Most of us in Learning & Development spend a lot of time thinking about what makes learning effective. We think about structure. Interaction. Practice activities. Slide design. Cognitive load. Engagement.

And rightly so. Good learning design matters.

Which is why I found myself slightly puzzled after sitting through a training session recently that, by most instructional design standards, really shouldn’t have worked as well as it did.

The room was crowded and uncomfortable. The slides were dense and text-heavy. There were almost no visuals. The session relied heavily on presentation and explanation rather than structured interaction. Even the one practical activity felt underdeveloped.

And yet, three hours later, I walked away perfectly satisfied with the experience. Not inspired by the design itself. But genuinely pleased with what I’d learnt.

That experience got me thinking about something we don’t always acknowledge enough in L&D. Learning effectiveness is not necessarily determined by design quality alone.

Motivation Can Really Change Things...

One of the strongest factors at play that afternoon was motivation.

I was deeply interested in the topic. I already cared about it before I entered the room. Which meant I was willing to tolerate friction that would normally frustrate me.

Research connected to Self-Determination Theory suggests that highly motivated learners are often willing to work harder and tolerate less-than-perfect learning experiences because the value of the content outweighs the inconvenience of the delivery.

In other words, when learners are genuinely curious, invested and self-driven, they often compensate for weaknesses in the learning design themselves. That doesn’t mean design stops mattering. But it does mean motivation changes the equation significantly.

The Expertise Effect

There was another factor at play too: prior expertise.

Most learners — especially novices — benefit enormously from structured learning experiences, carefully scaffolded practice, and clear guidance.

But research into expertise suggests that more experienced learners often respond differently. Once people already possess strong domain knowledge, they frequently prefer concise explanation and refinement over highly structured instruction.

That was certainly true in my case.

I was already familiar with many of the concepts being discussed. So rather than needing step-by-step practice, I found myself mentally integrating the presenter’s refinements into things I was already doing.

The learning still had value. But the value came through extension and refinement rather than foundational instruction.

The Presenter Matters More Than We Sometimes Admit

Another important factor was the presenter himself.

He was enthusiastic, credible and clearly experienced. The session was filled with practical stories and examples drawn from real experience.

And while we often focus heavily on the mechanics of instructional design, learners also respond emotionally to the person delivering the learning.

Research consistently shows that instructor enthusiasm and credibility strongly influence learner engagement and satisfaction.

The slides may have been weak. But the stories were memorable. The examples were relevant. The presenter felt authentic.

And authenticity carries weight.

Good Design Still Matters

Now, none of this means we should abandon good learning design principles. Far from it.

Clear structure, meaningful practice, strong visuals, thoughtful sequencing and authentic activities all remain incredibly important — especially for less experienced learners.

But perhaps the more interesting point is this. Learning effectiveness is often the result of multiple interacting variables rather than any single design decision in isolation.

Sometimes, in the right circumstances, the “not-so-good” can still be good enough.

And perhaps recognising that complexity gives us a more realistic ( and ultimately more useful)   understanding of how learning actually works.



A fuller exploration of these ideas, including the tensions and trade-offs behind them,  can be found in the original Learning Re-Framed article on Substack.

If you work in Learning & Development, you’ve almost certainly encountered this reaction from outside the profession:

“Surely modern tools make e-learning quick to produce now?”

On the surface, it feels like a fair question. After all, the tools we use today are dramatically more capable than the ones many of us started with 10 or 15 years ago. Add AI into the mix and it’s easy to assume that development times must have collapsed.

But interestingly, the reality doesn’t seem quite so straightforward.

The surprising persistence of development time

Recently, while sorting through some old folders on my computer, I rediscovered a well-known 2010 report from Chapman Alliance about e-learning development times.

The headline figure from the report was striking. At the higher end of complexity, organisations reported spending roughly 184 hours of development time for every one hour of finished e-learning.

Importantly, that figure included the whole project effort:

• instructional design

• SME input

• media production

• quality assurance

• project management, and

• review cycles

Not just authoring time.

Revisiting those numbers made me wonder whether they still held true today. After all, since 2010 we’ve seen huge changes in authoring tools, media production, collaboration platforms, accessibility tooling and, more recently, AI-assisted workflows

Surely development time must now be dramatically lower?

Yet when you look at more recent industry benchmarking and practitioner data, the modern estimates for complex interactive e-learning often still sit somewhere between 80 and 150 hours per finished learning hour.

Lower than 2010? Yes. But perhaps not lower in the way many people might expect.

The “more powerful, not necessarily faster” effect

I suspect something slightly counterintuitive has happened over the last decade or so. The tools haven’t simply made development faster. They’ve made it possible to produce more sophisticated output within a similar amount of time.

In other words, the capability has increased more dramatically than the efficiency.

Think about tools like Storyline. Many of the core production mechanics still involve significant manual effort:

• building interactions

• configuring triggers

• managing layers and states

• testing logic

• refining navigation

• checking accessibility, and

• iterating through reviews

The interface may have improved. Certain workflows may be smoother. But sophisticated interactive e-learning still involves a considerable amount of detailed point-and-click production work. And interestingly, improved tooling can sometimes encourage greater complexity rather than faster production.

Features that once felt too difficult or time-consuming suddenly become achievable, which naturally encourages designers to create richer, more ambitious experiences.

The result? More sophistication. But not necessarily dramatically less labour.

AI is helping — but mostly around the edges

Of course, AI is already speeding up parts of the workflow. It can help with outlining content, drafting objectives, generating ideas, summarising SME input and producing first drafts

All genuinely useful. But most current AI tools still don’t remove the deeper production effort involved in:

• building interactions

• implementing design decisions

• governance and stakeholder review

• testing and refinement, and

• organisational approval cycles

And in larger organisations, those review and governance layers can account for a substantial proportion of total project time.

So while AI may improve efficiency in certain areas, it hasn’t yet fundamentally transformed the overall production reality of high-quality interactive learning.

What's the significance of this?

I think this creates a real tension for many L&D teams.

Externally, there is often an assumption that modern technology should make production almost instantaneous. Tool vendors don’t always help here either, with messaging that suggests sophisticated learning experiences are quick and effortless to create.

Internally, this can leave L&D professionals feeling that they are somehow inefficient or behind the curve.

But perhaps the more realistic conclusion is this:

Creating genuinely thoughtful, interactive, well-crafted e-learning still requires a significant amount of human judgement, design thinking and production effort.

The technology has become more powerful. But the craft itself (and the labour behind the craft) still matters.

And perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us quite as much as it does.

A fuller exploration of these ideas — including the wider implications for e-learning production, AI and workflow support — can be found in the original Learning Re-Framed article here:

Most people working in L&D have probably experienced this at some point.  You design a programme carefully. The learning objectives are clear. The facilitation is strong. Learners are engaged. Feedback is positive.And yet, once people return to work, the outcomes vary.

Some learners apply what they’ve learned quickly and confidently. Others, who seemed equally engaged during the training, struggle to turn learning into action. Not dramatically. But consistently enough to notice. That unevenness can be frustrating because it often feels difficult to explain.

Our first instinct is usually to look at the training itself. Was the design strong enough? Did the learners get enough practice? Was the content too complex? Those questions absolutely matter. But even when we get many of those things broadly right, the pattern often remains.

Which raises an interesting possibility. What if part of the difference sits not inside the training programme itself, but in how learners approach learning once real work begins?

The Part We Rarely Talk About

Research into workplace learning has repeatedly shown that learner characteristics play an important role in whether learning transfers successfully into workplace performance.

Things like how:

• learners respond to setbacks

• they build confidence

• they monitor their own progress

• they turn intentions into action under pressure

This isn’t about labelling learners as “good” or “bad.” Nor is it about blaming learners when transfer doesn’t happen. It’s simply recognising that some people arrive with stronger workplace learning habits than others. The interesting part is that many of those habits are teachable.

Which creates an important opportunity for L&D.

Perhaps part of our role is not just helping people learn a specific skill, but helping them become more effective at using learning in the workplace.

Confidence Often Comes After Action

One of the strongest predictors of workplace application is something called self-efficacy — a learner’s belief that they can successfully perform a task in real conditions.

Importantly, this isn’t abstract confidence. It’s highly contextual.

Can I still do this when:

• I’m under time pressure?

• things don’t go smoothly?

• the stakes feel higher?

• someone is watching?

Learners with lower self-efficacy rarely opt out consciously. More often, they hesitate. They delay using the new skill. They quietly fall back into familiar habits.

What’s interesting is that confidence usually grows through successful use, not through explanation alone. That has practical implications for L&D. Rather than encouraging learners to “feel confident first,” we can help them:

• break a skill into smaller usable steps

• identify low-risk opportunities to apply it quickly

• repeat those actions deliberately, even imperfectly

Sometimes the smallest successful action is what starts building real momentum.

Helping Learners Manage Their Own Learning

Another important factor is what psychologists often call self-regulated learning. In simple terms, this is a learner’s ability to manage their own learning process once formal support reduces. Effective workplace learners tend to:

• plan how they will apply learning

• notice when something isn’t working

• make adjustments

• reflect briefly and purposefully

Less effective learners often wait for:

• more instruction

• more clarity

• more confidence

• more time

Unfortunately, modern workplaces rarely provide perfect conditions for any of those things. The encouraging part is that this kind of learner self-management does not need to be taught in a complicated way. Even a lightweight three-step loop can help:

• What will I try next time?

• How will I know if it’s working?

• What will I adjust if it isn’t?

Small reflective prompts like these can significantly increase learner ownership and application.

Good Intentions Are Surprisingly Fragile

Most learners leave training with positive intentions. The problem is that good intentions often collapse under the pressure of real work. Not because learners don’t care. But because workplaces are busy, cognitively demanding environments. People forget. Priorities shift. Familiar habits return.

One surprisingly effective technique for bridging this gap is something called if-then planning. Instead of vague intentions like: “I’ll try to use this more", learners create clear situation-action links such as: “If I receive a difficult customer complaint, then I’ll use the three-step response structure before replying.”

This works because it reduces the mental effort required in the moment. The situation itself becomes the reminder. For L&D, this creates a simple but practical opportunity: help learners leave training with a few realistic workplace application plans rather than just good intentions.

Supporting Recovery, Not Perfection

Early attempts at applying learning rarely go perfectly. Some learners interpret that as:

“I’m obviously not very good at this.” Others interpret it as: “That approach didn’t work particularly well — what can I adjust next time?”

That difference matters enormously because it shapes whether learners persist or quietly disengage. As L&D professionals, we can help normalise imperfect early application by encouraging learners to ask:

• What part of this was under my control?

• What would I change next time?

• What support or resource would help?

This shifts the focus away from personal failure and towards gradual improvement.

A Small Shift That Can Have a Big Impact

None of this replaces good instructional design. Design quality still matters. Practice still matters. Manager support still matters.

But increasingly, workplace performance also depends on whether learners know how to use learning effectively once they are back in the flow of real work.

That may be one of the most overlooked parts of workplace learning.

The encouraging part is that many of these learner habits are highly teachable. And once learners begin building them, every future learning experience has a better chance of translating into meaningful workplace performance.

A fuller exploration of these ideas — including the psychology behind learner confidence, self-regulation and workplace transfer — can be found in the original Learning Re-Framed article here.

Over the last few years, neuroscience has become increasingly influential in the world of learning and development. Concepts around attention, memory, cognitive load and emotion now appear regularly in conversations about learning design — and with good reason.

One of the first neuroscience-related concepts that really stuck with me was the role of the amygdala in how we respond to challenge and uncertainty. Michael W. Allen references this in his book Designing Successful E-Learning, explaining how the brain can trigger a kind of cognitive “flight mode” when we encounter something stressful, difficult or emotionally uncomfortable.

Most of us have experienced this in learning situations.

You reach a moment in a course, workshop or e-learning module where something suddenly feels difficult, awkward or mentally draining — and you quietly disengage. Your attention drifts. You stop processing properly.

This matters because learning design doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens within the constraints of how human brains actually work. And when you start exploring books like John Medina’s Brain Rules, that reality becomes even clearer. Medina highlights several principles that feel especially relevant to anyone working in L&D:

• The brain doesn’t pay attention to boring things

• Attention is limited and selective

• Stress interferes with thinking and memory

• Multitasking reduces effectiveness

• Emotion strongly influences what we notice and remember

The practical implication is obvious enough: if learning design ignores how people actually process information, outcomes become unpredictable. Which is why many good learning design practices already compensate for these realities. We:

• chunk information into manageable sections

• repeat important ideas

• simplify complex tasks

• use prompts, scaffolds and job aids

• reduce unnecessary cognitive overload

All sensible and valuable approaches. But I think there’s an interesting tension hidden inside all this. Because taken too far, the “work with the brain” perspective can unintentionally become limiting. It risks framing learners primarily in terms of their constraints and weaknesses.

Anyone who has worked in L&D for a while will probably recognise the following situation. Two people attend the same programme. They receive the same content, the same practice and the same support.

Yet what happens afterwards is often very different. One person experiments, adapts, recovers from mistakes and gradually improves in the workplace. The other hesitates, delays, loses confidence or reverts to old habits under pressure.

We often explain this through motivation, personality or mindset — and all of those factors matter. But I suspect there may also be something slightly deeper involved: what we might call learning capability.

This is about the ability to:

• act despite uncertainty

• recover when things don’t go smoothly

• monitor whether something is working

• adapt rather than abandon

And this raises an interesting possibility for L&D. What if understanding how the brain works isn’t just about designing around human limitations? What if part of our role is also helping people become better at managing those limitations themselves?

That doesn’t mean ignoring cognitive science or pretending attention and memory don’t matter. Quite the opposite. It means building capability on top of that understanding.

Because perhaps the long-term goal isn’t simply to design learning that compensates for fragile attention, unreliable memory and uncertainty. Perhaps it’s also to help learners become more resilient, adaptive and self-aware when facing those realities in the workplace.

And that, I think, may be a slightly bigger and more interesting challenge for modern L&D.

A fuller exploration of these ideas — including the tension between cognitive constraints and learner capability — can be found in the original Learning Re-Framed article on Substack.

Most of us in L&D have had plenty of practice in using words to communicate clearly.

We know how to structure content. How to explain ideas. How to sequence information logically. How to write learning objectives, facilitator notes, e-learning copy and assessment questions.

But visual communication? That’s different.

Despite working in a profession that relies heavily on visuals — slides, graphics, scenarios, video, interfaces, layouts and e-learning interactions — very few of us have ever been taught how visual communication actually works.

And yet we instinctively know when something visual feels right.

We recognise strong visual storytelling immediately in films, television, photography, comics and advertising. We can usually tell when a slide deck looks polished or amateurish. We notice when an e-learning course feels visually polished and engaging versus visually flat.

The strange thing is this: most of us consume visual language fluently every day… while feeling far less confident about creating it ourselves.

Why This Matters for L&D

If you’ve ever:

• struggled to make slides feel visually engaging

• created visuals for scenario-based e-learning that felt a bit unnatural, or 

• found yourself thinking, “I know the look I want, but don't seem able to achieve it”

then you’ve already experienced this gap.

And historically, there’s been a practical problem sitting behind it. Even if someone in L&D developed stronger visual instincts, actually bringing ideas to life often required access to:

• graphic designers

• illustrators

• photographers, or

• video specialists.

Most small L&D teams simply didn’t have those resources available.

Why AI Changes the Equation

That resource barrier is suddenly much lower than it used to be. AI image generation tools now allow L&D professionals to create visuals that would previously have required specialist design support.

But there’s an important catch. The quality of the output depends heavily on how clearly you can describe what you want visually. And this is where many people hit frustration.

A prompt might feel perfectly logical in everyday language but still produce disappointing results because AI image tools “think” more like photographers, directors and visual storytellers than instructional designers.

They respond much more effectively when prompts include things like: framing, composition, camera angle, lighting, perspective and visual focus.

