Learn. Show. Repeat.

Author: Matt Guyan

  • Response from an eLearning Creator

    Dear Engaged Learner,

    Thank-you for your letter and my apologies for the delay in replying. I receive so many from engaged learners like you that it takes me a little while to respond but it always warms the cockles of my heart to read them.

    I’m so pleased to read that you were engaged during the course but I honestly can’t take all the credit. You see, my colleagues and I usually receive a request for some training when there’s a real or imagined issue or when the legal or safety teams say it needs to be done. We don’t dig to deeply to find out more because it’s always a knowledge gap and creating courses full of information is always the most effective solution. Plus, it’s what we’re known for! Our motto here in the creation team is “if we build it, they will learn”.

    When I develop a course, I work with people who have expertise in the field called subject matter experts (or SME for short and is pronounced smee). But they are so much more than that as they are usually experienced writers, graphic designers, assessors and learning theorists. Even though I have many years of experience, multiple degrees and diplomas in Adult Education and Multimedia and Educational Psychology, write for numerous online publications and actively participate in the eLearning community I still don’t know as much as they do about online learning. They’re so amazing! The SME’s also like to change their minds a lot and they always want to add just a little more content to the course which is quite ok with me because they know best and it always makes the courses better.

    The Communications and Marketing area also deserve a pat on the back for supplying us with the 153-page branding guideline document that spells out the exact colours and fonts to be used as well as the layout and crucial logo information (size, position and inclusion throughout). These things make such a significant contribution to learning but more importantly, it makes the courses look like everything else that’s produced by every other department in the organisation. This will ensure we don’t cause panic among people who won’t know where they are or who produced the course and also keeps them engaged.

    Even though most people use computers and the internet for work and at home and have done for many years without instruction they may not know how to navigate through our courses. Which is why we include the navigation help in every course (even if they are the same). Also, having people think for themselves in online learning is dangerous so it’s much easier if they are always controlled which is why I don’t let people skip anything. As you mentioned, you didn’t want to miss anything which is great because you need to read all of it to learn.

    I’m happy that you liked how I jazzed up the course as the content was dull so it seems like I was able to engage you and at the same time show you how clever I am. There is some well-known and much-loved “science” behind it though. The use of audio to read screen text, images on every screen and lots of clicking, dragging and hovering is because I’m catering for different learning styles, such as seers and listeners and touchies. There’s over 70 learning style models that we use and we manage to have something in there for all of them! This helps people to learn much more effectively and guides many creators here and around the world to produce engaging learning experiences.

    I’m so glad that you enjoyed the game show knowledge check! For the next module (and please keep this a secret) you’ll be a knight that goes on a quest. Along the way you’ll come across a series of dragons who’ll ask you questions and if you choose the right answer you’ll slay the dragon! It’s going to be so much fun and so engaging. You’ll be able to print a certificate for this one to add to your collection. I often look fondly on the ones I’ve accumulated over the years.

    Well, while I may never meet you, I’m easy to find. Just look for the tower made from the finest ivory and that’s where I’ll be along with the rest of the learning and development team working on our next engaging course so that people will know more stuff.

    Signed,
    The Senior Head Specialist Consulting Advisor in Instructional Learning Architecture Design and Creator of Engaging Knowledge Development Solutions for Organisational Capability.

    Image source: morgueFile.com

  • Letter to an eLearning Creator

    Dear eLearning Creator,

    I don’t normally do this but after what was one of the greatest hours of my life, I felt that I must. I’ve just completed a wonderful eLearning course that you created and I wanted to personally let you know how much I enjoyed it and that I was so engaged from start to finish.

    Day-to-day I’m quite busy in my role, however when I received the notification that I needed to complete my module I was happy to stop what I was doing, set my phone to voicemail and get started. Actually, a quiet hush fell over the entire office when they found out that another course was ready as everyone was hungry to consume more content.

