzini (scroll down to the Testimonials section) on how web designers get educated.  What struck me the most about this infographic were the testimonials from web designers and the bottom of the page.  Look at how many of these designers consider the skills they have self-taught themselves through experimentation and the tutorials of others priceless- and in many instances superior to those skills acquired in a formal education. 

The interim results from Jane’s survey as well as the infographic and other anecdotal data we continue to receive from our clients point to a growing trend in the learning and development field.  Ownership and control of learning and development activities is shifting from the L&D department to individual learners.  One technology that is sure to move this trend further along was the release last week of the new Tin Can API. 

Click on image for slides from presentation of The Experience API by Nik Hruska at Defense Game Tech Users’ Conference 2013.

The new Tin Can API brings with it the portability of “experience” data will allow learners to take their learning records (which will be stored in the cloud) with them when moving from one organization to the next.  Learning records are no longer locked into one organization’s LMS and left to rot there once an employee leaves.  This has some pretty massive implications for the fields of human resources, organizational development as well as training and development.

There are still some kinks left to be worked out with this API, for example – when an employee leaves a company and is in between jobs, who pays for that cloud-based learning record store?  Traditionally speaking, companies have paid for some learning management system to keep these records. When employees ask to take their learning records with them so that they don’t have to retake that compliance or sexual harassment prevention course again upon starting employment with another organization, will companies download these records from their learning record cloud and hand them over to the employee in a USB stick?  Better yet, will organizations feel comfortable handing over this data on behalf of a departing employee to a competitor?

Many of these issues will get worked out in the months and years ahead.  In the meantime, if you are one of those learners whose already taken responsibility for your own learning and development- would you pay for a personal and portable cloud-based learning record store?

- 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.

E-learning for Nuclear Newcomers

As a designer, I maintain a pretty robust collection of e-learning samples to which I will gladly add this one that I found today. It's been developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency and has a very clean look. I found the navigation quite intuitive (albeit not very attractive), and several features of the course such as the glossary and the search bar are easy to find and use.  

The IAEA created the interactive e-learning series explaining the IAEA’s Milestones Approach to introducing a nuclear power program. This approach is based on three phases and covers the 19 infrastructure issues that need to be addressed, and brings decades of expertise to life.  If you're like me and enjoy collecting sample e-learning projects for future reference this isn't a bad one to add to your stash.

Click on the image below to take you to the samples, and enjoy! 

Sample ​IAEA E-learning modules.

- 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.

Here's one way you can prioritize requests for "training"

Every time I talk to the manager of a Training or L&D department, the one thing I can always count on hearing is how extremely busy they are. I remember well being in this role, and having to find a solution to the barrage of training requests that came into the department in a way that was transparent, objective, and somewhat inclusive. These three characteristics mirror my leadership style pretty well, and I feel it's important for the team to be able to clearly articulate why we are tackling some projects with haste, while allowing others to simmer on the back burner for a little while. I thought I'd share one of the tools we came up with, in the hopes that you can find some benefit in this "weighted scoring" methodology.

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I gathered the troops one Monday morning and announced that going forward every training request that came into the department would be scored and given the priority it deserved.  After all, we were only seven, and were being stretched way too thin by all the competing demands that were being placed on the team.  It took a couple of hours but we developed the matrix you see here. It's a very simple tool to use, and I'm providing you with a link to the Excel spreadsheet that we created and you are more than welcome to modify it according to your needs. In this meeting we developed nine criteria that we were going to use to rank projects, and gave them a weight from ten being our most important to two being the least important criteria for us in evaluating a project.  Secondly we identified three priority levels with one having the lowest priority and three the most.  WE gave each priority level a description we could all objectively agree on.

Once you've got this training prioritization matrix developed, take the list of projects on your plate and simply score them.  For each criteria on your scale multiply the weight by the priority level and add up the total (or have Excel added up for you) to "score" the projects. The projects with the higher scores are what your team should be focusing on with vigor, while projects with a lower score should be on your back burner.  The next time someone comes running in through your door with a request for a new training initiative gather your troops, grab this matrix, and objectively ask yourselves– where does this request belong on our list of priorities?

I hope this tool can help some of you training or project managers out there, and by no means is it perfect. In fact, if you've got a different method for prioritizing your training projects I'd love to hear it!  Feel free to grab the spreadsheet from my Google Drive by clicking on the icon below.  How do you prioritize training requests that come across your desk?  Leave a comment below, I'd love to hear from you.

Click to download the training priorities spreadsheet here.

- 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.