In other words, the more fluent you become in visual language, the better your AI-generated visuals are likely to become.

Learning the Vocabulary of Visual Communication

The good news is that this visual “grammar” is surprisingly learnable. You don’t need to become a professional film-maker or illustrator. Even a small amount of familiarity with visual storytelling principles can significantly improve your ability to:

• direct AI tools more effectively

• create stronger learning visuals

• design more authentic scenarios, and

• communicate ideas more clearly.

Two resources I’ve personally found useful are: Making Comics by Scott McCloud and The 5 C’s of Cinematography by Joseph V. Mascelli.

Neither was written specifically for L&D, yet both contain extremely practical ideas about visual storytelling, framing, composition and sequencing that transfer remarkably well into learning design and AI prompting.

And importantly, they help develop something many of us were never formally taught: the ability to think visually — not just verbally.

A Final Thought

For years, many of us in L&D have quietly accepted that visual design was something best left to specialists. AI is beginning to change that.

But making the most of these tools will require more than simply learning how to write prompts. It may also require us to become more fluent in the language of visual communication itself. And that feels like a genuinely useful new skill for modern L&D professionals to develop.

A fuller exploration of these ideas — including the connections between AI prompting, cinematography and visual storytelling — can be found in the original Learning Re-Framed article on Substack.

In my previous post, I explored why learning styles fail to stand up to scrutiny when examined through the lens of evidence. Despite decades of popularity, there is no reliable research showing that matching instruction to a learner’s preferred style leads to better learning outcomes.

But that only addresses part of the problem

A more interesting question is this: if learning styles are so poorly supported by evidence, why do they still feel so intuitively right to so many people in L&D?

Learning styles emerged as a genuine attempt to fix a real and persistent problem — but in doing so, they quietly pulled L&D’s attention in the wrong direction.

Why learning styles gained traction

Learning styles rose to prominence at a time when L&D was beginning to confront an uncomfortable reality: one-size-fits-all training wasn’t working.

Courses were generic. Learners were disengaged. Completion rates looked fine, but application and impact were questionable at best. Learning styles offered a compelling response:

• People are different
• Those differences matter
• Learning shouldn’t look the same for everyone

At face value, that instinct was (and still is) entirely reasonable. The problem wasn’t the intent. It was how the idea evolved.

From design challenge to classification exercise

Learning styles transformed a complex design problem into a categorisation problem. Instead of asking, “What does someone need to be able to do?”, we started asking, “What type of learner is this?”.

That subtle shift matters. It moves the focus away from performance and toward cognitive processing preferences. In doing so, it anchors L&D firmly in the knowledge-acquisition phase of learning — not in the messy, pressured reality where learning needs to be applied.

Modality is not style

This is where a lot of confusion crept in. Research by Richard Mayer on multimedia learning — later synthesised and extended by Ruth Clark — demonstrated something important: how information is presented does matter.

But Mayer and Clark were never talking about learner preferences. They were talking about matching instructional design decisions to the:

• nature of the content
• type of task, and
• limits of working memory

For example:

• Visual-spatial tasks benefit from diagrams
• Procedural tasks benefit from step-by-step visuals with minimal text
• Language-heavy tasks are often better supported by text than audio

This is modality as a design principle — not a learner trait.

Unfortunately, modality was often simplified and misinterpreted as learning style. For example, dual channels - the idea that we process words and visuals through different mental pathways - became “visual vs auditory learners”. A design insight turned into a personal label.

That kind of leap was never supported by the research.

The self-diagnosis problem

There is another, deeper issue with learning styles — one that Ruth Clark addresses particularly clearly in her book Building Expertise.

Learning styles rely heavily on learners diagnosing their own needs and preferences. The problem with that? Research consistently shows that learners are very poor at self-diagnosis.

Across multiple studies, learners:

• overestimate how well they have learned
• confuse fluency with understanding
• prefer easier, more comfortable instruction even when it produces worse outcomes
• struggle to identify which instructional approaches actually help them perform better

In other words, people are not reliable judges of how they learn best. So, a model that encourages learners to self-diagnose and request a specific, instructional “prescription” rests on a very shaky foundation.

Why none of this matters when application is required

The massively important design insights of Mayer, Clark and others tell us lots about knowledge processing and recall but very little about what happens next.

When someone is back at work, under time pressure, trying to complete a task they:

• don’t choose their preferred style
• don’t reflect on presentation format
• do what the task demands

In performance mode, preference disappears. What matters instead is:

• Clarity
• Relevance
• Confidence
• access to the right support at the right moment

Learning styles have little or nothing useful to say about any of that.

 A more productive shift

If learning styles were an early attempt to personalise learning, the good news is that we now have far better, evidence-based ways of doing this.

Instead of asking, “What type of learner is this?” we get much further by asking:

• What does good performance actually look like?
• Where do people struggle when they try to apply this?
• What decisions, judgements, or actions really matter?
• What support would help most at that moment?

That shift moves L&D away from categorising learners and toward designing for performance.

Reframing the legacy of learning styles

Learning styles weren’t foolish. They were a signal. A signal that L&D wanted to move away from content dumping and toward something more thoughtful, more learner-centred and more effective.

But focusing too heavily on cognitive preferences distracted us from the harder — and more important — question, “How do we help people apply their learning better when it actually matters?” 

Few ideas in Learning & Development have been as popular (or as persistent) as learning styles. Most of us are familiar with the basic idea: people have different styles of learning (‘visual’ or ‘auditory’ are couple of examples). Identify someone’s style, match the training to it, and ‘hey presto’ learning will be more effective.

You can understand the attraction. It’s an idea that seems deeply intuitive. That feels totally learner-centred. That is, in fact, irresistible to many learners and L&D professionals.

Which goes a long way to explaining why, for years, learning styles have been taught, assessed, and embedded into L&D practice. But there’s a big problem with this idea. Because when you look closely at the evidence, the idea simply doesn’t hold up.

Let’s be precise about what’s being challenged

The specific claim that research has examined and failed to support, is what psychologists call the meshing hypothesis. The idea that learners learn better when instruction is matched to their preferred learning style (e.g., visual learners taught visually, auditory learners taught verbally).

Now it’s important to note, that this is different from saying:

• people don’t have preferences (they do),
• or that variety is bad (it isn’t),
• or that accessibility doesn’t matter (it absolutely does).

But back to that central question: does matching instruction to a learner’s declared style improve learning outcomes?

Fans of the learning styles idea are going to be disappointed. Because after more than two decades of research, the answer is still: no compelling evidence.

What the research actually says

One of the most widely cited reviews was published by Harold Pashler and colleagues in 2008. They set out very clearly what evidence would be required to support learning styles — and then examined the available studies.

Their conclusion was blunt: there was no credible evidence showing that matching instruction to learning styles improves learning.

Other reviews have reached the same conclusion. A very major UK review by Coffield et al. examined dozens of learning style models and found serious issues with reliability, validity, and practical usefulness.

As a result, learning styles are now commonly described in the research literature as a “neuromyth” — a belief about the brain or learning that sounds scientific but isn’t supported by robust evidence.

So much so that for years there has even been an open “Learning Styles Challenge”, offering a cash prize to anyone who can demonstrate real-world benefits from designing instruction around learning styles. To date, the prize remains unclaimed.

Why the idea refuses to die

If the evidence is so weak, why does the idea persist? Partly because learning styles play into something everyone is a fan of: personalisation. They give learners language to describe themselves and give designers a sense that they are tailoring learning rather than mass-producing it.

They’re also easy to explain, easy to assess, and easy to sell. But ease and intuitiveness are not the same thing as effectiveness.

What actually works better

Ironically, many people who believe in learning styles are already doing things that do work.

Research consistently shows that learning is more effective when:

• the mode of instruction matches the nature of the content (for example, diagrams for spatial information or audio for pronunciation),
• learners get practice, not just content exposure,
• retrieval and feedback are built into practice
• complexity is managed carefully,
• learners are supported in applying learning in context.

In other words, the question isn’t, “What type of learner are you?” It’s, “What kind of learning does this task require?” That shift — from labelling learners to analysing tasks — is what helps L&D become more effective.

Preferences still matter, BUt...

None of this means learner preferences should be ignored. Preferences matter for all sorts of reasons like:

• motivation
• engagement,
• inclusion and accessibility.

But preference is not the same as learning effectiveness. Giving learners choice in how they engage with content can be valuable. Designing everything around a fixed learning style is not.

A more helpful way to think about it?

If we really want to personalise learning, there are better levers to pull than learning styles:

• design for the task, not the learning style label
• design for application and performance, not just exposure to or consumption of content
• design for context, not abstraction

Learning styles promised personalisation. The evidence suggests we can do better — by focusing less on categories and labels and more on what people actually need to do more effectively in the workplace.

If you want to make something sound serious and inaccessible, here’s a simple trick: talk about neuroscience.

I’m serious. Just roll the word around in your head for a minute. Neuroscience.

See what I mean? It feels scary. Impersonal. Something conducted in hermetically sealed labs where nobody smiles and every sentence (uttered by scientists in crisply-laundered white coats) must contain at least three syllables.

It feels like the kind of thing that can’t possibly relate to regular people or everyday jobs — let alone the practical world of Learning & Development.

(And just to be clear, I’m poking fun at the discipline of neuroscience here, not at the very real cognitive differences that many people live with.)

But then you open John Medina’s book Brain Rules, and suddenly your perception of neuroscience is completely flipped. His writing is energetic, engaging, and fun. Medina is that rare person that can bring even the driest-sounding of subjects or topics to life. And if you haven’t ever read his book, I’d strongly encourage you to.

One of the ideas that stayed with me long after reading Brain Rules was his discussion of music. Not in a “Playing Mozart to babies makes them genius-level smart” way, but in a grounded, evidence-based way.

And more recently, I happened across some research from MindLab, a UK-based cognitive science group, that reminded me just how powerful (and misunderstood) music can be when it comes to helping us concentrate.

So, if you've ever wondered why some playlists help get you into the flow while others knock you off track, this article explores the brain-friendly principles behind that difference.

So, let’s dive into understanding what music does — and doesn’t — do when you’re trying to get work done.

First: Music does not make you smarter

Medina is unambiguous about this.

• No, Mozart won’t raise your IQ.
• No, playing classical music to babies doesn’t give them a head start.
• No, music is not a cognitive shortcut.

So, if you’ve been blaming your lack of genius on a childhood without Chopin… sorry.

What music can do is change your mental state

But what Medina does explore is how music can:

• alter your mood and your energy and stress levels
• shift your focus by making tasks feel more enjoyable
• increase alertness if you’re drifting
• create a rhythm that helps with repetitive tasks

In other words, music doesn’t make you smarter but it certainly puts you in the right frame of mind to think more smartly.

From the point of view of cognitive load, this is important. After, all, anything that reduces stress or stabilises your frame of mind frees up more bandwidth for meaningful work.

The MindLab research adds a useful layer

The MindLab research reminded me of all this. It ran a series of task-based studies involving music. It’s not deep neuroscience — but it is practical psychology, and it very much aligns with Medina’s findings.

Here’s what they found:

1. Different tasks benefit from different types of music

• Classical is good for accuracy-based tasks and detail-heavy work
• Ambient/electronic music is better for repetitive tasks, data entry
• Dance music boosts speed, but sometimes reduces accuracy
• Pop is okay for conceptual work (if lyrics aren’t distracting)

2. Music reduces stress, which improves performance

Participants consistently showed lower cortisol when listening to calming music. If your stress levels are lower, you attention levels are generally higher. Better attention levels generally lead to better results or output.

3. Lyrics are the enemy of language-heavy tasks

If your task requires reading, writing, or generating language…music with lyrics will probably slow you down. (This is why your “productive Spotify playlist” works brilliantly—until it doesn’t.)

A simple, practical takeaway

Most people in L&D will have moments in their working day when they have important jobs that just need to get done. Defining some objectives, designing a course outline, working up an e-learning interaction, to name but a few. So, can music help?

Well, I think the real takeaway here isn’t about genre, although clearly that can be a factor. It’s more about fit. Making sure there’s a good fit between:

• task type
• emotional state
• personal musical preference

And really, that’s Medina in a nutshell: know how your brain works, and design for it. And sometimes, working out how your brain works can begin with something as simple as recognising why a particular playlist helps you slip into flow — and why another playlist derails your concentration completely.

A couple of final thoughts

Reading Medina’s work makes you realise that learning about neuroscience doesn’t have to be intimidating or abstract. Quite the opposite.

And in case you’re wondering? Yes, I wrote this while listening to music. Did it make me smarter? Sadly, not. But it did make the words you’ve just been reading flow more readily.

• Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School
• John J.Medina
• Pear Press 2008
• Brain rules.net

In last week’s post, I wrote about the jagged edge — the uneven frontier between what AI is exceptionally good at and where it is still surprisingly weak.

That insight came into focus for me while standing on the patio of the Stahl House in the Hollywood Hills, looking down at the sharp, uneven ridges, set against the flat, orderly grid of Los Angeles below.

That contrast — smooth here, jagged there — feels like the perfect metaphor for AI right now. Not evenly distributed. Not predictable. Not consistent.

The takeaway from last week’s post was pretty clear: success with AI isn’t about mastering the technology. It’s about recognising where it shines and where it stumbles.

And that raises the next logical question.

What Does the Jagged Edge Look Like for L&D?

This is the part that matters. The practical, day-to-day reality of using AI in real L&D work.

Because if you work in L&D, you are very likely navigating that jagged edge — whether through generative content requests, experiments with course outlines, or colleagues asking, “Can we use this AI thing to help with…?”

Understanding where AI is strong (and where it is unreliable) is becoming a genuinely useful professional skill. So, here are some thoughts on what this looks like as we head towards the end of 2025

Where AI Really Helps L&D (The “Smooth” Side)

This is where the ground is smooth and firm and flat. Where AI consistently behaves well and adds value without fuss.

Summarising long, dense content

Policies, procedures, reports, transcripts — AI is excellent at turning them into:

• short summaries
• digestible bullet points
• suggested learning objectives
• concise recaps for learners

This isn’t just speculation. If you’ve used AI for this kind of task already you’ll know it’s pretty reliable.

Cleaning up messy SME input

We all love our SMEs; but we also know that a massive, unstructured ‘brain dump’ is often their default mode. However, if you give AI:

• rambling emails
• half-formed notes
• slides covered in dense bullet points

it will make a good first pass at organising that content more clearly and logically. The output won’t be perfect. It will still need some extra human brain power to get it over the finish line; but it will get you to the end of the process much more quickly.

Drafting outlines, ideas and examples

AI is consistently strong at:

• drafting module outlines
• drafting simple scenarios
• creating examples and non-examples
• rewriting content at different reading levels

It certainly doesn’t replace creativity and original thinking; but it can really help unblock those creative juices when you are struggling to come up with good ideas.

Re-framing content for clarity

“Explain this as if…”

“Give me examples from…”

“Rewrite this in plain English.”

This is an area of real strength. In the right circumstances, AI can be just as great at giving you the last 10% (refining and polishing) as it at getting you 90% of the way there.

Where AI Still Struggles (The Jagged Edge)

These are the uneven ridges — the places where footing is uncertain and relying on AI is definitely risky.

Anything requiring organisational context

AI doesn’t know:

• your policies
• your culture
• the shortcuts your learners actually use
• the unofficial steps that matter
• the messy real-world constraints

Its answers can sound right in theory, but can be very wrong in practical terms.

Emotional nuance, judgement or interpersonal dynamics

Handling conflict. Managing a difficult conversation. AI can mimic empathy but it often misses:

• tone
• boundaries
• what not to say

Use it in these kinds of contexts with extreme care.

Multi-step reasoning

AI still struggles with:

• multi-stage logic
• conditional pathways
• decisions that depend on context
• keeping its own reasoning consistent

It can excel at steps 1–3 then completely misfire on step 4.