    I love PowerPoint! I often see it in meetings so right from the beginning of the course there was a cosy familiarity about it. Even though I was sitting at my desk at work, using my company computer and sipping from my company branded coffee cup, I was delighted to see that our logo was visible throughout the entire course to remind me of where it came from. Not only that, you applied the our branding guidelines consistently and faultlessly throughout – the fonts, the colours and even the distance of the logo from the top right-hand corner of the screen – which really added to the experience.

    I was thankful for the navigation instructions you provided up front. I use computers and the internet a lot here and at home, and I did have to log into our learning area and click on a link to open the course, but I was pleased to find out that clicking on a ‘Next’ button would take me forward, ‘Back’ would take me backwards and ‘Takeaways’ would have some extra information. The progress area came in handy too as it was useful to see how many of the 143 slides I’d completed.

    I must admit that I was a little unsure about what I’d get out of completing the course but to my relief you let me know on the objectives slide what I’d be able to do by the end. I don’t quite remember what they were (they were some good verbs though) but if you say that I can do those things then I believe you!

    Having the audio narration read everything on the screen for me was delightful! It allowed my senses to really soak up the material and it was clever that I couldn’t skip ahead until the audio had finished (meaning that I wouldn’t miss out on anything). I found the pictures in the course made the text less dull and the characters used reflected the happy and diverse mix of people working here. The animations you used certainly jazzed up the information and my right hand got a good workout from all that clicking, dragging and hovering!

    You saved the best part until last – the knowledge check! (by the way, this sounds so much nicer than quiz or test). I thought that presenting the questions in a game show format was so fun! How did you know that true and false questions are my favourite? Multiple choice questions are a bit trickier but luckily I could have as many tries until, by process of elimination, I finally picked the right answer. I appreciated that I wasn’t just right or wrong but that I was Correct! or Incorrect! Funnily enough, that’s just how my boss says it when I answer one of his questions.

    It was a bittersweet moment when I completed the course. I was sad that it was over however the gazillion points I received plus five gold stars did cheer me up as did the ability to print out a certificate to keep and treasure (which incidentally now hangs proudly on a wall in my home).

    Well, that’s all I wanted to say and even though I will probably never meet you, keep those information courses coming – more often and longer would be great. I speak on behalf of my all colleagues when I say THANK-YOU!!

    Signed,
    The Engaged Learner.

    Image source: JPPI on morgueFile.com

  • Learning and Development: You Have One Job

    In many organisations, the learning and development (L&D) area are known as the people who deliver information – mostly via courses – either online or in a classroom. Many of which are essentially nothing more than one-off, content dumps.

    We say that we want to be business partners and express our desire for a seat at the table so we talk about “capacity building”, “a learning organisation” and “ecosystems” in an attempt to achieve this.

    We talk about blending, flipping, shrinking, socialising and gamifying learning events but often the execution has the wrong focus.

    We’ve become overly fixated on frameworks and models and waste time debating their proportions instead of using them as a guide and not a prescription.

    We cling to concepts that don’t exist yet dismiss others despite the evidence from research that exists.

    However, the role of everyone working in learning and development is simple:

    To support the people in our organisations who do the actual work.

    We’re not operating machines, or digging trenches, or serving customers in shops or on the phone, or treating patients or selling widgets. We’re not working outside in the elements. We’re not (usually) working night shift or on the weekend. But the people in our organisations are and we must ensure they can perform whenever and wherever they are working.

    I’ve been reading Innovative Performance Support by Conrad Gottfredson and Bob Mosher and they refer to the ‘Five Moments of Learning Need’ (p37-38):

    New: when people are learning how to do something for the first time.

    More: when people are expanding on what they have learned.

    Apply: when people need to plan what they need to do, remember what they may have forgotten or adapt their performance to a unique situation.

    Solve: when people need to deal with problems, something breaks or doesn’t work as intended.

    Change: When people need to learn a new way of doing things that requires them to change ingrained skills.

