NYNP blog post 8-5-10

E-learning for change
Changing learners’ perspectives can change their behaviors


Last week, respected e-learning provider Allen Interactions offered a free lunchtime webinar series featuring Ethan Edwards, their Chief Instructional Strategist and author of the free ebook Creating e-Learning that Makes a Difference. He was assisted by Carrie Zens.


Each of the four days covered one of the elements of their CCAF (Context, Challenge, Activity, Feedback) design model for creating e-learning that actively engages people’s minds in order to change their behavior in a meaningful way.  Edwards pointed out that engaging people’s minds is different from simply testing whether they can regurgitate facts.  He said that whereas many e-learning programs claim to be interactive because they include tests, genuine interactivity gets learners thinking and teaches them in such a way that they change their point of view.


I attended one of Edwards’ excellent Allen Interactions ASTD e-learning instructional design workshops years ago, so I know he’s an expert presenter and I was excited to attend the series.  The key points from each day are below.  


Context
An inviting and realistic context for e-learning helps people understand the point of what they they are learning and motivates them to engage with the e-learning.  It sets the stage for success by creating a relevant experience that is obviously worth the learner’s time and attention.


Rules of thumb - good context should:
1) be immediately obvious as soon as the learner opens the e-learning
2) relate to the audience’s needs
3) create concrete experiences
4) suggest a real-world performance environment
5) be helpful as a reference point for what the participants are learning
6) be visually appealing


Challenge
Edwards pointed out that a good challenge needs to tie in with the learner’s motivation, which is usually not the same as the company’s or the e-learning designer’s motivations;  this direct appeal to the learner’s motivation can counteract complacency on the part of learners by getting them to care about the e-learning.  Possible learner motivations include interest, success, curiosity, reward, or just plain completing the task.  On the other hand, learners are usually not motivated by tests, so unless a test is absolutely required, the learners’ performance can be evaluated by providing a challenge that requires the skills and knowledge taught by the e-learning.  


Rules of thumb - a good challenge should:
1) be clear
2) increase in difficulty as the learner’s skills improve
3) relate to the learner’s motivation
4) offer a meaningful risk of failure


Activity
Edwards shared that the most common activity in e-learning is reading or listening, neither of which are particularly engaging activities.  In addition, there is no real way to tell if these are even being done by the learner or not.  With reading and listening, any learning that happens is basically a matter of chance.  Reading and listening are commonly followed by an assessment, which only shows whether a learner can recall the right answer.  


A good activity, however, helps the learners recognize the right answer by applying what they’ve learned.  It simulates key real-world activities, which makes it much more likely that genuine learning will actually occur.  


Rules of thumb - a good activity should:
1) create physical involvement
2) build commitment to learning
3) encourage investment
4) transfer ownership of the learning from the e-learning designer to the learner
5) involve all of the senses because the story behind the activity is is so fully fleshed out


Feedback
Feedback is a motivating opportunity to teach learners, as they will naturally be interested in learning about why their decisions during an activity were correct or incorrect.  When e-learning is designed well, the context peaks the learners’ interest, the challenge and activity let them apply it, and the specific feedback deepens their understanding and lets them monitor their own learning.  When e-learning is designed poorly, it dumps all of the information on the learners at once, asks them to regurgitate it during a test, and then punishes them if they don’t remember everything, without telling them what was wrong or why.  


Rules of thumb - good feedback should:
1) clearly communicate correctness
2) preserve the learner’s response for reference
3) deliver new content, as learners will be much more interested in content at the point of feedback
4) demonstrate the consequences of non-performance
5) continually reinforce the context
6) delay judgement, to allow the learners time to figure something out for themselves
7) be compelling to the learner
8) require correct performance

NYNP blog post 11-23-09

Six ideas for e-learning design

Last Friday, I attended a workshop titled "Strategies for Delivering Effective eLearning in Trying Times," hosted by e-learning company Kineo. I had worked with Kineo's UK partnership when I was at BELL, and they recently launched Kineo's US arm. It was a pleasure to see Kineo Partner Mark Harrison again, as well as meet US CEO Steve Lowenthal and US VP of Learning Design Cammy Bean.

As part of the workshop, Kineo demo-ed many of their e-learning designs, which can be seen on their website, kineo.com. It was interesting to see samples of their work, as well as several diverse ways the open source learning management system Moodle can be customized.