Highly specialised expertise

In specialised domains like medicine, engineering, law and compliance, plausible-sounding nonsense is especially dangerous.

Explaining the “why” behind a rule

AI is good at restating a rule. Much weaker at explaining the reasoning behind it. Learners need the “why” for authentic understanding — and AI often can’t supply it.

Navigating the Terrain

As noted in last week’s post, the jagged edge isn’t a barrier — it’s a map. In an L&D context, it really helps us understand where:

• AI can accelerate design work, and
• humans must remain firmly in the loop.

The real work right now is not avoiding the jagged edge but learning to navigate along it with confidence.

A few weeks ago, during a trip to the US, I was lucky enough to find myself standing on the patio of the Stahl House in the Hollywood Hills — a glass-and-steel architectural icon perched high above Los Angeles.

The view from the patio is breath-taking; and as a lover of mid-century minimalist architecture, I found the house equally stunning.

From that patio vantage point, the other striking aspect was the contrast between the hills immediately below the patio and the distant cityscape. Way below, the city stretched out in a perfect grid: flat, predictable, orderly. But right in front of me, the landscape fell away in uneven ridges — sharp, fractured, unpredictable.

I was reminded of the sharp, uneven edges of those hills the other day when I came across the term jagged edge - to describe what the world of AI looks like at the moment.

So, let’s explore the meaning of that term and what it might mean for L&D.

Often, we talk about AI as though it’s spreading evenly across everything; but it isn’t. It’s advancing in fits and starts — powerful in one moment, incredibly clumsy in the next. Researchers have named this unevenness the jagged edge of AI.

Understanding the Jagged Edge

You may well have experienced this jagged edge first hand, when AI is strong and accurate in some areas but weak and unreliable in others. 

It can draft a pretty good course outline in seconds. It can generate accurate code that works. Yet still produce nonsense when asked to evaluate a moral dilemma.

This unevenness exists because AI doesn’t understand; it predicts. It excels where data is abundant and patterns are clear — structured writing, number crunching, summarising, and retrieval. It falls short where context, empathy or tacit knowledge contribute significantly to the outcome.

Evidence from the Research

The Human–AI Division of Labour

• AI excels at automating structure: generating first drafts, summarising information, categorising, and identifying patterns.
• We excel at interpreting complexity: spotting anomalies, understanding tone, making ethical calls, and connecting dots in ambiguous situations.

What This Means for L&D

• A learning designer can use AI to structure a skills framework (below the edge), but must still apply contextual awareness to fit it to their own organisation (beyond the edge).
• A subject matter expert might use AI to generate examples or case studies (below the edge), but they’ll need to refine and validate accuracy, richness and complexity of those examples (beyond the edge).

It’s going to take us all a while to get used to this ‘new frontier’; and we’ll need to be ready for the jagged edge to shift as AI technology evolves. But recognising and navigating the jagged edge confidently, within our own job roles, could massively transform our productivity and effectiveness.

Reference:
Dell’Acqua, F., Kalliamvakou, E., Kirov, S., Ransbotham, S., & Rock, D. (2023). Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality. Harvard Business School Working Paper 24-013.

I’ve written a lot over the last few months about the significance of shifting from a training-focused paradigm to a performance-support focused one. It’s a big shift. Understandably, plenty of people feel like this is me saying, ‘do away with your training events.’

Why training still matters — but needs to evolve

Definitely not the case. But it does raise a big question that people often ask:

"What would training look like if it were designed with performance support in mind from the start?"

Let’s dig into answering that, to see how you might refine what you do during a training event, when designing for a more performance-support focused paradigm.

It’s easy to see performance support as a nice ‘add-on’. Something to highlight to the learners towards the end of the event, as a rather perfunctory ‘transition to the workplace’ segment. I confess, I’ve run my fair share of such segments over the years.

Unfortunately, this approach will pretty much guarantee that your performance support solution gets little use or has low perceived value.

From event thinking to performance thinking

So, if you are providing performance support tools or materials, then they need to be introduced and used as an integral part of the training – not as an afterthought.

The question remains: 'How to do that?'

In our impact and instructional design programme, we introduce attendees to a very simple, very flexible but nevertheless very robust design flow that works very well during in-person and live online events.

It’s a three part design flow. It starts with presenting to learners, moves to providing structured practice, and finished with much less structured extended practice. The idea being that as you go through this sequence, you are helping the learners’ capability and self-direction to increase

From a learning design point of view, this is about providing multiple points of practice that is highly interactivity. Learners gradually become more autonomous and increasingly confident in their ability to apply what they are learning.

Ideally, by the time you reach the extended practice phase of a session, the trainer will be able to fully step back, observe the learners and only provide feedback (where needed) during a group de-brief after the activity.

The good news is that from a performance support perspective, this is a very effective design flow, too. The difference comes in how you think about and design your practice activities.

What a performance-support-focused training session looks like

So, from a learning design perspective, a good flow of practice activities will help the learners to process and embed what they have learnt; the only ‘external’ assistance comes from the trainer’s input during the structured practice stage and any feedback or de-brief after the extended practice stage.

From a performance support perspective, the structured and extended practice activity stages of the flow are the perfect moments to enhance that trainer input and support by introducing and phasing in use of the performance support tools or materials.

This familiarises learners with the tools and how to use them; and positions them as the natural post-training ‘go-to’ which will help to get the job done.

Bringing performance support into the classroom

For example, imagine a training event that is focused on helping learners to plan and prepare annual performance reviews with their team members.

The course design analysis phase highlighted the benefit of providing a simple performance support tool to guide learners through the planning and preparation.

Having learners use the planning tool as part of any practice activity makes the practice much more authentic; and, ensures the learners see the tool as part and parcel of how to apply what they are learning.

Training as the gateway, not the goal

All this highlights clearly that selecting and designing performance support tools or materials must be an integral part of your existing impact and instructional design process. Not an afterthought. The training is vital but only the first stage of a journey to the really important goal: improved workplace outcomes.

Achieving this level of performance support integration requires L&D to get close to the business. To have a good understanding of what desired workplace performance looks like. To be clear about how knowledge and skills covered during a training event are applied in the learners’ workflow, once they are back on the job.

If that sounds a bit challenging, it shouldn't. In reality, performance-support-focused training isn’t a different discipline — it’s simply the next logical step in doing what great L&D has always aimed to do: help people do their jobs more effectively.

Context, they say, is everything. Very true in many areas of life, especially true of instructional design. And just as significant when it comes to performance support. Without carefully considering context (and its close relative integration) you are likely to come unstuck.

I was reminded of this just recently when I re-discovered a wonderful example from Allison Rossett. Her example was written in the 90s, meaning the original tech references are out of date now. Below, you’ll find my (minor) re-working of the example to include current tech references.

But before recounting the example, I want to add a bit of context of my own.

Why context matters 

Ever since the arrival of cognitive learning theories, we’ve recognised the importance of context in learning. Viewed through a purely instructional design lens, understanding how learners actually apply their learning in the workplace, will avoid teaching knowledge and skills in the abstract. A clear understanding of the specific ways in which knowledge and skills are being applied, helps you craft a tailored learning experience that closely reflects the workplace reality of the learners.

When thinking about supporting learners after a learning event, understanding that aspect of context is equally important. After all, the content of the support materials will need to be equally well contextualised and tailored.

But you will also want to focus on actual physical surroundings. Literally, where are they when they need that support. At a desk? At the top of an electricity pylon? In a noisy, crowded space?

That’s a much narrower and much more specific aspect of context. But it’s vital because it helps determine what a usable performance support tool needs to look like. 

A job-aid printed on a piece of paper won’t be very effective at the top of a pylon. Audio support won’t be much help in a noisy, crowded workspace. Granted, these are obvious, simplified examples. But you get the idea.

Consider integration for EVEN greater effectiveness

Within that aspect of context, you also need to consider integration. What do I mean by that? Essentially, it’s about how embedded the support is within the task. Making sure that learners can get to the support they need as quickly and easily as possible, while still taking into account the type of performance support tool that will make most sense in that context.

In some cases, you only need to think about these questions for a minute or two. The answer will stare you in the face. Other times, it’s a bit more nuanced and you might need to work through a few options and possibilities before you reach the best result. Other times, you may end up having to compromise a little bit.

And this is why I like Rossett’s example, so much. It takes an example that everyone understands and readily walks us through many of the considerations connected to context and integration. So, here’s my slightly updated version of her example…

Context and integration example

Imagine that you have to drive to an event on the other side of the town where you live. Your brother works on that side of town and knows it well; but you rarely have cause to go there and only a very limited experience of driving around there.

How might you go about finding your way there?

Look at the city map you keep in your home office. 
Not very integrated and only tailored in the sense that it’s a map of the place you need to drive in.

Go to Google Maps and have it map out the route. Print out the results to have with you in the car.
There is significant tailoring here. You get the exact route that you need. The support is integrated. But dangerously so. Glancing at the print out of the directions while driving is not recommended!

Ask your brother for directions
Tailored. And depending on your memory and the accuracy of his directions, this could work quite well. But not hugely integrated.

Pull out a city map that you keep in your glove box. Look at this before your journey and keep consulting it as you drive.
As with the map in the home office, not very tailored. As with the printed directions, integrated but dangerously so.

Use your sat nav
Lots of tailoring (and adapting). Deeply integrated into the task.

Of course, in this example most people will see immediately the benefits of the sat nav over all other options. This is one of those ‘staring you in the face’ decisions. 

However, just to be a little bit contrarian, I continue to be a sat nav refusenik. I could share multiple examples where I have sat as a passenger and watched people make the dumbest of navigation decisions because they have switched off their navigation brain and rely slavishly on a sat nav master. Another post for another day, I think!

But in conclusion, whatever decisions you make regarding context and integration, the important point to remember is that the more embedded, intuitive and tailored you can make that support solution, the more your learners are likely to see value in it and engage with over and over.

You can read a more personal view of my journey to create an AI-driven performance support tool in my weekly PerformaGo Diary.

If you are an end user of AI it all feels pretty simple. Ask your question or make your request. Get an answer or response. Keep going until you are done.

But what about if you need to start engaging with AI at a slightly more strategic/technical level. “It’s all a bit too complicated for me,” is not an untypical (or unreasonable) response. After all, once you start talking about APIs, prompts, Python or LLMs you can understand why someone’s eyes might glaze over and their brain might shut down.

To the uninitiated, it does start to sound like a bunch of tech gobbledygook dreamt up by a fairly unfriendly bunch of Martians!

(By the way if you are interested in dipping your toe into the more technical aspects of AI, my goal is to unpack the jargon and concepts in an L&D-friendly manner in my PerformaGo Diary and the associated Making Learning Stick blog)

But the good news in all this is that you don’t need to become a part-time programmer to get more than end-user value from AI. Because a lot of what’s going on behind the curtain with AI is as much about design logic as it is about programming. And design logic is something that most people in L&D are already very familiar and comfortable with.

It’s About Design, Not Code

So, what do I mean by design logic and how is it different from something like coding? Well, coding is about telling a system how to execute something, step-by-step. The detailed ‘how to’ instructions that run under the hood. Whereas design logic is about the why and the what.

So, viewed from a strategic or purpose-driven perspective, what makes AI really useful is the ability of those deploying it in a work-based environment to clearly define its intent (the why) and the outcomes you want from it (the what).

Which, of course, is not that different from thinking purposefully about a piece of work-based training.

What This Means for L&D

So, if we move beyond the anxiety many people feel about coding and tech speak, what we actually discover is that AI design and learning design share the same DNA.

Both are about:

• Creating flows and structures so things make sense.
• Filtering out unnecessary complexity.
• Anticipating what people will need, when they’ll need it, and how they’ll best engage with it.

In reality, you are already thinking in systems, flows, and interactions — exactly the same kind of mental models that you need to use when thinking about deploying AI.

So, working more strategically and purposefully with AI isn’t about shifting from instructional designer to techie expert. It’s about applying your existing learning design skills into a slightly different arena.

You don’t need to learn a single line of Python code to work effectively with AI. But thinking like a learning designer will definitely help you get better results from it.

AI Doesn’t Replace Design Thinking — It Rewards It

So, AI isn’t something L&D needs to fear or surrender to. It’s something we can shape using our existing design skills and thinking. Because when you strip away the code, AI’s power depends on the same things that make great learning work: clear purpose, sound structure, and empathy for the learner

That’s why the future of L&D doesn’t belong to the coders — it belongs to the designers.  People who can take what they already know about how people learn and apply it to how intelligent systems perform.

Because design thinking isn’t just part of L&D’s DNA. It’s also our bridge to the future.

Curious how this post took shape?
This post was inspired by a story I shared in my Diary blog — “From Rodeo Drive to AI: The Three Languages Every Custom GPT Needs.”

Spoiler alert. It is a bit more technical in content. But it’s the tale of a California trip that unexpectedly helped me understand how several bits of tech work together to make AI more effective.

You can read that story here

Ask anyone outside of L&D what comes to mind when they think of “learning,” and the answer is almost always the same: classrooms, courses, qualifications.

That’s not surprising. From the time we’re four or five years old, we spend hours of our lives in an education system where the ultimate prize is being good at school. Success is measured in grades, certificates, and diplomas. Society reinforces the message: the more successful you are at completing formal learning, the more valuable you are.

So, it’s no wonder that when business leaders run into a performance problem, their first instinct is to ask L&D for training. Courses feel like the answer because courses are what we’ve all been conditioned to believe in.


The Blind Spot This Creates
The problem is, formal learning isn’t always the lever that moves performance. In fact, often it’s not even close.

Sometimes what’s needed isn’t weeks of training. Sometimes it’s something as simple as a single page of A4 paper — a job aid, a checklist, a quick reference — that gives people exactly what they need, when they need it.

But here’s the counterintuitive part: because these solutions look so simple, they often get dismissed. People inevitably think, “How could something that small make a real difference?”

This bias towards formal learning is a big blind spot in how we approach workplace learning. It’s why L&D so often gets trapped in the order-taking cycle — asked to churn out courses because they’re seen as the “serious” answer, even when simpler, leaner performance support would have more impact.


Why Simplicity Works
The irony is that simplicity is exactly what makes performance support powerful:

•    A well-designed checklist can significantly reduces errors.
•    A short job aid can save hours of wasted time.
•    A contextual nudge can shift behaviour more effectively than any course module.

None of these examples look like the formal learning solutions we’ve been trained to overvalue. But they work; and often, they work better.


Shifting Our Mindset in L&D
If we  want to increase learning impact, we need to challenge the cultural over-perception of formal learning. That doesn’t mean courses don’t matter. It means we stop treating them as the default solution.

It means educating our stakeholders that effectiveness isn’t about how long or formal a learning solution is, but about how well it supports performance. Sometimes that’s a course. Sometimes it’s workplace support. And sometimes it’s a combination of both.


A Closing Thought...
The world has taught us to equate learning with classrooms, exams, and certificates. But in the workplace, those aren’t always what move the needle.

Performance improves when people have the right support at the right time. And sometimes, that support looks a lot less like school — and a lot more like a single sheet of paper.

We’ve all been there. “We need a course on…” or “Can you put together a workshop about…” And before you know it, you’re scoping out slides, activities, and maybe even booking rooms.

It’s the classic “training order-taking” scenario. The problem is, fulfilling training orders doesn’t always lead to better performance. Sometimes it just leads to more training.

The Limits of the Order-Taker Role

When we accept training requests at face value, we miss the bigger question: what’s the real problem we’re trying to solve?

Is performance lagging because people don’t know how to do something? Or is it because the process is broken, the tools are clunky, or expectations are unclear? In many cases, training isn’t the answer at all.

That’s the trap of being an order-taker. It turns us into a busy L&D function, but it doesn’t necessarily make us impactful.

The Shift: From Training to Performance

To increase impact, L&D needs to move from being an order-taker to becoming a performance enabler.