    My takeaway is that different moments of need require different solutions and the current one size, one event fits all approach is not effective. So, before we launch yet another information overloaded course, we should ask ourselves a question – is this really supporting our people to do the work they need to do?

    Image source: Morguefile

  • Accessing Curated Content – Experimenting with Rise

    A question I have about content curation in an organisational setting is:

    How do you make the content available for people within an organisation?

    I guess you could use the LMS but I don’t know user-friendly this would be especially if you need to sign-in to get to it. Maybe an intranet or other website? I’ve been playing around with Anders Pink and from what I’ve seen, it’s a useful tool for curation for individuals and teams. I’ll write a post about it in the future.

    Another idea was to use one of the new apps in Articulate 360 called Rise so I thought I’d try it out. Rise won’t curate the content for you but if you’ve already done the curation you can add your content and then make it available to people via a link. Content can be added or removed easily and it’s responsive so it works well on mobile devices too.

    I decided to try it out by creating a simple demo using some resources from my Continuing with Content Curation blog post. Click on the image to access and let me know what you think:

    Rise example

    If you know of or have used any tools for distributing curated content, I’d be most interested to hear about them and your experience.

  • Valuing all Sources of Learning

    Each year I meet quite a few people who work in the eLearning field, usually they’re developers or eLearning creation is part of their L&D role. Most are newbies to eLearning and we come together in a classroom setting to get them started on their eLearning development journey. At the beginning of each session I like to find out a little about each person – such as their background, their experience – and while most people are brand new to eLearning authoring usually there’s at least one or two who have been experimenting with the tool or they’ve watched some ‘how-to’ videos on YouTube or they’ve read some articles on websites/blogs or they’ve asked questions in (or visited) the eLearning communities.

    However, there’s one thing that these people do have in common, and that is they all finish their introduction with:

    “but I haven’t had any training”

    These people still learn from the sessions but they can do a lot more than they give themselves credit for. The classroom setting for learning (at least in this case) is still valuable especially for novices and even those who have basic experience learn a few things they didn’t know prior. Plus, they can ask questions specific to their context, get answers straight away as well as being able to interact with and learn from other people in the room. But, there’s two things I find troubling about the above statement.

    Firstly, they seem to put a much higher value on formal training events for learning as opposed to learning something via other more informal means. It’s like they don’t quite trust the information that comes from a blog post, a website or a YouTube video. They seem to need the security of an “expert” in a room to tell them. I’ll let you in on a secret, I’ve had no formal training in creating a WordPress site or in blog writing and yet here I am…

    The second, and more concerning aspect of this situation, is that these same people who “haven’t had any training” are working in the learning area within their organisations. This leads me to believe that a reason why the default response for many L&D folks to always create a course is because they themselves only see courses as a way to truly learn something. There’s also another (perhaps bigger) issue – if they only see formal, instructor-led learning as a necessary requirement for their own learning, then they’re probably less likely to embrace blogs, videos, just-in-time resources, curation, communities and working out loud/ showing your work to either supplement, support or perhaps replace some formal learning ‘events’ within their organisations.

    The course mentality that is so prevalent in L&D won’t change until the very people charged with improving workplace performance get past the ‘formal learning is the only way to learn’ mindset and start to see the value in and embrace other options. Perhaps if they put a higher value on other sources of learning for themselves they’d be more likely to introduce other methods into their workplaces and create conditions from which it can flourish.

    While I do believe that formal, instructor-led courses have their place to improve performance there are many other options available to L&D practitioners. We’ve been conditioned throughout our lives that real learning only comes from structured learning events so we tend to stick with what we’re comfortable with. The problem is that one-off events take people away from their work but people need to learn and have tools and resources available to them in the flow of their work – at the point of need.

    So, if we are to move forward, things need to change starting with our own how to learn something mindset…

    Informal learning

    Image source: Shutterstock