Here are six ideas from the workshop that you might find useful, especially if you work at a nonprofit that's short on time or resources:

1. Speed, rather than excellence, is the new wow factor. The difference between excellent and ok design is sometimes just not that big a deal anymore, but the difference between taking weeks to meet a project's goals versus taking months is truly impressive.

2. Use a fuzzy graphic to keep reviewers from ruining a project. Cammy shared a time-tested designer's trick for solving the problem of having too many reviewers who all want to put their mark on a project even when it's to the detriment of the project - intentionally include a fuzzy graphic. If you include a flaw like a fuzzy graphic, the reviewers can point it out and thereby feel like they've made a contribution (and hopefully leave the rest of the design alone).

3. You'd have to be bonkers to pay for an expensive LMS. With open source LMS options like Moodle, which are easy to use and highly customizable, there's no reason to pay for an expensive LMS. Mark shared that not only is Moodle widely used by corporations (this is backed up by a recent study by The eLearning Guild), but it's also used by the US military because the military finds it more secure to control their LMS themselves, rather than relying on a proprietary LMS.

4. Design e-learning like a magazine. Rather than forcing all learners into a linear experience, design e-learning that can be explored the way that readers explore magazines. Allow for browsing, provide a menu, and create an attractive look and feel that encourages voluntary exploration.

5. Have consultants hand off e-learning that's not finished. Some Kineo clients have found that they prefer to do the last-minute changes themselves, so Kineo has handed off e-learning that's almost finished, but not quite. The company creates e-learning that's easy for clients to edit themselves, which lets clients change their minds about the final wording as many times as they like because they control the content themselves.

6. Get the bloat out of the design process. Skip the 30-page design document, and go right to the mock-up. Better yet, start creating concrete designs during a meeting rather than merely talking about hypothetical designs, so that everyone's on the same page.

NYNP blog post 9-10-09

Waking up learning content: Patti Shank's tips
Notes from the opening session of The eLearning Guild's online forum on Instructional Design

The eLearning Guild's online forum on Best Practices in e-Learning Instructional Design and Management opened today with a session by Patti Shank, President of Learning Peaks, titled "Boredom-proofing Learning Content: Tips for Making Learning Content Compelling."

Shank presented a useful (and not boring) session, offering five overarching design techniques for keeping learners engaged:

1. Focus on making a great first impression. If learning content doesn't look interesting from the first moment, the learner will be inclined to believe that it's boring before they even get started and will begin to tune out immediately. Just as first impressions are important in life, they are important in learning.

2. Design the content so that it gets noticed. People are wired to notice content that is vivid, unusual, unexpected, or emotionally charged, so learning content should include these characteristics.

3. Promote your learners' curiosity. An easy way to do this is to ask questions or be provocative.

4. Reduce the amount of telling. Make the learning meaningful by challenging learners to analyze, compare, practice, and otherwise think for themselves.

5. Use humor.

For more info about the forum, you can go here: http://bit.ly/mEnNV.

NYNP blog post 9-3-09

Upcoming online forum hosted by The eLearning Guild
Best Practices in e-Learning Instructional Design and Management

For folks interested in learning more about e-learning, The eLearning Guild is presenting an online forum next Thursday and Friday focused on design and management. Zora Rizzi and I will be presenting one of the sessions, on Friday, September 11 from 1:15pm to 2:30pm; our session is called "Blended & Interactive Design on a Limited Budget."

Here's some info about the forum from The eLearning Guild website:
"This Online Forum focuses on best practices and strategies for e-Learning instructional design, and the management of your ID teams and processes. We have asked the top ranked speakers who presented sessions at our two recent Regional Instructional Design Symposiums to present their sessions again for this Online Forum. To facilitate your planning, we have organized the sessions into two “tracks,” one focused on strategies for managing teams and processes, and the other on practical and proven ID approaches."

Forum info is available at http://bit.ly/mEnNV

***

The recording and materials for our session today are available at http://tinyurl.com/n976km

NYNP blog post 9-2-09

Notes from Day 2 of The eLearning Guild's New England Regional Instructional Design Symposium

Designing Learning for the “Moment of Need”
Bob Mosher, LearningGuide Solutions USA

Mosher talked about creating a "holistic learning ecosystem" that helps people at each moment of need for learning. He suggested that there are five such moments of need: 1) the first time we learn something, 2) when we want to learn more, 3) when we try to remember or apply learning, 4) when things change, and 5) when something goes wrong. As trainers, we need to create support for staff that's appropriate for each stage, and Mosher suggested that e-learning can be useful for the first two types of moments, whereas just-in-time performance supports are more useful for the last three.