Sometimes, that means asking harder questions up front:

• What’s really getting in the way of performance?
• Is this a skills gap, a motivation gap, or an environmental issue?
• If training is part of the answer, what else needs to be in place for it to work?

It also means widening our toolkit. A course might sometimes be the right solution — but often it’s just one piece of a broader picture.

What Performance Enablement Looks Like

Performance enablement is about making it easier for people to succeed in their work. That might look like:

• A job aid that reduces reliance on memory.
• A checklist that ensures key steps aren’t missed.
• A guided conversation that helps managers coach effectively.
• A performance support tool that provides answers in the flow of work.

These may not look as impressive as a full-blown course, but their impact can be huge. They get used in the moment of need. They reduce errors. They increase confidence. And they show the business that L&D is directly connected to performance outcomes.

Why This Matters Now

People don’t always have time to attend courses, however well designed. They need solutions that fit into their flow of work, not outside it.

That’s why the order-taker mindset feels increasingly out of step. The future belongs to L&D teams who can enable performance: diagnosing real needs, designing for usability, and delivering support that works in the moment.

How This Shapes PerformaGo

This shift is also shaping the design of the AI-powered tool I’m currently working on, called PerformaGo. From the ground up, it’s being built around the principle of performance enablement.

Instead of just asking, “What training can we deliver?”, it encourages us to consider, “What support will make performance easier?”

The goal isn’t to replace courses. It’s to give those of us in L&D a way to extend learning into performance — so the business gets the impact it needs, and learners get the support they want.

A Closing Thought

The order-taker model has kept many in L&D busy for many decades. But if we want to stay relevant, we can’t just take orders. We need to enable performance, too.

That’s the shift PerformaGo is designed to support. If you would like to stay connected and receive regular updates about what we are doing, you can register your interest.

If you prefer a more personal, behind-the-scenes take on all this, check out The PerformaGo Diary.

Looking into the L&D world from the outside, it’s tempting to think that more is better. More slides, more content, more detail. After all, if learners have all the information, they’ll surely be more successful, won’t they?

But anyone who’s worked in L&D knows that is rarely true. It's information or content overwhelm that can discourage learners from implement learning successfully; too much information rather than not enough of it.

Typically, they don’t need more information, but they could surely benefit from more relevant and better-structured information. And that’s where a simple but immensely powerful design principle comes in. The principle of chunking with relevance.

My Early Introduction: Information Mapping

I was first introduced to the principle of chunking with relevance through a methodology called Information Mapping. It’s a structured way of presenting information that relies heavily on breaking content down into smaller, clearly defined units.

With good reason. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that we all (not just learners) process and understand information much more easily when it’s organised into meaningful, focused “chunks.”

Even outside of the framework of a formal methodology like Information Mapping, chunking with relevance is something all of us in L&D should be aiming to apply.

Fundamentally, chunking with relevance helps shift us from a mindset of, ‘what do I need to tell them’, to a more learner-focused approach that considers two things: ‘what do they need to know’ and ‘what will be manageable for them to process’.

 Why Chunking Works: The Cognitive View

The roots of chunking with relevance lie in cognitive psychology. We don’t have unlimited working memory. So, when information is presented in large, unstructured blocks, our brains struggle to process it.

Chunking with relevance reduces that cognitive load by grouping information into smaller, meaningful units. This makes it easier for learners to:

• Understand new material as it’s introduced.
• See the relationships between pieces of content.
• Retain and recall knowledge more successfully.

Chunking with relevance doesn’t guarantee perfect recall, but it does make initial comprehension much, much easier.

A Principle Shared with AI

Interestingly, chunking isn’t just good for us. It’s also vital for AI systems like GPTs.

For example, when you create a knowledge base for a custom GPT, dumping in a 100-page PDF won’t produce great results.

The GPT will work better when the information is broken down into smaller chunks. Each chunk gives the AI clearer context, helping it generate more accurate and relevant responses.

In other words: both humans and machines process information better when it’s structured thoughtfully. It’s a reminder that chunking is a universal design principle, not just a quirk of instructional theory.

 Why This Matters for L&D Now

Learners often face information overload at every turn — in their jobs, in their inboxes, and even in the learning materials we create. If we want our learning interventions to be effective, we can’t add to that overload.

Applying chunking with relevance is one of the simplest ways to reduce the cognitive burden. It helps learners see the signal in the noise. It makes content usable rather than intimidating. And crucially, it demonstrates the value that L&D brings: not by producing more information, but by structuring it in a way that is meaningful and relevant.

And if you’re curious to find out a bit more about the importance of chunking for AI, take a look at this week’s diary post 

Indulge me for a second and let’s try a little thought experiment.

Imagine your colleagues outside of L&D — managers, frontline staff, sales reps, new hires etc — each had their own always-available, always-supportive AI performance coach. No set-up time, no searching for materials, just instant, intelligent support in the moment they need it.

What would you want that coach to do for each of those colleagues?

• Offer reminders on key tasks?

• Help them prepare for or reflect on a difficult conversation or meeting?

• Serve up step-by-step guidance during their first few weeks in a new role?

This isn’t the stuff of fantasy anymore. AI is becoming sophisticated enough to do all of that — and more. But let's not get carried away.

Your answers to the 'learner need' question matter more than any tech solution. Because performance support is about learner need first and tech delivery second — not the other way around.

That's why the PerformaGo AI tool that we are developing, starts with performer needs, not content or clever tech. It help's you to think through: What do learners struggle with most, post-training? What’s hard for them to remember? What gets skipped when things get busy? What barriers exist in the workplace that might be holding them back or discouraging them from applying their new skills?

Then we make it super-easy for you to design lightweight, AI-powered assistants that:

• Provide authentic and accurate help, advice and reminders

• Reference the specific skill sets and content that an individual learner needs to complete a specific task 

• Prompt the learner to plan, complete or reflect, based on real-world application and challenges

This is about providing real-time learning and support that lives in the workplace — not inside the LMS.

So, what would you want an AI coach to help your learners do? 

Interested in finding out more about how PerformaGo could help your learners achieve more successful workplace application? Register your interest at pacificblue.ai -  help us shape the tool and get early access.

Blended learning has been around for a while now. Plenty of organisations claim to use it. Some actually do. Not so many learners claim to like it. But there are some who actually do.

However, in this post we'll focus on the reasons a blended approach might not be popular because this can offer some clues about to how to change or refine the approach.

The objections take a variety of angles:

For some, it's just a fad. A new name for something we've always done. Long before computer technology there were alternatives or complements to classroom teaching. People listened to cassettes, worked through self-study packs, went to seminars or had one-to-one coaching. What's suddenly so new?

Others worry that it's just about choice. It's not about really providing a coherent mix of learning. They point to the duplication of content that happens in many organisations. Just the same old stuff being churned out in a variety of flavours.

What about the work involved? Another common and very valid objection. Aiming for a coherent blend of learning provided through a variety of delivery mediums and instructional techniques is hard. It will take some careful thought and planning. Why bother some might ask, if only a handful of learners fully engage with all the elements.

It's just a marketing ploy. A ploy dreamt up by e-learning vendors and/or management.  A ploy to get more e-learning in through the back door allowing them to slash the classroom training budget. 

It gives e-learning a bad name. The people who develop blended learning would much rather be using classroom training throughout. They deliberately put all the boring bits of the blend into e-learning and save the fun bits for the classroom training.

It's frequently not necessary. Short training programmes or knowledge that can be covered in a day or two simply doesn't require the complexity of a blended approach. To provide it in these circumstances is just overkill.

As you see, the reasons people don't like blended learning are many and varied. And all those reasons, to a greater or lesser extent have validity.

However, overall, they miss a key point, which is this. Certain contexts or certain workplace performance needs or certain types of content are, generally speaking, better suited to certain types of delivery medium.

This isn't always immediately obvious - especially to non-learning and development people. And this can lead to problematic mismatches which cause headaches for learners and instructional designers alike. For example, you spend lots of time and budget creating a piece of e-learning covering some simple product updates, which could easily be covered in a short presentation style webinar. 

In this example, learners will suffer because they are being asked to complete some learning that is less than optimal for their needs. Instructional designers will be frustrated because they have spent precious time and resource that could have been better allocated elsewhere.

There are several factors that we need to consider and that should feed into any decision-making about a delivery medium: how much the learning is used; the complexity of the topic or the skill being learnt; and, how much and how often content changes or needs updating.

Systematically weighing all of these factors up doesn't absolutely guarantee the best decision about which delivery medium is best to use but it significantly increases the chances of getting that decision right.

If you want to know more about how to systematically evaluate the best delivery medium for a given piece of e-learning, take a look at these modules from our impact and instructional design programme.

Many of us in L&D still hesitate about AI. The reasons vary enormously. For example:

• “It’s not good enough yet.”
• “It’s going to steal my job.”
• “I’m not technical enough.”

Last week’s post explored the flaw in that last reason. We saw that most of us in L&D already hold a hidden set of technical skills — more than most of us give ourselves credit for.

This week, I want to dig into that idea a bit more, with a personal story and a reminder of another skill that many of us underestimate.

You Don’t Need to Know the Detail to Benefit

I’ve never been particularly strong in or had much of an interest in maths. Yet here I am, building a software tool. Even more surprising, as part of deepening my understanding of how AI works, I became quite fascinated by the elegant mathematics that sits behind GPTs.

Luckily, I don’t need to do the maths to be in awe of it — or to benefit from what it enables. I can use GPTs without knowing the detail of semantic maps, tokens, or probability models. I simply need to know how to make the best use of what that ‘behind the scenes’ math can produce.

And I think that highlights an interesting and important parallel for us in L&D. We don’t have to understand every last underlying detail of the subject matter we turn into courses for our learners.

Instead, we need to filter out irrelevant complexity and translate what remains into a learning experience that is relevant, authentic, and usable. This is the hidden L&D skill that I'd like to focus on here.

The Hidden Skill: Turning Complexity Into Clarity

Plenty of SMEs know their subject in depth. A few are even instinctively good instructional designers. But a key understanding that separates a good instructional designer from many an SME is perspective. We design for the learner, not for the content. We can take a step back in order to

• see it from the learner’s point of view
• strip away the content clutter
• sequence ideas clearly and logically, and
• build authentic practice out of all that.

This, I believe, is one of our greatest professional assets.

From Learning Design to Performance Support

Not everyone reading this will have designed performance support materials or content before. If you haven’t, the good news is that the skills you use to design an effective course are very similar to the ones you’ll need to design useful performance support in the workplace.

And here’s the even better news: performance support is the perfect way to combine those existing skills with the power of AI.

Just as we filter complexity into clarity for learners during the course design process, we can use AI to help us produce, usable workplace performance support scaffolding.

Put those two forces together — L&D’s eye for learner relevance and AI’s knack for simplification — and you have a winning formula for extending learning into the flow of work.

Harnessing AI without Being a Techie

You don’t need to be a techie to make AI work in L&D. What you need is a recognition of the skills you have already — and a willingness to apply them in new contexts.

The maths that underpins GPTs may remain out of reach for me, but the elegance of what it makes possible is not. The same is true for L&D. Our job isn’t to master the inner workings of AI, but to harness its power in ways that help people learn, perform, and succeed at work.

If you’d like to see the personal story that sparked this reflection, take a look at this week’s post from my PerformaGo diary: In Awe of the Math I’ll Never Do 

As a customer, it’s a generally a pleasant experience going to a restaurant.

We order the food we want. It arrives as specified and we get to enjoy it. And if anything is not quite as we’d like it, we can always have a word with the staff.

But what about if you are the chef and his team. Always busy. Always harassed. Always churning out the same predictable product. Frequently dealing with picky customers who don’t like this or that about what you produce.

In theory, the chef should be very much in control of his or her universe. In practice it may not be like that.

Does that chef’s kitchen sound like your L&D function? If not, I’m delighted to hear it. No need to read on.

If yes, then you are currently facing a very unattractive future. Because the orders are only going to increase in volume and the ‘customers’ are only going to get pickier and more demanding.

If your ‘customers’ are telling you what they want and how they want it, fundamentally they don’t value you. In their heads, you don't know anything much about the best approach to learning for their particular need. So they formulate their own plans and just present them to you for implementation.

There could be various reasons for finding yourself in a situation like this.

Perhaps you've inherited it from a predecessor. Perhaps this is all you've ever known and you just assume this is the way it's done. Perhaps you'd love to do things differently but can't see a way to turn things around.

Whatever the causes, this is a terrible situation to find yourself in as part of a learning and development function. And it doesn't have to be this way. The ship can be turned around.

If you are serious about turning your L&D department into the trusted and respected part of your organisation it deserves to be, take a look at our on-demand webinar on this topic: How to amplify learning: the journey from order-taker to trusted expert.

It’s easy to feel uncomfortable or distracted when yet another new technology comes along.

Fresh concepts, unfamiliar vocabulary, and endless hype can leave us feeling overwhelmed or even anxious. Neuroscientists call this an amygdala response — the part of our brain that processes threats quickly kicks in, making us want to shut down or avoid the source of discomfort.

That reaction is natural. But here’s the problem: it just reinforces a sense of inadequacy. A sense that we’re “behind” or “not technical enough” to keep up. And in the new world of AI unfolding before us that feeling can become overwhelming.

I went to a fairly tech-focused, hands-on event run by Amazon Web Services in Manchester last week. And trust me I had a couple of my own, amygdala-induced, 'shall I just cut and run, now?" moments. But I stuck it out. And I'm glad that I did because the more I persevered, the more I realised something really important

Most of us in L&D are far more tech-savvy than we give ourselves credit for.

Take a step back for a minute and think about all the different tech tools in your orbit and the different ways you might use them:

• Instructional tools → You’ve already learned to use Articulate Storyline, Rise, Captivate, or similar platforms. That’s logic, sequencing, and (if you really get into Storyline in particular) using variables.

• LMS administration → Uploading SCORM files, managing enrolments, troubleshooting access. That’s systems thinking and workflow design.

• Digital collaboration tools → Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Slack, Miro. That’s user experience awareness and adoption strategy.

• Content authoring → Video editing, podcasting, slide design. That’s multimedia fluency and interface design.

These aren’t minor skills. They are the very foundations of working with any new software, regardless of its unfamiliar associated concepts or jargon.

Now granted, not everyone is going to be expert in every one of those areas or those tools. But joining the dots between what you know already and what's emerging is probably not as difficult as you think. The “new” world of AI doesn’t replace what you already know — it connects to it.

As well as my recent experiences last week, I’ve been reminded of this in my wider journey. If you've been reading any of my recent posts on this blog or over on my  new diary blog, you'll know that I'm on a journey to build a performance support app, specifically for L&D.

Moving into software development felt like jumping in at the deep end. But as I began exploring no-code tools and AI, I kept noticing familiar patterns: workflows that echoed the decision-making aspects of Storyline variables and interfaces that weren’t so different from the tools I’ve used for years.

We’re already carrying around a whole bunch of tech-related skills around with us. It's almost like discovering a hidden skillset that we never realised we had.

If you’d like to find out about how I worked through the excitement (and the fear) of stepping into a more tech-focused space, I share some of the behind-the-scenes story in this week’s Diary post.

One of the things that we cover in the e-learning modules in our impact and instructional design training is the difference between user interface design (UID) and learner interface design. I first came across this distinction courtesy of all-round e-learning genius Michael Allen.

Without getting into the weeds, it’s the difference between what you might call the basic high-level global interface settings you provide to your learners – navigation being the most obvious and probably the best example.

As with all things UID, the aim is to make this as simple, consistent and intuitive as possible. However, Allen makes the point that within that global UID it’s likely you’ll have an entirely separate set of design principles that relate specifically to the task-focused practice activities that you are building into your e-learning.

The interesting point here, is that your learner interface design (LID) might not be consistent with your user interface design. In fact, in extreme cases, it might effectively ‘go against’ your UID.

