Focus on Action in eLearning Design

My job involves coaching and mentoring a great many instructional designers - both within our own eLearning development projects and as a service for many of our clients. One of the biggest challenges I face in this regard is getting designers to get to the essence of a training challenge and cut out all extraneous content that detracts from the main learning objectives. Less is indeed more when we can get from A to B in a short, straight line.

I recently came across an excellent technique called "action mapping" that I will start using to help focus eLearning on intended outcomes based on desired actions. Cathy Moore, in her very informative blog (Ideas for Lively eLearning), lays out succinctly how action mapping can work in this slideshow:

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Moore advocates an approach to eLearning design that works backward from the intended business goal (expressed as an action). This avoids the trap of a linear information content dump and piling up irrelevant information that does not really help learners get to the desired goal. Action mapping is a four-step process as follows:

1. Identify the business goal.

2. Identify what people need to do to reach that goal.

3. Design activities that help people practice each behaviour (the "to do's" noted in #2).

4. Identify the minimum information people need to complete each activity.

By starting with a clear goal and focusing on required actions to reach that goal, we can provide a great deal more focus to our learning design and avoid the information dump that unfortunately characterizes much of eLearning today.

Rule #1: Respect the Learner

Our Certificate in eLearning Management is based on principles of experiential learning. In other words, instead of just learning about eLearning, we have learners doing various facets of eLearning to demonstrate competency attainment. The last competency deliverable in our Engaging Your eLearners course is for learners to actually facilitate on online session, receive feedback from participants, reflect on their experience, and produce a list of facilitation best practice principles.

One program participant recently lead a 10-day asynchronous online discussion as her facilitation competency exercise on the topic of "What advice would you provide for a novice learning designer?" The topic really forced me to think about what I considered to be the most important thing to keep in mind when designing learning experiences, especially with respect to designing eLearning.

The conclusion I came to was that it was most important to respect the learner. Learning Designers should:

Respect the Learner's Needs

• We too often cram way too much content into eLearning experiences, not all of it immediately relevant to what targeted learners need to know and need to do. We have to be the filters / editors between what subject matter experts (SMEs) think is important and what is most important to learners.
  

Respect the Learner's Time

• This is closely related to the first point. Adult learners are time-starved. You need to get to the point quickly, divide learning into digestible "chunks," and create intuitive and easy-to-navigate learning experiences.
  

Respect the Learner's Intelligence

• Acknowledge that learners have brains and are willing to use them. Do not make tasks / assessments so mind-numbingly obvious or easy that they insult the learner's intelligence. Challenge them, make them stretch, and let them fail if need be. The best lessons are hard-won.

Just like Aretha Franklin, all that learners want is a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Update on eLearning is Green (March 2nd Posting)

My last posting on the green benefits of eLearning generated a lot of response, including these resource links from reader Andy Lang:

http://www.terrapass.com/buy-carbon-offsets/

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/

eLearning is Green

In the course of helping a company devise an eLearning strategy, we were interviewing a number of key stakeholders in the organization. These interviews are an important part of the process of gathering information on the best ways of better integrating eLearning into the organization's training mix.

When we asked interviewees why the company wanted to better utilize eLearning, we heard many of the usual and quite predictable answers: they need learning on demand and at the point of need; they need to reach a highly dispersed workforce; they need to keep up with the rapid pace of change; they need a consistent approach to training across the organization, etc. However, we also heard from two Vice-Presidents who said that replacing a lot of classroom-based training with various eLearning approaches (e.g. online courses, webinars, knowledge repositories, online communities, etc.) will help them meet their strategic focus of becoming an environmentally sustainable company.

This was something of an "aha" moment for me. It is so obvious now, but I never really stopped to consider it before. eLearning is a green industry! They talked about reducing their "training footprint." These two VPs could see how more eLearning meant less carbon expended on planes, cars, taxis, training rooms (to ferry and house trainers and trainees across the country) and fewer trees expended on three-inch thick training manuals (which seem to be de rigueur for in-person training sessions).

I'm not the expert on environmental questions, but I am sure there must be some formula out there for calculating an organization's carbon footprint, and the amount that their current training efforts contribute to this. If anyone has seen any literature out there on this question, please pass it on.

So, if you are looking for more potential benefits to list when convincing decision-makers to invest in eLearning, be sure to mention its green nature. This, however, cannot be the only reason for doing eLearning, or the only measure of success. If you reduce your organization's training footprint, but fail to provide training that is focused on real value creation for the organization, you are not really any farther ahead. You may end up helping save the planet a little in the short-run, but lose the company in the long-run.