The learning ecosystem needs to include guidance for learners on what to access and when, because Mosher noted that research shows that 80% of adults make poor choices when given choices in their learning -- we tend to choose based on what's shortest, shiniest, etc., rather than on what will actually help us perform.

E-Learning on the Cheap! Finding Resources for Free (or Virtually Free)
Steven Yacovelli, TopDog Learning Group, LLC

Yacovelli made the point that e-learning doesn't need to be expensive to be good, as long as it's designed well. As he said, "cheap does not equal low quality." Without necessarily endorsing any products, he and the group shared many free resources, including Audacity and Wavepad for creating audio recordings, Moodle and Sakai for managing e-learning content much like an LMS, Udutu for building SCORM objects online, Wink or Camstudio for doing video screen captures, Guttenberg Press for books that are out of print, Stockvault for graphics, Comicpics or Toondoo for creating comics, and Drupal or Joomla for web authoring.

He also said that his company has a paper measurement that can help benchmark attitudes about e-learning before a project begins, which can be used to measure the project's success -- and they will share the measurement for free if the user agrees to share the data collected.

Blended and Interactive Design on a Nonprofit Budget
Matthea Marquart & Zora Rizzi, BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life)

Day 2 of the symposium was the day when Zora and I led a session, which provided lessons learned from BELL's e-learning project. It was a delight to present our project to e-learning professionals, and it was a thrill to receive positive feedback. If you're interested in checking out some of what we shared, our handouts are available at http://www.elearningguild.com/showFile.cfm?id=3495

Closing General Session – Panel
Panelists: Lee Maxey, MINDMAX, Inc.
Bob Mosher, LearningGuide Solutions
Marc Rosenberg, Marc Rosenberg and Associates
Allison Rossett, Department of Educational Technology, San Diego State University
Will Thalheimer, Work-Learning Research
Ellen Wagner, Sage Road Solutions, LLC
Moderator: Heidi Fisk, The eLearning Guild

Here are some highlights of the panel's responses to questions from symposium participants.

In response to the question of the top three things a new e-learning manager should do, Will Thalheimer said that the new manager should prioritize evaluation, learn to be a good leader of many different types of people, and maintain a sense of humor; Lee Maxey said that the new manager should read The First 90 Days, determine success measures, and get a coach that will help the manager be accountable.

In response to the question of what organizations should consider when selecting an LMS or CMS (learning management system or content management system), Marc Rosenberg said that the LMS doesn't really matter because well designed, relevant e-learning content is the key and LMS's can become a roadblock when they control what type of e-learning is produced in order to fit the LMS's limited capabilities; Lee Maxey said that it's not important to have a perfect LMS because there are many web-enabled services you can tack on as long as you get an LMS with 80% of what you need; Will Thalheimer cautioned that having an overly fancy LMS can send the message that training is separate from work if the training becomes more about the LMS than the job.

In response to the question of what kind of interactivity multiple generations need, Allison Rossett said that everyone needs interaction, so we should assume that certain generations don't need to be engaged; Will Thalheimer noted e-learning should engage people to the point that they stop multi-tasking, because research has clearly demonstrated that multitasking doesn't work and that what happens is that people jump from one task to another without focusing on anything and therefore do everything worse.

In response to what books e-learning professionals should read, the panel recommended Ruth Clark on design and e-learning, Jackie Fenn on managing the technology hype cycle, John Kotter on leading change, and Chip & Dan Heath on making ideas stick.

NYNP blog post 5-22-09

Dealing with emotional requests for help from the training team
A tool to examine problems, identify manager expectations, and consider issues

Jane Bozarth of www.bozarthzone.com facilitated another free lunchtime webinar today, titled "BozarthZone! Instructional Design for the Real World," with technical assistance from Kassy LaBorie of www.insynctraining.com. (See my prior blog post "Free resource for learning how to conduct training online" for info about these webinars.)