In other words, for the purposes of making your practice activity authentic and a reflection of the real-world situation it is aiming to replicate, if that real-world activity is messy and complicated to complete, that may need to be reflected in the design of the activity. Meaning that from a learner perspective, it might not be simple, consistent and intuitive.

Diving into that in a bit more detail is probably a good topic for another day. Today I really do want to focus on simple, consistent and intuitive UID. Because endless unnecessary clicks can be a quiet killer of learner engagement.

Every extra click — the extra “Next” button, the redundant confirmation screen, the maze-like menu — acts as micro-barrier. It slows learners down, interrupts flow, and chips away at motivation. It may not seem like much, but multiplied across an entire course or module, the hidden cost is high: lost learners, missed outcomes, and frustrated managers.

E-Learning is a particularly problematic delivery medium in this respect; but the hidden cost of too many clicks or actions is not restricted to e-learning.

Performance support provided in a digital/electronic format is no different. If we want support tools to be genuinely used in the flow of work, they need to feel like they fit perfectly in that flow. That means eliminating friction at every step. Every second counts when someone is trying to solve a problem or apply a skill on the job.

The principle is simple: the easier the journey to the required solution, the more likely the learner is to stick with it — and the more likely performance will actually improve.

If you’ve been following my posts recently, you’ll know that I’m very focused on supporting performance in the flow of work just at the moment. So well-contextualised performance support tools built around well-defined and contextualised moments of need are very much top of mind at the moment.

That’s why, as I continue building performance support-focused tools like PerformaGo, one of my guiding principles is simplicity. Because every unnecessary click isn’t just wasted effort — it’s a lost opportunity for impact.

If you are interested in reading a little behind the scenes story of my obsession with UID, you can read the latest entry from my PerformaGo diary here.

I’ve long been interested in technology and its potential to make life easier and more efficient. However, I’m definitely not a pointy-headed tech nerd. Tech jargon user-unfriendly pieces of software drive me insane.

One of my particular pet peeves is the ability of the tech world to make something simple and every day sound much more complicated than it actually is.

One of my favourite toe-curlers is ‘boot up’ or ‘reboot’. For the ordinary folk in the room, ‘start’, ‘switch on’ or ‘restart’ seems like a perfectly reasonable and well-understood alternative.

And it’s amazing how, just when you thought you had heard all the weird and wonderful terms that the tech world can come up with, you discover a new one.

I honestly don’t know if this has come into use recently with the arrival of AI or if it has been around for a while and I’d just never come across it before; but a newly discovered tech term for me is ‘ingest’ or ‘ingestion’.

Now the standard usage, of course, would be in a biological or medical context.

But in the best traditions of tech jargon, this slightly obscure verb/noun combination, which is definitely not used much in everyday speech, has become the standard way to describe how a file or doc has been uploaded and chunked by a GPT’s knowledge base.

Granted, it is a term that most people will more or less understand; and, ‘yes’ there is some logic behind its use. In a biological/medical context, of course, it describes the full consumption/digestion of something into something else; and this is clearly the intent behind the tech usage.

But really? Couldn’t we just say, the files have been uploaded and chunked?

Of course, the annoying thing about all of this jargon is that once it’s established, if you are working in a tech context in which it is used, at the very least you have to make the effort to understand it; and (shudder) eventually you’ll almost certainly find yourself using it.

In short, sometimes you have no choice but to learn to speak the tech ‘lingo.’

If you have read some of my recent posts, you’ll know that I’m in the early stages of building an AI-powered app for L&D called PerformaGo. I’m also keeping a diary-like blog which is documenting the journey ‘behind the scenes.’

I’ve divided the diary into 4 broad sections, one of which is called, ‘Learning to speak API’. It’s all about understanding, unpacking and explaining the tech ‘lingo’ and concepts so they make sense to me and to ordinary readers like you.

So, why not follow along if you are interested. And if you’ve got any particular tech-speak pet-peeves, I’d love to hear from you.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve made reference to what I call Storyline’s ‘secret weapon’. A Storyline ‘advanced’ feature that gets buried away in the background because it’s not very ‘sexy’ nor particularly easy to market. Yet learning to use it can transform the e-learning courses you build.

In case you are wondering? I’m talking about Storyline variables.

However, the purpose of today’s post is not to write extensively about Storyline variables. (If you are interested, I have written about Storyline variables here).

What interests me today is the fact that lots of software/technologies often have some kind of ‘secret weapon’. In other words, a hidden something that a majority of users don’t know about, which is incredibly powerful or useful but somehow never gets the attention it deserves.

Typically, the hidden something is conceptually abstract or technically a bit complex; so, it takes some care and effort to explain it clearly and easily. And it often takes some care and effort by software users to really reap the benefits of it.

Which usually leaves it friendless. Tucked away in an obscure corner of the interface by UX and UI designers. Shunned by the marketers (just not ‘sexy’ enough). Glossed over by the technical writers and technology evangelists.

And you can understand why. In the push to get a piece of software or a technology widely adopted as quickly as possible, the most popular and easiest to use features are, inevitably, going to get the most attention.

And in lots of ways, that is a good, user-centred approach. After all, if the software or technology in question isn’t obviously solving some kind of problem or making it easier or possible to do something that was previously difficult or impossible to do, what’s the point?

But this also misses an important point. Hiding that more difficult-to-explain feature probably results in inferior user output. Returning to the example I opened with, this is absolutely true in the case of Storyline variables. It’s not that you need to use them in every single course that you create. But never using them at all will absolutely reduce the creative potential and the effectiveness of your instructional design.

So, why am I obsessing about all this, at the moment? Well, you may already know that I’m working on a new software tool for L&D called PerformaGo. And the AI technology that this software is designed to help L&D folk like yourself unleash, definitely has its own buried treasures. (Something I’ve been writing about here). In essence, it’s about how you provide specific knowledge to your custom GPT so that you get reliable, accurate output when it’s being used by a learner.

Which means that this particular ‘buried treasure’ is going to play a very significant role in making the PerformaGo tool a success. The question of how that specific knowledge is packaged up and accessed can’t be glossed over, in the hope that some users will find it and work out how to use it. It needs to be front and centre.

And that will be a challenge. Because in some respects this element is a bit abstract. It will definitely require some careful thought around how it is presented and explained to users within the software interface itself and in any related ‘help’ content or software onboarding.

But once you consider the benefits for L&D folk of getting this ‘buried treasure’ front and centre, the challenge of achieving that goal seems small by comparison.

If any of this interests you, or you like the idea of becoming an early adopter or pilot user of PerformaGo or you would just like to find out some more about the tool, why not register your interest.

And you can follow a more ‘behind-the-scenes’ take on the journey to build the PerformaGo software tool in my online diary.

Regardless of the skill, the expertise or the situation, when we compare where we are currently with where we would like to be at some point in the future, the journey from point A to point B often feels pretty daunting.

If you are are looking with dismay at your current e-learning output and thinking about doing something more effective and interesting for your learners, I get that you might feel like you simply don’t have the time to do anything any better.

But here’s the dirty little secret of e-learning development.

It takes pretty much the same amount of time and effort to produce a really dull piece of e-learning as it does to create a really effective and interesting one.

I’d encourage you to re-read that last sentence. Because many people think I have become slightly unhinged when they hear me say something like that.

But here’s the thing that most people don’t realise.

It’s the development bit of e-learning that is the most time consuming. All the pointing and clicking in the authoring tool software is always the biggest and longest part of any project. Typically, I’d say that instructional design represents about 35% of the project time and the development represents the other 65%. 

And here are the two really crucial points. First, the instructional design phase is never that long, anyway. Second, it’s going to take much the same percentage of time, regardless of whether you do it poorly or brilliantly. 

In other words, it’s about how you approach that instructional design phase and the tools and techniques you use while you are in that phase that make the difference, not the total amount of time you spend on it.

Once you’ve made the mindset shift from thinking about your e-learning as predominantly knowledge-presentation to something more task and skills-focused, all you are doing is using different tools and techniques to ensure that the time spent on that instructional design phase produces something much more effective and creative.

Now, a skills and task-focused piece of instructional design might take a little bit longer to implement in your authoring tool. But really not very much. And the payback you will get in terms of improved effectiveness and impact will easily outweigh that small bump in development time. 

So if you think that creating really effective e-learning is out of reach, think again. It’s about designing smarter not longer.

Looking for help with making your instructional design smarter and more effective? Take a look at our impact and instructional design programme.

I think there are many people in an L&D role who spend their days quietly tearing their hair out in frustration. They are what I call the order-takers. They came into the profession, like most of us do, because they like and care about people. They believe that learning can (and should) make a meaningful difference in someone’s professional life and career. Perhaps they experienced this in their own lives and wanted to help others achieve the same.

But somewhere along the way, something went horribly wrong. The job they thought they would be doing wasn’t the job they actually found themselves doing.

They became a harassed (and not very well-respected) internal supplier. Taking orders for courses and workshops others demanded from them. Courses and workshops that satisfy the demands of the order-giver but don’t do much to benefit the learners or the organisation they work in.

Perhaps this describes your situation right now. Or perhaps you’ve been there, done that and escaped to pastures new. Either way, being caught in a cycle of delivering training that doesn’t really solve problems and doesn’t really improve workplace performance is deeply frustrating and ultimately, very demotivating.

I’ve worked with scores of L&D teams over the years and witnessed people caught in the order-taking trap in a variety of sectors and industries. Almost everyone wants change. But how? How can we make the impact and build the influence that we keep saying we want, if just delivering excellent training is not enough.

The truth is, we need to get better at enabling performance. Which means getting much, much closer to our learners’ real moments of need. For example, when someone is:

• facing a new challenge on the job
• making a decision under pressure, or
• trying to apply a skill they should remember, but can’t quite recall

Those are the moments where performance can either bumble along as always or start to excel given the right support. Things like a timely nudge; a helpful prompt; a short, smart answer that moves someone forward, in the flow of work.

I learnt the importance of supporting those moments of need about 15 years ago, during a workshop run by Jim Kirkpatrick. And since then, I’ve spent years deeply frustrated by the fact that the concept is simple; but effective implementation of that concept is not.

However, that frustration is no more. Right now, I’ve finally found a way to do something I’ve wanted to do for years. A way to help L&D professionals design and deliver intelligent, contextual support for those very moments of learner need just described above.

This is not about trying to replace the learning experiences we already do well. It’s about adding a layer of performance-first thinking that gives our work more credibility, more relevance, and yes, more respect.

The future of L&D isn’t about smarter content. It’s about smarter integration with how workplace performance actually flows.

So, this is my new mission. And over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more about the journey that’s got me here — and the tools we’re building to help others add that layer of performance-first thinking.

If any of this resonates and you’ve felt the same frustrations, then I hope you’ll come along with me.

And if you would like a more personal take on this new mission of mine? I’m keeping a ‘behind the scenes’ diary of this new journey. You can follow the story here. 

What I really want, what I’ve always wanted, is for L&D to actually make a difference.
To stop being side-lined. To stop doing good, hard work that goes unrecognised.

L&D professionals genuinely care about helping others grow. We want to have impact. We want to make a difference. But time and again, we share the same frustration:

“We’re doing all this work and the business still doesn’t recognise our effort.”

It’s a painful feeling. One I’ve heard expressed countless times across countless courses and workshops. But over the years, I’ve also had to face up to an uncomfortable truth:

That lack of respect feels unfair but sometimes, it might be the symptom of a deeper problem we haven’t fully acknowledged.

What do I mean by that? Well, people come to us with a ‘training’ need and ask us to create a course. If we see ourselves as the “training people” then, naturally, we want to oblige. So, we design workshops. Build e-learning. Roll out programmes. And then we wait for results - that rarely come.

And the reason those results rarely come? Because, I believe, we’re focusing too much on delivering learning solutions… rather than supporting workplace performance.

It’s not that training we are providing is bad. Far from it. But training alone doesn’t move the needle - especially when people forget most of what they’ve learnt before they get a chance to use it. What actually makes a difference is what happens after the training: in the messy, unpredictable reality of work. The part L&D rarely reaches. The part where support and follow-up could really make a difference.

Now, let’s be honest, the idea of supporting learner performance in the workplace is hardly a new idea. In fact, it’s been around for decades. And we are already very familiar with this kind of ‘just-in-time support’ when using apps and systems.

But the ways and means to make this kind of support simple, scalable, and genuinely useful in other areas of the workplace just hasn’t been there. Until now.

Because the arrival of AI, I believe, completely changes the performance support game.

Of course, AI is being widely used in L&D already. But most of that use is focused on content production. Quicker instructional design. Faster course creation. Automating aspects of e-learning production.

Useful? Absolutely. Transformational? Probably not. Because speeding up training design and production doesn’t fix the core problem. We don’t need more training, created more rapidly. We need smarter workplace support.

We need tools that help people in the flow of their real work, not just when they happen to have time for a course.

We need smarter ways to support problem solving, decision-making, and action-taking
right at the moment of need.

Over the last 12 months, I’ve become a bit obsessed with all this and with thinking about how we can turn this new technology into a practical, performance focused solution. One that L&D teams can deploy easily. One that’s practical, low-friction, and grounded in the work people are actually doing.

So, I’m working on a new approach. A new platform I’m calling PerformaGo that puts performance support at the heart of L&D.

If you’re ready to move beyond training delivery and start designing for real-world results,
join the waitlist and be the first to know more about PerformaGo and when it goes live.

P.S. Curious about the journey behind this shift in focus?
You can follow my personal diary, where I share the highs, lows, and learning curve of building an AI-first product from the ground up.

Read my diary here

Forgive me for asking, but does it? Because so much e-learning I see still falls into this category.

If you’ve answered ‘yes’ (however sheepishly) I’ll guess there’s a good chance that you chose your e-learning authoring software on the basis that it was easy to convert existing PowerPoint presentations into something more ‘interactive’.

This is still a major selling point pushed by many software vendors. Import your PowerPoint slides into our gloriously quick and easy-to-use authoring tool and then add some interactivity to those slides. 

Sounds like a miracle, doesn’t it? But guess what? You still have a PowerPoint presentation. It’s just that now it requires the learners to do endless clicking to get through it. 

Now I know that at this point some people get frustrated with me and go, ‘but Andrew it’s all very well you having a go at me for creating a dull piece of PowerPoint-like e-learning but I haven’t got time to do all that instructional design stuff you think I should be doing.’

Well, let’s take a step back from that for a minute.

First, imagine you are the learner. Seriously, would you willingly click your way through what you’ve just produced? Unless you suffer from desperately low self-esteem and think it’s your lot in life to be miserable, then the answer must surely be ‘No’.

Second, this is a bit like saying, ‘I’m a chef but I don't have time to do proper, authentic cooking. I rely entirely on pre-packaged food and a microwave. So if you come and eat here, you’ll just have to put up with second-rate food’.

Bet you wouldn’t willingly book a table at that restaurant, would you?

Finally, do you really expect your colleagues and your learners to respect your skills and professionalism if this is the best you can do? 

Ready to take stock of your e-learning and see if there's some room for improvement? Start with our Discover Your E-Learning Impact Scorecard. It only takes a couple of minutes to complete and you get some rapid feedback on your current e-learning design strengths and the areas that could do with some TLC.

I don’t have direct, hands-on experience with a huge number of Learning Management Systems but every single client we work with either has one in place or is in the process of acquiring one. And I’ve yet to hear a gushing recommendation about a single vendor or their system.

What I do have direct experience of is numerous complaints about value for money, lack of transparency from vendors during the sales process and slow responses to fixing problems or getting customisation completed.

Put less delicately, our clients frequently tell us that vendors tend to promise the earth, fail to deliver adequately on what they have promised, provide support in their own sweet time and charge an arm and a leg for the privilege.

I usually hear all this in the context of, ‘can you recommend a good LMS because ours is terrible?’ I've considered a whole host of LMS options over the years sometimes for use by Pacific Blue and sometimes just to keep abreast of the market.

