Learn. Show. Repeat.

Category: Reflections

  • Looking Back at 2017

    As the end of another year approaches, I like many bloggers look back on the year that was. It’s been a quieter year on the blogging front for me as my wife and I welcomed the birth of our first child in May, a beautiful baby girl – Eva Rose – who has kept us busy and we’re learning lots!

    Here’s all of my 2017 posts (select a title to read):

    10 Blogs Every eLearning Professional Should Read

    Working with Images in eLearning (part 1)

    Working with Images in eLearning (part 2)

    Valuing all Sources of Learning

    Accessing Curated Content – Experimenting with Rise

    Learning and Development: You Have One Job

    Letter to an eLearning Creator (this was my most popular post EVER!)

    Response from an eLearning Creator

    Sharpening Your Axe

    A Little Help from Your Friends

    I also spent time creating more Storyline tutorials (which now stand at 38).

    Thanks for reading and all the best for the festive season from my family to yours! Catch you in 2018!

  • Sharpening Your Axe

    There was a woodcutter. He used to work incredibly hard to ensure a good livelihood, but he always felt that his work was not giving him enough output. Every day he would decide to work harder and longer, but at the end of the day he would find his pile of wood smaller than the previous day.

    One day, when he was busy as usual, he noticed a bigger pile of logs with a woodcutter sitting next to it. He asked, “How can you have a bigger pile than me in less time, and how can you relax so early in the day?”

    The other woodcutter replied, “I take time off to sharpen my axe.

    Pile of logs

    I first read this story in a blog post by Ryan Tracey and it’s stuck with me ever since. In Ryan’s post, he talks of manager’s not giving their teams time to ‘sharpen their axes’ and how this is a short-sighted approach. However, whilst I agree with his view, I also believe that all eLearning ‘woodcutters’ should find the time for sharpening rather than waiting for our workplaces to give us the time. In our field, it’s important for us to sharpen our axes to not only be more productive but to be better practitioners.

    Most people – if not all – transition into the (e)Learning field and while there are many creating eLearning, only a small few actually do it well. If you pick up a guitar and strum the strings you’ll hear sound. But there’s a big difference between producing sound from an instrument and producing music. Creating eLearning is no different in that there’s a big difference between creating an interactive content dump and something that has impact and helps people to perform better.

    Generally speaking, eLearning has a poor reputation for being an effective solution for workplace learning. One of the reasons for this is that anyone can buy an authoring tool, maybe complete a course in how to use it, watch some tutorials and then call themselves a developer. However, the tools in trying to make eLearning creation easier, have unintentionally created a false sense of competence in many users. By this I mean that just because someone can easily insert some text and pictures and interactive objects into a tool and then click a few buttons to convert it into a SCORM file for uploading to an LMS doesn’t mean that they can really create useful, meaningful eLearning. Using an authoring tool and an LMS is a start but there’s many more skills required.

    Everyone is busy and many people believe they don’t need to improve (or don’t realise they need to) because they can already do it but it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s up to all of us to DO something regularly to hone our skills. The only people who can improve our industry are those working in it – you and me. So, what can you do to sharpen your eLearning axe?

    Here’s some ideas:

    Firstly, spend some time reflecting and note the areas that you’d like to improve. If you don’t have any areas for improvement, look for ways to share your expertise with others.

    Join an association such as The eLearning Guild, The Learning and Performance Institute or Australian Institute of Training and Development.

    Read some blogs, here’s some suggestions.

    Listen to podcasts, check these ones out.

    Read some books, here’s some of my favourites.

    Join a community such as E-Learning Heroes.

    Connect with other practitioners on social media – LinkedIn, Twitter and/or Facebook.

    Attend a conference.

    Join a Meet-up group in your area Third Place and IDeLers (if you’re in Australia)

    The important thing is to do something regularly, actively and make it a habit. If you look at anyone who is good at what they do regardless of their field, they continually develop themselves. We should be no different.

    What do you do to sharpen your axe?

    Image source: Morguefile

  • 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