Bozarth offered practical tips for training design, and one lesson in particular stood out -- the fact that coworkers sometimes come to trainers with intense emotions like anger, frustration, desperation, avoidance, or hope. We hear "everyone needs training on X right away," "things would be so much better if everyone just knew how to X," or "please help me get my staff to X because I've tried everything and they just won't do it."

In order to deal with an emotional request for help, trainers need to respond with a systematic analysis of the problem and how to solve it. We need to listen, ask good questions, identify the actual business challenge underneath any emotional complaints, and help ease our coworkers' emotions by finding effective solutions to the challenge even when the appropriate solution is not training.

Bozarth suggested using a tool to help with this systematic analysis -- a list of "Twenty Questions You Should Always Ask Before Starting Any Training Program," created by Dr. Nanette Miner. Bozarth included the tool in her latest book From Analysis to Evaluation: Ready-to-Use Tools to Make Training More Effective, and it's downloadable as two of the pages here: http://tinyurl.com/qhgj73.

NYNP blog post 4-28-09

E-learning training that matters

"It doesn't matter what people know -- it matters what they do and say."

Last week I attended a free lunchtime webinar hosted by Chief Learning Officer magazine (www.clomedia.com). The presenters were from respected e-learning provider Allen Interactions: Scott Colehour, solutions architect and co-founder, and R. John Welsh, Jr., vice president.

The webinar was called "Performance Learning Filter: Are Your Learning Designs Increasing Organizational Performance?"

Performance-based E-learning
Colehour and Welsh presented a filter for evaluating e-learning design that they called CCAF -- Context, Challenge, Activity, Feedback. Context refers to the framework for the e-learning, which should be relevant to the learner's workplace and job; challenge refers to a stimulus to take action within the given context; activity refers to the action taken to solve the challenge; and feedback refers to letting the learner know when they make mistakes and when they are correct.

When an e-learning incorporates all the elements of CCAF, it moves past simply making the learners aware of information, to actually changing their behavior. This is key, as the presenters' statement at the beginning of this post suggests.

The bottom line: e-learning that simply makes staff aware of information doesn't necessarily translate into improved service for our clients. To make a difference, we need to create e-learning that changes employee performance by helping them master the skills that will help them improve our clients' lives.

See for Yourself
If you'd like to see the webinar for yourself, the free recording and powerpoints are available at the links below. (Note: sometimes the blogging software adds spaces, so if you try the link and it doesn't work, just delete any extra spaces.)
* Recording: http://www.webex.com/web-seminars/view_recording/660672486?sid=CLO042309rec
* PowerPoints: http://try.webex.com/meet/pdfs/CLO_042409.pdf

NYNP blog post 3-24-09

What is good training design?

Good training design = when there's nothing left to take out.

Today I attended an excellent, free lunchtime webinar hosted by InSync Training (see my prior blog post "Free resource for learning how to conduct training online" for info about these webinars). The facilitator was Jane Bozarth of www.bozarthzone.com, the co-facilitator was Kassy LaBorie of www.insynctraining.com, and the webinar shared the title of one of Bozarth's books, Better than Bullet Points: Creating Engaging E-Learning with PowerPoint.

Ms. Bozarth shared the rule of thumb above for good training design. What did she mean?

When a trainer or instructional designer (I'll just say "trainer" for simplicity) approaches material that needs to go into a training - whether e-learning, webinar, or classroom-based training - the trainer needs to start by thinking: What are the key objectives for the training? And what is extraneous information that confuses the point?

In order to keep participants focused on the learning objectives, the trainer needs to cut away all of the extraneous information, so that what's left is clearly related to the objectives. Once the material has been cut down to the essential information, the trainer needs to consider how to present the information in a way that's tied to real world behavior change on the job. Then, just as the raw material needs to be cut down to the essential, the activities and training materials must also be cut down. Irrelevant PowerPoint slides, handouts, graphics, text, colors, animations, activities, etc. must be cut away, so that the training content that's left is clearly related to the objectives.

This process can be deceptively time-consuming. For nonprofit trainers doing a lot more with a lot less right now, it can be easier to just dump everything we can think of into training, rather than taking the time to sort through the content and focus it. However, if we don't create clear and effective training the first time, we may end up having to redo it, so in the end it can save time to do this right. And, if we implement good training design that leads to quality service and performance towards our organizations' missions, our clients will be the ultimate beneficiaries.