But I’m never willing to ‘go there’ when a client asks for a specific recommendation because there are so many possible variables involved in how someone might use their LMS that it's impossible to say, 'use that one' without doing a deep dive into their current and potential future needs.

Where people have only a limited initial need, I have in the past, suggested starting with a basic, cheap option to see how that works. It's often the case that only when you actually start using a system like this are you able to clearly identify what you need and what you don't need. This approach (if feasible) is a great way to test the water.

But overall, I do marvel at the LMS market. It seems to me it’s hugely overcrowded with lots of look-alike products. 

Which suggests to me that this is a market ripe for disruption.

In recent years, there's a been a smoke and mirrors exercise within the industry, as some vendors have morphed to a magical new product called LRS. If the old LMS doesn't quite fit the bill, we've come up with a marvellous new variation which you'll just love. 

While the possibility of much more granular tracking of learning activity is, on the face of it, quite appealing, this doesn't seem to be something that is really setting L&D on fire - or at least, not the L&D folk I talk to.

So if there are any tech entrepreneurs out there, looking for a new opportunity, this could be it.

And if anyone does use a system that they would love to shout about from the rooftops, I'd love to hear from you.

This, I believe, is the elephant in the room for most people in a learning and development role. The one thing people will sometimes pay lip service to. But the one thing they never really want to think about beyond an end of course ‘happy sheet’.

You know what I’m talking about. It’s the question of quantifying in some form, the impact and effectiveness of the training we design and deliver.

We have a real hard time getting clients to engage with this when we are talking to them about a potential development project. 

After delivering some in-house instructional design, we even encounter resistance to taking part in our own light-touch follow-up programme, which helps evaluate the usefulness of what we deliver. It takes very little time to participate. It is completely free of charge. It is almost always helpful for those who do take part. Yet almost no-one wants to.

A couple of thoughts. If you think evaluating impact tis only about, boiling success down to the last pound or penny of return on investment, I get why you might be very hesitant. There are loads of factors outside learning and development's direct control that can have an impact on the effectiveness of the training provided.

So you could end up on the awards podium (or in the dog-house) when you really don’t deserve to be, just because under a certain set of circumstances, the numbers came out good (or bad).

That is a bit like walking along the high wire with no safety net below. Understandably, not many people are up for that. 

But thinking about impact and effectiveness doesn’t have to be like that. The alternative starting point is that we are not in the business of instantly achieving a prized metric but we are there to support continuous improvement, over the longer term.

This, it seems to me, is a more honest approach and a more achievable one. It acknowledges from the start that a single ‘dose’ of training almost certainly won’t cure any performance problem or performance need.

And it recognises that a more consistent course of ‘treatment’ over a period of time is what likely will. It also recognises that not all ‘patients’ are equal and some might need a longer course of ‘treatment’ than others.

What I’m talking about is a well-designed approach to achieving impact, which starts with a training intervention, follows up after that with learners to see what’s working and what’s not, provides short, simple follow-up interventions, as required and gradually course adjusts to help achieve a good outcome both with current and future learners.

It doesn’t have the big bang impact of a large ROI number but it almost certainly guarantees visible performance improvements over time and will most definitely raise your profile and the respect for learning and development across the organisation.

In reality, it’s not hugely difficult to set up and build in this kind of approach at the beginning of a project. So it begs the question, what’s holding us back?

Want to start taking a holistic approach to looking at the impact and effectiveness of the learning you design and deliver within your organisation? Take a look at the programme we offer.

We've lived with a multitude of technologies for learning for decades now. 

Each new technology that comes along is hailed as the next 'big thing', full of promise. We mostly get sucked in to the hype. Enthusiasm is high. Vast amounts of money are spent on said new technology. Yet the early promise is rarely fulfilled.

Which begs the question, 'Why?' The problem, I believe, lies with us and not the technology.

We lose sight of the fact that a particular technology is never the complete answer to improving the quality of learning. It is (and always will be) just another means to deliver it.

But because technology adds a layer of complexity to the learning design process, we tend to get blinded by the mechanics of using the technology and focus too much on that.

An example  would be someone thinking, "If I get really good at using Storyline, I'll be able to create fantastic e-learning". Sad to say, being really good at using Storyline only results in being really good at using Storyline. That is to say, mastery of lots of features. The ability to use those features quickly and efficiently. The ability to troubleshoot and solve problems when the features don't work as expected.

All of these skills are fantastic to have and would be an asset in any learning and development team. But, unfortunately, mastery of the technology alone does not guarantee an effective piece of learning. 

As well as being really good at using the technology, you need to be smart about how you apply your learning design when using a particular technology.

And here's the conundrum. People who are really good at learning design are often not so hot (or interested in) the technology. Those who are really good with the technology tend not to be so talented with the learning design. Finding someone who is equally talented in both areas is rare. If you have such a person in your team, do whatever you can to hold on to them.

In the end, it'll be the smart application of your learning design that makes the difference between a run-of-the mill piece learning and a really impactful, effective one. So if you don't have a tech and design genius all rolled into one, you'll really need to find ways of getting closer collaboration and understanding between the design and the tech experts.

Want to see how you are faring with your e-learning technology and design? A great place to start is our Discover Your E-Learning Impact Scorecard. It only takes a couple of minutes to complete and you'll get some personalised feedback almost instantly.

When it comes to deciding about their own learning, do learners always know best?

It pains me to say this, but there's quite a bit of research evidence to suggest that the honest answer would be 'quite a lot of the time, not'.

This gives us L&D folk quite the dilemma.

After all, we want the best for our learners. We don't want to appear like rigid authoritarians. Yet we also know that our suggestions or ideas can appear counter-intuitive to some learners and project sponsors.

How often have you been asked to provide a specific type of learning solution to a group of learners, only to discover that once you start digging, the requested solution is entirely unsuitable. And then meet significant resistance to changing the original request.

Often, the learners (or those requesting learning on their behalf) are trapped by their own limited experience of prior learning. If all they know, for example, is knowledge presentation e-learning and they are okay with this and haven't experienced any other type of e-learning, they will probably just request what's familiar and comfortable. Even though this might get poor outcomes or results.

If, as another example, they have been told that on-demand videos are the new big thing in learning and that they'll get massively better results from using this medium, they will probably come to you asking for a video solution, utterly convinced this is what will work for them.

All of this, I think, relates to problems with respect and perception. In many organisations, the learning and development function is viewed (rightly or wrongly) as not very effective. This means that people in the wider business don't especially value or respect the learning expertise that may be available.

They look elsewhere for advice, work up their own ideas which are then presented to learning and development as a fait accompli.

This can feel very frustrating and demoralising. After all, it's very unlikely that the very same people would pitch up in the marketing department, telling them how they wanted to see marketing campaigns and materials designed and executed.

The key, ultimately, is what should we do as learning and development folk to deal with this dilemma. First, we need to take a long hard look at ourselves. Are we as expert and professional as we could be? Are we sometimes stumbling along and just getting by? 

If you feel harassed and put upon, it's tempting to blame someone else: lack of resources, unrealistic timelines, a culture that is hostile to formal learning.

All of these factors could be true. But unless we are prepared to think about how to start shifting perceptions and how to keep constantly evolving our skills and expertise, this particular L&D dilemma will not be resolved.

Feeling frustrated and demoralised because your L&D expertise and skills are not valued or trusted? Check out our on-demand webinar on this topic: How to amplify learning impact: the journey from order-taker to trusted expert.

I can’t believe people are still doing this! Forgive the rant below but sometimes it’s good to let off a bit of steam!

I’m talking about some of the basic things people still do (but really shouldn't) when creating e-learning or putting together PowerPoint slides. Here's the first of my top three gripes:

Simultaneous text and audio on an e-learning screen.

Why is this problematic for learners? They’ll be able to read the text faster than the ‘voice’ can read it out loud, so it’s incredibly frustrating for learners. Do they read the text on screen and try to ignore the audio? Or do they sit and listen to the audio and avert their eyes from the screen!

If you want to use a voice, then make whatever is on the screen different but complementary to the audio. By the way, you see this technique on the TV news and documentaries pretty much everyday of the week.

If accessibility provision requires the need for both audio and text versions of the same content, then use subtitles and make sure the audio and/or subtitles can be turned on or off to suit individual requirements.

My second gripe. Walls of words or an endless list of bullet points on PowerPoint slides, which the presenter then proceeds to read out loud. This is really the face-to-face version of the e-learning problem just outlined above.

Use graphics with short labels, to outline the points you want to talk about on each slide. Or a simple flow diagram if you are explaining a process or procedure.

My third and final gripe. Too much of everything on a screen or slide.

Most people crowd their PowerPoint slides or e-learning screens with too much stuff! Even if you are following the suggestions outlined above, most of the time you really want to pare down what you are introducing on any given slide/screen.

If you are creating e-learning that looks like a set of glorified PowerPoint slides, our instructional design training could help break you out of that cycle.

If you’ve been involved in L&D for any length of time, you’ll almost certainly have had one of those conversations with a new convert to e-learning.

Given how long the medium has been knocking around now, it always surprises me that there are candidates still available to be newly converted. But there are.

Their fresh-faced enthusiasm is usually because they’ve been sold on a couple of benefits: speed of development and anytime, any device delivery. On the first of those two points, authoring tool vendors tend to be shockers when in marketing mode. they have to sell their wares, so you can see why they focus on speed as a benefit of buying their product.

But really, this is so untrue. If you are creating anything in an e-learning authoring tool that is going to be useful or worthwhile, it will always take you a significant chunk of time.

If the fresh-face converts have bean-counter tendencies, they my also be licking their lips at the prospect of saving vast amounts of money by going down the e-learning path. Forgive me for sitting in the corner, laughing cynically whenever I hear that one. 

The old saying, “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is”, springs to mind here.

So much for the expectation. What about the reality?

It’s definitely possible (and desirable) to be smart about your e-learning design and development approaches and processes. But as just noted above, the development side is never as fast and easy as the technology providers would have you believe.

As for the anytime, any device mantra, the “build it and they will come” principle rarely applies.

If you are pushing out boring, knowledge-heavy, ‘PowerPoint on steroids’ type courses, then it's quite likely that only compulsion will drive learner uptake. As John Medina rightly points out in his book ‘Brain Rules’, our brains don’t pay much attention to 'boring'.

If you would like to escape the grind of churning out boring e-learning, then start by taking stock of your current situation with our Discover Your E-Learning Impact Scorecard. It only takes a couple of minutes to complete and you'll get personalised feedback almost instantly.

This is something that plays out day-in-day-out in businesses everywhere. And something I've written about time and time again. You might think I’m referring to a boardroom battle that spills blood on the corporate carpet. But I’m not.

This is the struggle between the holder of knowledge and skills (usually an SME) and the person or team tasked with turning that knowledge and those skills into a piece of learning.

It’s fairly typical to find that SMEs want to stuff everything they can think of into the course. It's perfectly  natural. When you are an expert in a particular area you, understandably, think that you should provide newbies with as much information as possible.

In reality, this is rarely helpful. Learners generally need a well-crafted subset of that knowledge, not the whole lot. And if they do need the whole lot, it will surely need to be carefully broken down into manageable chunks.

With a bit of luck, the learning and development team or person will be able to push back and aim to focus on relevance for learners.

In the best situations, learning and development will have positioned themselves as the true learning experts and have no problems when asserting that they are the ones best placed to make the final decisions about the scope of a given course.

In the very worst cases, learning and development are effectively doormats, pushed around by the knowledge and skills holders, bending to their every whim and desire. They have truly become powerless order takers.

My experience working with a wide range of learning and development folk over a good few years now, is that most people find themselves somewhere in the middle on this issue. Not necessarily having total say but certainly able to push back against the worst excesses of SME overload.

If you typically don't have any control in the power struggle just described, you need to work on getting some of that control back.

If you are relatively new to working with SMEs and the whole analysis and planning piece that needs to go on in the early stages of an instructional design project, check out our on-demand webinar: How to embrace your inner instructional 'architect' for increased design success. 

It's a while ago now since most bank transfers (finally) started happening via the faster payments system. We've all got used to the benefit of having money arrive quickly and efficiently into our accounts.

At the time, the banks were boasting about this great leap forward. However, I had a wry smile on my face. That's because when I worked in Sweden for a couple of years at the start of my working life, instant transfers (and instant cheque clearing) was the norm.

At the time I was amazed. Not only by the advanced technology, but by the fact that a supposedly advanced economy like Britain had no such system. Whenever I mentioned this amazing Swedish system to anyone back in Britain they used to furrow their brows and give me a strange look. I'm sure most people thought I was making it up.

You have quite likely had the experience of going abroad on business or for a holiday and coming across a system, process product, gadget or some way of doing things that is so simple and appealing that you can't understand why the whole world doesn't adopt it.

And yet the whole world doesn't. Or if it does it takes forever to catch up - many years in the case of instant bank transfers.

It always leaves me wondering why. Numerous factors surely come into play: ignorance, apathy, vested interests, aversion to change or the risk involved with change. These reasons are not why I'm writing this today.

To me, the important point is this. There is almost always a better way of doing things than the accepted conventional wisdom. This is true in most aspects of life - including the world of learning and development. 

Sometimes it's something as simple as taking a step back and tweaking things a bit. Other times it's seeking out the ignored genius idea that most of the world genuinely doesn't know about but when finally discovered and implemented makes a phenomenal impact.

In the world of learning and development, how much of what we do could be done better? How much of our thinking is still based on outdated theories of learning and knowledge acquisition? How often do we really seek out a radical alternative when the old ways of thinking are clearly no longer working?

Not often enough, I fear. It's all too easy to keep on keeping on and too often the sheer burden of managing the day job stops us from taking a vital step back and finding time to seek out the alternative approaches. But make that time, we really should.

In part 1, I wrote about Rob Brinkerhoff's work in looking at approach to learning design that places focus on two key areas that are often overlooked or not given sufficient attention. First, performance support. Second, the idea of continuously improving the learning and support on offer, based on the evidence of its current success or failure. This second area is often referred to as 'kaizen'.

As I mentioned in the previous post, 'kaizen' was developed by Japanese manufacturers to gradually increase the quality of products. So, is there any reason why 'kaizen' shouldn't be applicable to L&D? In theory, not.

In practice, though, there are still barriers to overcome. And those barriers are usually not erected by L&D but come as part of an organisation's wider culture that has likely built up over a number of years. Here are some of the most common cultural traits that work against the adoption of 'kaizen'.

First, if your organisation sees failure as a pure negative and can only entertain the idea of 100% right first time, every time, then that culture will almost certainly struggle with 'kaizen'. With this mindset, people are driven by fear of being punished or berated when things go wrong. Notice the absence of 'if' in that last sentence because something always goes wrong at some point.

Second, living in fear of failure is going to establish another barrier to implementing 'kaizen': not admitting to shortcomings in the first place, And frankly, if you know you are going to get a 'kicking' for any mistake you make, why would you own up to one. Far easier to bury the mistake or shift the blame elsewhere. But if no-one can admit to shortcomings or failure, will struggle to adopt a continuous improvement mindset.

Third, if failure is completely unacceptable and punishment for failure must be meted out, then it's likely that 'more training' might be one of the punishments. In this mindset, training is a pill to be swallowed to 'cure' the failure. Everyone must take the pill. The pill must be perfect. And if the pill fails to cure, then it must be the fault of the pill makers (i.e. L&D).

Finally, it's also likely that a 'no room for failure' culture will focus on presentation of knowledge rather than successful application of knowledge. If something isn't being done properly, drum the knowledge into heads a bit longer and a bit harder. Again, when that doesn't work, blame L&D.

This can all feel a bit depressing. But just like 'kaizen' itself, the introduction of 'kaizen' frequently needs to be a gradual, evolutionary process. Start small with a project sponsor who is open to doing things a bit differently. Assess the results and learn from those results. Build on the success and refine and revise what didn't work.

