Bottom-Line Performance

I’ve been working on a tough topic lately. I won’t tell you what it is except to say there are a lot of technical details – and experts in the field tend not to agree on how they all fit together. So, while there is a huge amount of information, there is no consensus around the “right” way to do most things.

There are still some good ways to address these topics. Worked examples are still useful – as long as we’re carefully non-exclusive in our language. Graphic organizers to communicate principles or chunk information are also useful – although deciding on how to organize things is still a real challenge –for the experts – which makes it definitely challenging for learning designers trying to create organization out of information chaos.

Still, sometimes it feels a little bit like trying to teach creative writing via an e-learning course. There are 1,000 good ways to write a paragraph. And while there are some rules about what doesn’t work – but even the rules often have exceptions. It can be tricky to balance the information so that it’s granular enough to be useful without being so granular that eagle-eyed SMEs can get in and find something wrong with it.

I certainly haven’t found the perfect answers on to how to do this . For now, I just have a few humble tips to offer. Perhaps you’ll share some of your own.

1. Make sure that you have clear consensus on the learning goals. Then be ready to remind the experts of those goals when they try and sneak in just a little more detail. I can’t count the number of times I’ve said “We’re not trying to turn them into you – we’re just trying to teach them X”.
2. Take a rapid-prototyping approach to your content. Draft something and then run it by the real experts before you try and make it perfect. They’ll catch implications and details you have no way of knowing, which can save a lot of time.
3. When it comes time for more formal draft reviews, have the experts review individually and then meet to consolidate their edits. This allows them to talk through any technical disagreements and come to consensus – and keeps you from trying to make any technical content calls.
4. Keep a steady supply of you own personal stress-reliever handy. Whether it’s chocolate or exercise or sitcoms, make sure you have a way to get away from the project and reset your brain when necessary. I’ve just about worn out my favorite yoga mat on this topic – but that’s ok. Who doesn’t like shopping for new yoga mats?

What tips would you add to this list?

I spent the day at an ASTD conference on e-Learning design. We spent a very abreviated time talking about development tools, and HTML and XML came up. (More about what else I learned at the conference later.)

When I got back this evening, I wanted to know a little more about XML. Oddly, I discovered this video among the links, and I’m very impressed. I think this video offers an astounding look at what XML really means, by tracing how society uses it to contribute to all that we call Web 2.0.

Check out what one professor of anthropology has to say about the evolution on the web.

I’ve been working on an instructor-led project lately and it’s caused me to think about what impact does culture have on learning preferences?

My disclaimer for this post is that I’m not advocating that we teach to “learning styles”. Check out this post for a starting point to learn more about why we shouldn’t design to learning styles.

However, my question is - How much should culture influence my design? And how much does my own culture influence the way I design courses?

I suspect that I don’t want to design to culture and here’s why. The question was, “This a German audience. They just want facts. Will they want to do hands-on activities?”

My first response was, “Yes!” I think that German audiences would hate death by PowerPoint as much as an American audience. However, wouldn’t there be different tolerance levels for the types of activities based on culture? How can we plan for that in our learning designs? (I would be willing to do a global tour and explore cultures to study it…I wonder if that’s in the budget???)

I did do a quick Google search, and didn’t come up with one link that addressed the topic.  Any thoughts? Things to consider?

Analogies have been a source of great amusement for me this past week. Analogies can be very helpful in learning, if they’re used correctly. In this award-winning (if I do say so myself) sample, we use water as an analogy to teach the surprisingly complex topic of electricity.

Learning games use analogies all time. Anne Derreberry talks about games that mirror reality (like a flight simulator) and others that teach through metaphor (like World of Warcraft as a leadership training lab). Either can

Analogies can be useful in classroom training, too. This exercise for using analogies in instructor-led training suggests you provide a variety of impetus materials and ask learners to create their own analogies. I like the idea a lot – with a few caveats. You’d also want to make sure your facilitator both knows the subject matter well, and is skilled at shaping a group’s reactions. Lacking either of those skills, the analogy exercise is bound to be at least ineffective, and perhaps even harmful.

Here are my top three rules for using analogies in learning.

1.) Make sure the analogy is directly on point. Comparing, say, a run through the sprinklers to living through a hurricane does more harm than good when you’re trying to teach a complex topic.

2.) Make sure your audience understands the analogy. Telling your audience that the Jedi mind trick isn’t the most effective training method for new hires won’t work very well with an audience of sports fans, unless they harbor a secret geek side. (And by the way, not everybody in your classroom likes sports. A lot of training metaphors are completely lost on me, because I can barely remember that football is the one with the pointy ends.)

3.) Explain the nuances. It’s not enough to say that electricity behaves like water – you have to clarify in what ways that is true. Electricity does have current – but it’s not good for hydrating people or plants.

What do you think – have you used analogies effectively in training? What tips would you share?

I came across a great new service, similar to Ning. It allows you to create your own microblog. Basically, it’s a “build your own” Twitter. ShoutEm allows you build a public or private microblog network, that you can connect to your Facebook account, a Ning site, or even Twitter. Now you have 140 characters to craft your own community. And, of course, it’s free.

This would be a great tool for groups focused on one topic. Check it out and let me know what you think!

As I was reading Mashable, the blog that identifies anything and everything connected to social media, I came across a cool polling tool that has some huge applications for either distance learning or even conference-style presentations and meetings. The tool is called Polls Everywhere and it makes it easy for you to set up polls that respondents can reply to via Twitter, texting, or the web. So…you can ask a question in an audience of several hundred people, folks can text a response, and then see an immediate (2 to 5 seconds) update of the results. Here’s the video demo:

Anyone who has taught a distance learning class or session knows that audience participation is key to the success of the session. Polling offers a great way to engage people - during the live session or in between live sessions. This tool makes it easy to generate these polls and provide immediate feedback to respondents.

I wanted to try this out so I signed up for a free account with Polls Everywhere so I could test it out.  You can only have 30 respondents on the “free” account; after that, you have to pay a monthly fee to get more responses. You’ll have to decide if this monthly plan is worth it for you.

If you’d like to take a poll to try this out, here’s the question I came up with:

What kind of blog reader are you?

You can respond in three ways:

1) Text a response to 99503 and enter one of these response codes:

• Daily reader (CODE: 34508)
• Weekly reader (CODE: 34509)
• Only read them when I am researching a specific topic (CODE: 34501)
• Occasional reader (checking in 1x or 2x month to see what’s new (CODE: 31739)

2) Use Twitter, and tweet a response to tweet@poll, along with one of the above codes.

3) Use the web. Click the web link and select the response you want.

http://www.polleverywhere.com/multiple_choice_polls/LTE5ODU0ODM0Ng/web

Happy voting. I’ll post a graphic with the updated results as we go. PollEverywhere allows you to download a PPT slide that you can insert into your presentations on the fly as results come in.

If this turns out to be a dud tool…I’ll let you know that too!

Results Thus Far

What role do you think mobile phones should play in training?

Check out this video - admittedly focused on using cell phones in the classroom - and let me know what you think?

1) Are mobile phones a viable training tool in the distance-based or live classroom in a training setting for adults?

2) Should schools be embracing mobile phones as teaching tools for children in schools?

Can’t wait to hear what you think!

It happened again last week. I responded to a Request for Proposal (online no less, which left no opportunity for any type of discussion) and felt so frustrated by the difference between what the requester asked for…and what I knew would actually result in learning.

We often use Post-Its, in our design meetings and just our day-to-day work. Here’s a use I’ve not seen  before, but perhaps I may steal the idea for the future.

Anyone want to guess how many Post-its? Or how long it took to cover the whole car?