Let's Broaden the Training Conversation

I really enjoy Donald Clark's Plan B Blog. Clark is an Englishman with loads of experience in the training field. He has an acerbic wit and writes about training in general, and eLearning in particular, with a refreshing candor. You may not agree with everything Clark says, but there is no confusion about where he stands. One of his recent postings about the blandness of training magazines really resonated with me. I myself stopped all my paid subscriptions to training publications a long time ago and only flip through the free ones quickly in the off chance that there may be something interesting and of value. There usually is not.

Clark thinks that training magazines are so dull, boring and predictable because they rely on an advertising model for their existence. Therefore, they go out of their way to be non-controversial, non-critical, non-offensive, and full of puff pieces about how rosy everything is everywhere in the world of training.

Certainly, the advertising model has something to do with this blandness. However, I also think that part of the problem is the very insular nature of the training field itself. Articles in training magazines are, for the most part, written by training professionals (consultants, academics, vendors, CLOs, training directors, instructional designers, etc.) to be read by people just like them. It's much the same phenomenon at training conferences - training folks talking to training folks.

This is why so much of the dialogue is self-congratulatory and a little delusional. Every thing's fine. Everyone is great. There are no problems. All training is of good quality, useful, effective, and, of course, well worth the investment of time and money. It is those nasty people not in the training function (executives, managers, business unit heads, etc.) who don't understand the inherent value of training and don't give it the respect and resources it deserves.

Well, working in the "eLearning trenches" every day, I can tell you that it is not as pretty a picture as is painted in the training magazines, or presented at training conferences. It is hard work producing quality learning experiences that meet real needs. Not everything produced by our field is of great quality, and results can vary tremendously. Some things work, and others don't, and we are still figuring things out as we go. It's messy business.

I think we should be more self-critical and be honest with ourselves about the state of our field. It is only when you recognize and openly admit problems that you can begin to work toward real improvement. The training field could really benefit from some lively discussions, debates and disagreements about what we do and how we do it.

Another way to broaden the training conversation is to invite non-training folks into the discussion. We should be giving a greater voice to our clients (executives, managers, directors, and learners) and listening to their needs and their concerns. We should be hearing more from these folks in our magazines and at our conferences, and a little less from each other about how wonderful we are. It can be a real eye-opener to see yourself as others see you.

Broadening the training conversation will not only improve the quality of our magazines and conferences, it will improve the quality of training itself.

Tap Into Your Organization's Tacit Knowledge Pool

The training / learning model embraced by most organizations can be characterized as top-town, centre-to-periphery, and decidedly one-way. In other words, training is pushed from the centre, out to a dispersed audience of learners to be passively received in isolation. Not only is this usually not a very productive or enjoyable learning experience for trainees, this one-way "push" model of learning completely fails to leverage the treasure trove of knowledge and organizational memory residing in the brains of those in the field.

In other words, all the tacit knowledge about how things work, what does work and does not work, lessons from past experience, etc., that individuals have remains unshared with others across the organization. Technology can make this tacit knowledge sharing a very efficient process, but, unfortunately, most organizations do not take advantage of such technologies.

Two items that have found their way into my email inbox in recent weeks really help to illustrate the importance of changing our organizational training models to more closely reflect how people learn in the age of Google and social networking.

Firstly, Janet Clarey of Brandon-Hall Research provides this excellent slide show that contrasts the multitudes of ways that individuals learn and interact online in their personal lives versus the very linear, isolating, and ineffective ways that learning is often organized in the workplace.

Secondly, Intel corporation set up an internal wiki, titled Intelpedia, that captures and shares knowledge across the organization. Anyone within the organization can post and edit content on this wiki. In its first year, Intelpedia had more than 5,000 pages of searchable content and had garnered 13.5 million page views. Talk about leveraging the tacit knowledge stored in your peoples' heads!

Remember, not all learning need be in the guise of formal courses (whether in-person or online). Sometimes, for many just-in-time, on-the-job learning challenges, the best thing you can do is facilitate an easy way of communication and knowledge sharing and get out of the way. Such an approach recognizes that most useful learning within an organization is informal and happens on- the-fly and as needed.

Trim the Text

I was at a meeting last week when someone commented on a thick file folder I had brought along, bursting with papers related to the project at hand. When asked about it, I replied that I am of the generation that does not like reading a lot of text off a screen. My eyes get tired easily, I feel I cannot read as quickly or accurately on screen, and I end up printing off the relevant information and reading it and marking it up off-screen.