Before you know it, you'll be a master of 'kaizen' and the developer of much more successful learning.

Don't forget that if you are interested in finding out more about this alternative approach to designing and delivering learning, you can take a look at our on-demand webinar How to Amplify Learning Impact - it's about making the journey from learning and development order-taker to valued and trusted expert.

Over recent years, the term 'project fear' is a term we've become familiar with. People first started to use the term in the run up to the EU referendum in 2016 and it has been re-used and re-hashed in various ways ever since.

So here’s a question that at first sight might seem a bit off the wall. Can anything about 'project fear' help us to design better learning? Crazy as it might seem, I believe so. Because 'project fear' should remind us of a very important aspect of learning and instructional design that’s too often overlooked. The emotional state of our learners.

'Project fear' works on a very simple premise: the more fearful of something you make people, the more likely they are to comply with your wishes. In the case of the EU referendum campaign, 'project fear' also leveraged peoples' general dislike of change. The scarier or more difficult you make change seem, the thinking went, the more likely people would be to resist it.

Of course, as the authors of that particular example of 'project fear' discovered, the danger is that you over-egg the pudding. The scariness you are promoting starts to look unbelievable and ends up having the exact opposite of the effect you hoped to achieve.

But the basic premise behind 'project fear' is accurate. In general, none of us much like change and depending on the nature of the change, we can be fearful of it. If that change seems like it involves more effort, more work or disruption to a comfortable routine, many people will resist.

And it’s this underlying response to change which is so important to us as instructional designers and trainers. Because in a work-based setting, training is often the conduit used to ask us or to persuade us to start doing things differently, to adjust our behaviour or to do things we have never done before.

If you are creating work-based learning, it is almost certain that you will be creating courses that are preparing learners for a significant change in their job role or its associated performance.

Because it involves change, your learners may well be less than thrilled about the prospect. In the days or weeks before taking your learning, any number of negative thoughts could have rushed through their heads about what lies ahead.

By the time they log-in to start the piece of e-learning you have created or walk through the training room door to attend a classroom course you have designed, it’s quite likely they will not be in a frame of mind to think positively about change.

If your learners are totally in the wrong frame of mind when they start your learning, it has some significant winning of hearts and minds to achieve before it can even start to increase or improve your learners knowledge and skills.

You may not have heard of Rob Brinkerhoff but you really should have. ( You can google him, naturally). His main focus is on moving away from solving workplace performance issues through a single 'hit' of training.

Brinkerhoff is interesting because he's both a practitioner and a researcher. His focus has primarily been about looking at how best to follow up with and support learners after training to improve overall learning outcomes.

You may not be surprised to hear that placing less emphasis on a single event and more on following up and supporting learners after an event sees massive improvements in workplace performance and application of learning.

You'll notice there are two parts to this. First, having actual support in place (more on this is a minute). Second, doing some follow-up with a sample of learners to see how they are getting on, what's working and what's not. The important point being that the intelligence gathered from this follow-up is used to evolve the learning event and the support so it's more effective still for the next group of learners.

It's a sort of 'kaizen' for learning and development. In case you are not familiar with 'kaizen', it's a concept that started life in Japanese manufacturing as a method to continuously improve the quality of a product.

In a learning and development context, this approach feels problematic. Will you get people not involved with training to give of their time and expertise willingly? Possibly not, or only up to a point.

So, while you might not get non-L&D people to coach and mentor their colleagues repeatedly, there are some relatively simple things that they might be willing to once.

• You might persuade them to record a video talking about their expertise. You can edit and package this up into bite-sized nuggets of learning.
• You might get people to write a short blog post or contribute to a wiki that you can direct learners to at a pre-determined point after their training. 
• You might get people to record a brief webinar where they walk learners through a worked example of a complex task or skill-based scenario.

Perhaps you can begin to see the picture.

It's about being a bit smart and savvy in the ways you provide that follow-on learner support, using technology to help create the kind of success scenario Rob Brinkenhoff's research highlights.

Interested in finding out more about this alternative approach to designing and delivering learning? Take a look at our on-demand webinar How to Amplify Learning Impact - it's about making the journey from learning and development order-taker to valued and trusted expert.

Early on in an instructional design training course or programme, one of the topics on the agenda might be different methods for and approaches to instructional design.

There are numerous approaches and design methods or theories that you could consider. But in our constantly evolving understanding of how people learn and what might work best to help them learn, three of the more significant approaches to have emerged are: behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism.  I'm not going to go into an explanation of each of them here.

The thing that I want to highlight is commonality and overlap. Although these theories are frequently presented as very distinct, with little common ground between them, the more you look in detail at each of them, the more you realise there is a good deal of overlap between them. 

For starters, they all share a common purpose: finding ways to engage learners and, thus, help them learn more effectively.

They share many other characteristics, too.  All three approaches accept that practice is critical to successful learning. They may have different views on what that practice should look like but the importance of practice is central to all of them.

None of them would argue with giving learners positive reinforcement or rewards for correct answers (although cognitivists and constructivists would argue this alone is not enough). 

Both cognitivists and constructivists believe context makes a massive impact on the effectiveness of learning. Both believe the way an individual models or constructs his/her understanding of something is unique. The list could go on.

So instead of thinking about a particular theory as the 'best' or only way to apply instructional design, perhaps it would be better to strive for a success-based approach to instructional design which incorporates elements of all these theories.

This way, rather than obsessing about the effectiveness of a specific theory or approach, you can put the needs and success of your learner at the heart of what you do and apply a variety of methods from all of the theories as and when they are appropriate to the specific needs of your learners.

Creating learning is all about achieving successful outcomes for your learners. A pragmatic,  pick and mix approach to applying instructional design approaches will almost certainly lead to a better result for your learners than dogmatically applying a single one.

You don't need to be a campaigner or activist to be passionate about something. We can all feel our pulse quicken, our emotions rise when we get chance to talk or write about a topic that engages us totally.

And it’s usually because either we know lots about this topic or something we are directly involved with in our working or private lives. Whatever this topic is, we can talk about it for hours without getting bored. We can tell anyone willing to listen about every last detail. In that sense, we are all subject matter experts in something.

And as learning and development professionals it's worth remembering our own passion for a particular subject matter when analysing and gathering someone else's subject matter expertise.

Aside from being more empathetic to a talkative SME sat in front of us, is there anything else we can do to make our time with them more productive? 

There are four areas it's worth considering when gathering content from SMEs. The greater the quantity of content you need to gather, the more you are likely to want to formalise the approaches below.

Ownership

Before any information gathering even happens, you need to take ownership of the process. This may involve becoming more assertive than normal: be quite specific about how you want the process to unfold, including the number of meetings you'll need, how long each meeting should be and how much time you'll need between meetings for reviewing and feedback.

Planning

Tempting as it might be to go into your early meetings knowing nothing, better to do research to familiarise yourself with the subject matter area. Spend time creating a basic project plan. Clearly define your and their roles in the whole process. Formally identify the risks of not getting the required information in a timely fashion and communicate this to the project sponsor.

Connecting

Your initial research can pay dividends once you start interacting with your SME. Exhibiting some knowledge of his/her topic can help build rapport and, more important, establish your credibility. Earn trust by emphasising the confidentiality of your information gathering sessions and the promise of a review of content before making it more widely available.

As the content gathering progresses, aim to establish points of shared interest both within the subject matter area and outside. Most people appreciate a little interest in their life outside work.

Focusing

Set an agenda in advance of the meeting clearly stating goals and expectations.

During your content gathering sessions, regularly paraphrase, clarify and summarise what you have covered; use closed questioning techniques if your SME has a tendency to go off on tangents. After the session, collate the content into a structured document you can share with the SME for review and feedback.

It's easy to dismiss some of the subject matter experts we deal with in our professional capacity as out of control windbags who want to bore us and our learners with every last detail of their knowledge.

That may be true. But let's not forget, given the right topic and the opportunity, many of us can happily do the same.

So with a bit empathy and some detailed preparation and worked before, during and after your content gathering, the analysis phase of your project need not be an out of control nightmare.

Before you start working on your next project, check out our Analysis and Planning modules for help on dealing with subject matter experts and their content.

Face-to-face, e-learning, mobile learning, web-based classes. Which is best? Is there a definitive answer?

One of my favourite bits of research into learning goes back to 1947. It was conducted by Hall and Cushing for the US Army. 

There was a feeling at the time that film was the 'big new thing' and that this would surely teach people better than classroom instruction. So the army set up some research to find out. 

They set up a very thorough comparative study using film for one group of students and classroom instruction for another and tested both groups at the end. The results? No difference in learning between the two groups! 

Numerous studies since have shown that it's really not about one medium being better than another it's typically all about three things: modes, methods and instructional design. Get these right and the learning happens, regardless of the delivery medium. 

Here's the briefest of explanations of each of those three elements:

Modes 

Whatever your medium, you will use some combination of text, audio and visuals - either still or animated. These are your communication modes. There's been plenty of research done on how best to use each of these modes to promote learning. 

Methods 

These are the examples and practice activities that lead to learning. If well-crafted and thought through, they will support the mental processing learners need to do to help embed new information and skills effectively. 

Instructional design 

This really is the blueprint for your learning that captures the sequence and type of content and activities that will make up the finished course or module. 

So on the path to building expertise through effective learning, it's not so much the medium, but the best mix of modes, methods and design that will help you achieve your goals and outcomes.

Getting started with designing courses or feel like you need to strengthen your underpinning knowledge about all this? Our free ID Essentials Checklist scorecard is a great starting point.

Autumn is often our busiest period. The time of the year when people are most likely to decide to take some training or embark on a new project to develop a learning programme or course.

And naturally, starting a development project or a training course means thinking about objectives and outcomes. So this week, I wanted to share a personal story with you that vividly highlights the importance of getting this kind of stuff right.

It's a cold February day. I'm in a hotel in Bournemouth running a 5-day open (public) course for a fairly well-known training provider. It's morning break and I've locked myself in a cubicle in the gent's toilet.

Do I need to use the facilities? Actually, no. Am I having a nervous breakdown? Thankfully, not. So why the heck am I there? Easy. To be absolutely sure of having a delegate-free 20 minutes! (I did take a newspaper with me to avoid getting bored - this is a pre-smart phone era story, I'm sure you will have realised). 

Before I go any further, I should point out, the delegates would have had no idea I was so desperate to escape them.

So how, you may well ask, did it get to this? Well we need to go back to Monday morning. Andrew to mission control: we have a problem. Unfortunately, mission control didn't give a stuff. 

By break time on Monday morning it was quite clear half the delegates were entirely unsuited for the course. Being a smart bunch of people, they had realised this, too. Hence the call to mission control. 

The solution seemed obvious to me. Refund of money or offer of a place on an alternative course at a later date. Problem solved. Mission control was having none of it. No refund. No transfer. Stick with the programme as advertised. Good luck…

As you can imagine, not a great start to any training week.

A couple of delegates left, vowing to fight the battle with mission control from back at the office. But most stayed. 

Did I stick with the programme as advertised. Of course not, how could I. Did I have one of the worst weeks of my training life? Without doubt. Every spare minute was frantically spent devising exercises and activities, typing up worksheets, trying to think of ways to effectively run two courses in one. And this was when internet resources were nothing like as plentiful as now.

Every session was a struggle, trying hard to manage a demanding group of people with very disparate needs.

So you can see the attraction of the toilet cubicle by the time the course was almost done (we finished at lunchtime on the Friday).

This example, of course, was about a problem with the sales people. Not knowing (or properly understanding) the course objectives and the content, resulting in the wrong people to the wrong course. 

But let's be honest, it's a problem that could just as easily be caused by poor audience and content analysis, unclear or unstated objectives or just not getting to the heart of why a piece of training is needed in the first place.

We're probably all guilty of seeing planning and analysis as a bit boring, something we want to get done as quickly as possible, so we get on to the interesting bits. But this experience seared into my little brain, how utterly important it is to get the early stages of the training development process right and that it is worth taking the time to do this.

If planning and analysis is one of your current challenges (or you have challenges in other aspects of developing training for the classroom or online mediums) then take a look at  our instructional design training programme. Modular. Highly flexible. Continually updated. ITOL Accredited. Lots of options and choice.

You know the old adage. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.

Brutal? You bet. Eight short words that devastate. Teaching, training, learning (whatever you call it) is a waste of space. Anyone involved in it, is a second-rate loser.

Unfortunately, those eight short words contain some truth. Look at secondary education. Why are good schools so over-subscribed? Because there are too many failing ones, chock full of teachers who are - well, not very effective.

Higher education is not that different. It may be overflowing with clever people. But they are often clueless about how to transfer their knowledge and skills effectively.

And look at the world of work. Plenty of dreadful second-rate training going on there - frequently delivered by subject matter experts who know their stuff - but have no idea how to teach it effectively.

Of course, it’s not all bad. But far too much of it is. And there’s a theme. Lots of clever people. Mostly eager to share their knowledge and skills. Unclear about how to do it effectively. They use a broken model, developed a long time ago, for a very different world.

It’s a model which should’ve been consigned to the rubbish heap long ago. But it’s a model that just doesn’t seem to die. What am I talking about? Good old chalk and talk. Or perhaps more accurately in the 21st century, PowerPoint and talk.

Why this model persists is a mystery. We know more about how to transfer knowledge and skills effectively than we ever did. We have the technology to make this happen more quickly and effectively than ever before. Yet we still struggle along using 19th century methods of teaching and learning.

Here's the real problem. Subject matter experts thinking teaching is about helping people know lots of stuff. Learners usually need to learn to do lots of stuff. And that provides a clue to the problem. Because there's a huge mismatch between the focus of most learning events: all about knowing; and the needs of the learners: more about doing.

And the key to re-aligning that mismatch? Meaningful practice.

Which raises the question, why is meaningful practice so absent from so much learning? Because it's hard to do well, if you don't know how. Faced with the challenge, subject matter experts in particular tend to side-step the problem completely. Much easier to throw a bunch of PowerPoint slides together and talk about them - at length.

And why do lots of people involved with training find it hard to create meaningful practice? Because they are largely unaware of instructional design. The very guidelines, principles and techniques that would help them to create learning that has meaningful practice at its heart.

If teaching or training is something you’re about to get involved with and you were thinking about using the PowerPoint and talk model; or, if you’ve been ‘PowerPoint and talking’ for a while now, there is an alternative way ahead.


Stuck in a PowerPoint and talk rut? Guide yourself towards a better way of transferring knowledge and skills by taking our Instructional Design Essentials Scorecard. Help turn your teaching, training or learning into something your learners look forward to, because they know it works.

When developing learning materials, most instructional designers and trainers rarely give much thought to how they use visuals and graphics. Typically, they just add them as a way to liven up dull looking text. 

In contrast, as most graphic designers know well, there is an entire vocabulary and language connected with the use of visuals. This is something rarely included as part of conventional instructional design training. A pity, because it is a language which instructional designers and trainers would get a great deal of benefit from knowing.

If you are interested in learning more about the language of visuals, as good a starting point as any is an understanding of the five instructional functions for graphics. These functional categories are as follows:

Decorative visuals: used to make instruction more appealing and motivating. They typically do not have a strong association with the instructional content. Interestingly, in a study of sixth grade science textbooks in the US, Richard Mayer found that over 85% of graphics fell into the decorative category.

This statistic seems to support the view expressed in the opening of this article - that many instructional designers (and text book publishers) pay little attention to the significance of visuals and graphics. In the light of this finding, it’s probably fair to say that decorative graphics should be used with caution.

Representative visuals: used to make information more concrete. They convey information quickly and easily, reducing the need for lengthy textual explanation.

Organisational visuals: help learners understand the structure, sequence and hierarchy of information and help people integrate that into their existing knowledge. Examples include charts, graphs and displays that help people see relationships between elements.

Interpretive visuals: used to help learners understand difficult and ambiguous or abstract content. In general, they help make information more comprehensible. Examples include models of systems and diagrams of processes.