I suppose on-screen readability will improve as technology improves. Amazon, for example, contends that its new Kindle digital book technology has overcome these limitations noted above.

Kindle

However, the comment on my printing habits, along with the following things I have come across in the last couple of weeks, has lead me to reflect on how much I rely on text in the eLearning I produce, and whether less text and more visuals and narration would be more effective. To wit:

• Tom Kuhlmann, who runs the user community for Articulate, outlines in this demo how you can present a concept much more effectively via the use of graphics and narration. The demo shows four different ways that you could teach someone how cell phones work.
  

• Cathy Moore, in her Making Change blog, shows how you can create more effective eLearning by trimming copy, showing rather than telling, and letting learners explore rather than being spoon-fed.

• There is a whole conference (VizThink) now dedicated to the art and science of visual thinking.

• There is sub-field of architecture, transportation and urban planning called wayfinding, that focuses on how best to help people navigate their ways through cities and buildings as intuitively as possible (i.e. via good clean design, creative use of symbols, and an economy of words).

There are lessons in all of these examples about delivering messages and enabling learning with more than just flat, one-dimensional, and often overly long text.

I think I tended towards an over-reliance on text in eLearning in the past because I began in this field in a post-secondary environment wherein text is revered. It is the bedrock of scholarship after all. As I move farther from the university environment, I am relying less and less on text. And not just for the practical considerations of ease-of-use. Rather, I do so because:

• Most of the adult learners being served by the eLearning I produce are time-starved and do not have the time or the patience to read great tomes (online or otherwise), and;

• Using a variety of approaches (text, narration, graphics, animation, video, etc.) makes the learning more engaging and memorable, and accommodates different ways of learning.
  

Creativity Should Precede Technique

Our daughter wants to be an animator. She will be going to university or college next year and has been checking out various computer animation and digital media programs. Interestingly, none of these programs really care about the applicant's computer programming skills. They are looking for talented and creative artists. They will help them hone these skills and then teach them how to channel them appropriately in a digital environment. In fact, we heard from some that students will be free hand drawing and doing story boards for a long while before they ever touch a computer.

What's this got to do with eLearning you ask?

I think eLearning professionals can learn from the approach used in the animation industry. As I have written many times in the past, I think the eLearning industry places far too much confidence in technology (e.g. authoring tools, learning management systems, content management systems, learning objects, etc.), and not enough on the human ingenuity and creativity required to make these tools sing.

As part of her research, our daughter checked out the Pixar site, her holy grail of possible future employers. They have a very interesting FAQ section for budding animators. Many of the things they say they are looking for in their animators are the things we should be looking for in those who design and develop eLearning. Here are some snippets from the Pixar site, followed by my take on how these principles apply to an eLearning context.

Pixar: "Pixar places the technology of computer graphics firmly at the service of the art of animation, not the other way around."
eLearning Context: "We should place computer software firmly at the service of the art of learning, not the other way around."

Pixar: "What Pixar looks for first and foremost in animators (is that) we want you to be able to bring the character to life, independent of medium."
eLearning Context: "What we look for first and foremost in eLearning designers (is that) we want you to be able to bring the learning to life, independent of medium."

Pixar: "A common question is, "What software should I learn?" The answer is....software doesn't matter; learning to animate matters."
eLearning Context: "A common question is, "What authoring tool or learning management system should I learn?" The answer is....software doesn't matter; animating learning matters."

Pixar: "Realize that whizzy technology is not great art."
eLearning Context: "Realize that whizzy technology does not, in itself, create a great learning environment."

Pixar: "Computers don't animate. People do."
eLearning Context: "Computers don't teach / educate / train / engage / enlighten. People do."

In the animation process, it is only AFTER the creative effort of animators working up characters and a strong story line is completed, that the idea for the movie, TV show, game is passed on to technical directors whose job it is to make this vision a realty. In much the same way, eLearning programmers and technicians should only start their work after an eLearning designer has constructed the creative vision for the learning experience.

Animators ensure that that the characters they create are interesting and that their story lines are compelling. Likewise, eLearning designers should ensure that the learning environments they envision are based on principles of active learning, interactivity, realistic stories, and are in the proper context for the targeted learners.

Technology doesn't magically create engaging animated stories out of a vacuum. Nor can it magically create engaging eLearning environments. Both processes require the intervention of creative human beings who understand the end goal and bend the technology to their will (not the other way around).