Transformative visuals: used to make information more memorable. They are intended to aid learners' thought processes. They focus more on helping the learner understand than on presenting content. Transformative visuals can be a little unconventional and because of this are not widely found in learning materials.

In conclusion, we've all heard the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words". And many people accept this wisdom without question. 

In fact, just because something is communicated visually doesn't necessarily make it more valid or easier to understand. A poorly designed visual or graphic could just as easily impede learning as facilitate it. 

Indeed, a poorly designed graphic where the purpose and instructional function are mismatched might need a thousand words to help explain it clearly to learners.

Looking for e-learning software or e-learning authoring tools, can be a pretty time-consuming process. There are many tools out there, and nowadays most of them are pretty sophisticated. 

Apart from the obvious criteria of budget, it can be hard to know how to choose. As I noted in a previous post, focusing relentlessly on feature comparison of selected tools is not necessarily going to get you anything other than a headache!

Let’s be clear, understanding the features and capabilities of the authoring tool you ultimately choose is a very important part of the selection process; but it’s not the only part.

Here are some more tips for avoiding ‘feature-itis’. They apply to both businesses and individuals and are particularly pertinent to anyone looking at using e-learning software for the first time.

1. Consider who in the organisation will be using the software

I’ve already mentioned that most e-learning authoring tools are pretty sophisticated and many offer a very similar feature set. But not all are created equal when it comes to user interface and general ease-of-use.

I won’t name names but I can think of several tools which all more or less offer the same features. Yet the experience of  using them can be like the difference between night and day.

Why is this important? If your users are hard-core techies who work out how to use whatever you throw at them, this isn’t a particular issue (although in my experience even hard-core techies appreciate a good user interface).

But if you r users are less technically adept, a poorly designed piece of development software could dramatically slow development, de-motivate users and cost you a good deal of extra time and money in remedial coaching and training. 

2. Know your initial instructional design capabilities

Everyone in the e-learning and training world claims to be an expert in instructional design. Yet if this were true, we’d only ever attend fantastically useful training courses or take brilliantly developed e-learning modules.

The reality is very different.

We’ve all been on (or taken) far too many mediocre courses and e-learning modules. So honestly, how good are your instructional design skills? Are you truly original, creative and forward-thinking and, therefore, looking for software that will enable you to push the envelope?

Or are you a little unsure of what e-learning development requires from you and, therefore, need software that in the early stages of use might provide a bit of structure or support before you spread your instructional design wings and get more creative?

Looking for help using Articulate Storyline? Check out our available course options.

When you are designing learning (regardless of the delivery medium) key to success is an understanding of how adults actually process new information and, therefore, acquire new knowledge and skills.

Different instructional design experts use slightly different ways to describe the basic knowledge transfer process, but when you are thinking about in-person training in essence it boils down to three broad stages.

Typically, at the start of this process is the presentation stage. This is when the trainer is introducing new or partially familiar knowledge and/or skills to the learners. Ideally, this is done through a familiar and meaningful context, rather than in a dry, abstract way. Once the trainer has carried out some basic checks to ensure learners have grasped the new information, the transfer process quickly moves to stage two.

Here, learners are given the opportunity to practice what they have just learnt in a structured environment. During this phase, the learners might take part in one or several activities - depending on the level of difficulty and how much need they have for initial practice. 

Once the structured practice is complete and the learners have grasped the basics, it is time to move to the final stage - more spontaneous practice. Here, learners are encouraged to use their newly embedded skills and knowledge with less structure provided. Ideally, this stage will use a context and activity that is both relevant and motivating to the learners.

Overall, the three stages move from a very teacher or trainer centred starting point through to a highly learner-centred one - where the trainer can take a back seat, observe the learning in action and provide feedback at the very end of the process.

One of the advantages of this broad approach is its flexibility and adaptability. You can vary the amount of structured and spontaneous practice you use based on the needs of your learners. 

You can increase or decrease the amount of feedback you provide based on the results you are seeing. This feedback can be adjusted during the structured and/or spontaneous practice stages. You could even add remedial structured or spontaneous practice at the end of the entire process, if you decide this is appropriate.

Additional flexibility is available to you with the sequence of stages. For example, you could use a structured practice activity as your starting point. This would enable you to diagnose existing knowledge and possible areas of difficulty before embarking on a customized presentation and follow-on practice activities.

Alternatively, with more experienced learners, you could turn the process on its head and start with a spontaneous practice activity to see how they cope. Following on from this, you can draw out learning points, leading you to structured practice (or additional spontaneous activities) for the purposes of revision or consolidation.

Understanding the significance of this flexible 'presentation, structured practice, spontaneous practice' model enables you to create effective learning events that help your learners to quickly acquire and embed new knowledge and skills.

Need help with instructional design for yourself or your team? As a starting point, why not take our free Instructional Design Essentials Checklist scorecard. This helps you evaluate where you are in relation to some essential instructional design best practices.

One big problem with games and learning: our first experience of them is usually part of play.

We generally watch or take part in games for pleasure. Playing games is not something we typically associate with 'serious' activities such as work or learning.

Understandably, many learners struggle with the idea of games for learning. The reason? Often, their only experience of games for learning is an attempt to replicate a well-known game or game-show format in a classroom or e-learning setting.

I recall a head of L&D telling me about one of the highlights of his tenure at a big-name corporate was setting up a Mastermind-style competition for a big chunk of employees, as a way fo teaching them new-product information. No expense was spared. A set was built, the same lighting and music was used as on the TV series.

A memorable event, no doubt. But not in the right way.

Would it have markedly increased product knowledge? For the finalists in this pretend 'game show' maybe. But for everyone else? I'd be surprised.

To me, this is a perfect example of someone wanting L&D to make a big impact but going about it in entirely the wrong way. Which begs the question why would you consider an approach like this?

Probably because it’s a well-intentioned attempt to make learning more effective and enjoyable. But it rarely works. It moves the learners far, far away from a context that is relevant for and authentic to how they might actually use their learning back in the workplace.

If you are teaching your learners about money laundering regulations, don't be surprised if a version of The Weakest Link designed to reinforce their knowledge of money laundering concepts seems trivial or irrelevant to them.

In reality, the key to successful gamification of your learning is about identifying the components of a game that are most relevant for your learners.

Once you have identified appropriate elements, don’t rely on using them within a generic, well-known game. Rather, use your creativity and design skills to create a relevant and authentic game-based context and activity.

One that will make sense to your learners and really enable them to practice and reinforce their learning.

Following on from Part 1 of this post, where I identified three key challenges for e-learning designers when thinking about games and gamification, here's a summary of some key game elements you could include in your learning design and their relevance to your learners:

• Creating an abstract of reality: actual reality is messy. Providing an abstraction of reality is a great way to minimise complexity, focus your learners on what's really important and help them understand cause and effect in a given situation – with much greater clarity than is usually possible in real life.
• Setting goals: including a clear goal in a game adds purpose, focus and the ability to measure outcomes.
• Setting rules: these can range from simple operational rules (i.e. how you play the game) through to implicit behavioral rules. In a learning context, you can also include instructional rules that relate specifically to the knowledge or skills being learnt.
• Working with or against others: others here can include the game itself, not just other players. Working with or against others, provides plenty of opportunity for conflict, competition or co-operation.
• Working against the clock: time can spur your learners into action and apply additional pressure to their environment. Additionally, time can be used as a resource that learners need to use with thought and care.
• Giving rewards: you may decide to make getting rewards and points easy - as a way of hooking people into your game early on. Alternatively, you may decide to make rewards and points hard to achieve, as a means of increasing motivation
• Providing feedback: there is plenty of opportunity to build in intrinsic feedback. In other words, your learners can immediately see or feel the consequences of their actions and decisions.
• Enabling different levels of engagement: you can vary the level of challenge and difficulty available to your learners as a way of building motivation.
• Telling a story: this always helps provide context and meaning.
• Keeping flow and sequence: a good flow and sequence helps 'hook' the learners early on and maintain their interest throughout – this is sometimes referred to as the 'curve of interest'.
• Thinking about visual design: this definitely doesn't have to be about realism, but your game should be visually appealing and recognisably authentic.
• Providing a replay option: this provides a very important opportunity for your learners - the opportunity to fail. This enables your learners to re-consider their actions and decisions - particularly important when you are teaching principles or approaches that can be applied in several different ways.

If you are looking for some help in incorporating these elements into your e-learning design, consider taking some of the modules in our impact and instructional design training programme.

"Good game, good game", was the regular catch phrase of the late Bruce Forsyth when he hosted the popular TV programme The Generation Game, way back in the 1970s.

No wonder it was so popular. Most people love to either watch or take part in games of some kind. We do so from childhood and the allure of a good game rarely weakens as we move into adulthood.

And with the popularity of games in general and computer games in particular, it's no wonder that gamifying learning is something many people believe is a must.

But what is gamification exactly? No surprise, perhaps, that different people have different definitions. But for the purposes of this article, let's call it, applying game-based elements or components to your learning to promote effective outcomes.

And applying these elements and components is about much more than awarding badges or points to increase motivation and participation - although all these are, without question, important components of game-based activity.

One important aspect of gamification for learning that is often overlooked? It is not new. If your view of learning is "chalk and talk" or good old page-turning e-learning, then gamification of your learning might seem like a new (and possibly scary) addition to your world view.

However, for skilled and knowledgeable instructional designers and trainers, gamification is old news. They have been adding elements of games to their learning for decades.

The challenge ahead is not about whether adding gamification is something your learners will enjoy. First-hand experience and anecdotal evidence suggest that when done right (and 'done right' is an important caveat) learners are pretty satisfied with it. Nor is the challenge about whether gamification works. There's a fairly substantial body of research to suggest it does.

The real challenge is threefold:

First, until there is a massive shift in the availability of cheap and easy technology to produce so-called 'serious games', most L&D professionals will never be able to consider the fully-fledged computer gaming experience advocated by some. For most of us the issue will be about whether we can apply the benefits of gamification without busting our budget.

Second, we need to better understand the components and elements that make up a game. Then we can make informed, intelligent decisions about which components or elements to apply to a given piece of learning.

Finally, we need some practical, realistic and cost-effective ways to use the game elements we identify within our existing delivery mediums, such as classroom and e-learning courses.

Looking for help with incorporating 'game' elements into your e-learning? Then check out our impact and instructional design programme.

There are plenty of websites and articles providing advice about how to assess and choose an e-learning authoring tool that’s right for you, your team or your organisation.

I’ve looked at many of them. One thing I've noticed time and time again? They only focus on comparing the software features of selected tools. Understanding the features and capabilities of the authoring tool you ultimately choose is hugely important; but it’s not the only consideration.

It’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. What about the people? What about the content you want to write and publish? These are all important elements that play a pivotal role in the development of e-learning. Elements that are easily forgotten in the rush to understand the detail of what a piece of software can or can’t do.

Leaving aside feature comparison, there are 3 broad areas you might want to focus on when you assess and select authoring tools: people and costs; content, design and quality; publication and distribution. In this blog post, I’ll cover just the first of these three points.

People and costs

A good starting point, clearly. Authoring tools vary so greatly in cost, that you need to be clear about what your limits are from the outset. At the very bottom end of the scale, you could go free or spend under a £100 on a single copy of a desktop tool; at the high end you could pay as much as £100,000 a year for a collaborative system available to hundreds of people.

Whatever your starting budget, is there some flexibility in what you can spend? I ask this because as you assess your requirements you may find you need something more than your original budget can handle. Equally, you could start off thinking you’ll need something sophisticated and expensive, only to discover less is more.

Some authoring tools are available by annual subscription (as opposed to owning the software outright). As a rule of thumb, subscription models tend to be more attractive to teams with bigger budgets, while standalone desktop tools are more attractive to individuals and small teams. There are pros and cons to both models but both are valid ways of getting hold of what you need.

Who's involved? This is a critical question. You need to take a couple of things into account. First, what job roles will be included as part of your team. Will it just be just instructional designers or will you have a range of other roles, and therefore, skills? 

Will the people using the tool be adept at learning it or are they going to need quite a lot of training and coaching? Are they the kind of people who embrace change and new ways of working or will there be an uphill struggle to get them involved? Finally, will you have the resource and budget to provide technical support to your team if needed?

Will people developing the learning be experts in the subject matter or will they need to get this information from someone else? Do they have the right skills to do this? If they are the SMEs will you be in danger of getting a brain dump? In other words, do they understand the importance of audience analysis and shaping their content around the audience, rather than simply telling the audience everything they know?

Linked to this is the question of instructional design. Even if your SMEs are good at scoping content for their intended audience, do they understand the importance of good instructional design and the specific do’s and don’ts that apply to e-learning?

If your team is new to e-learning, you may have people brilliant at developing classroom courses, but no real experience of instructional design for e-learning. Some of their existing instructional design skills will be transferable, but their existing knowledge alone probably won’t be enough.

I've done more than my fair share of PowerPoint-bashing in the past. And with good reason. Because there's no getting away from it. Misuse of PowerPoint is responsible for some truly awful e-learning content. 

But today, I want to present a more balanced view of PowerPoint's plus and minus points.

Because the fact of the matter is, e-learning created using PowerPoint doesn't have to be awful. When used well, PowerPoint can be a very versatile tool.

PowerPoint sits somewhere in between a free-form rapid authoring tool and a form-based one. And this is its great strength. 

If it's a familiar tool to you already, it wouldn't take that much extra time or effort to learn its more advanced features. This would give you the option to build graphics, audio and animations onto your slides, as well as linking those slides in a non-linear sequence.

So PowerPoint's big strength? You can achieve quite a lot without any specific programming knowledge, but you have more freedom than if you were using a form-based authoring tool. 

If that all sounds like too much trouble, quite a few authoring tools allow you to create a basic framework of slides in PowerPoint, import them into the authoring tool and develop something more sophisticated from there. However, this approach comes with a big health warning. Plenty of really bad e-learning has been produced this way, too.

Which brings me to the other side of the argument. Because PowerPoint is so widely used and because its basic features are relatively easy to learn, lots of people with little or no instructional design knowledge or experience end up 'designing' e-learning courses. In many cases, very, very badly.

This is made worse because many of these courses started off as (bad) presentations. They hardly get altered in their transition to 'e-learning' and so end their life as truly dreadful online slide shows which consist of nothing more than slides of text, brightened up by a few cheesy graphics here and there.

If you care about creating effective e-learning that improves performance, it's easy to hate or demonise PowerPoint.  And in demonising PowerPoint, it's also easy to lose sight of the real problem which is not the tool, but the lack of instructional design knowledge and experience of the people using it. 

So the perennial challenge is not so much about how to get better at using the tools themselves (although that's important). The challenge is how to apply good instructional design while using those tools.

Get the balance right and you can create quality e-learning that embeds knowledge and skills and improves performance over time.

Our Creating Boredom-Busting E-Learning modules focus on e-learning instructional design, not the point and click of the authoring tool. Take a day or two out of your schedule to dramatically shift the way you think about e-learning.

I know, the title sounds a bit dramatic, doesn’t it? But Tom Kuhlmann (who writes Tom's Blog for Articulate users) tells the story of a piece of e-learning created over a weekend. Real rapid e-learning. 

And it was rapid with good reason. The company producing it had several manufacturing facilities working 24/7. On this particular weekend, there was a serious accident at one of the facilities and an employee died. 

The safety team (of two) quickly got to work, creating pieces of content (including video footage), to highlight the sequence of events that led to the loss of life and remind people of the safety rules they needed to follow to avoid a recurrence. 

12 hours later, the site safety manager had pulled this all together into a piece of refresher e-learning, distributed to all manufacturing facilities across the company. 

Imagine how long that could've taken with the involvement of a large, corporate e-learning development team?

The final output from the site safety manager may not have been perfect, but it met the organisation's needs at a critical moment.

This story brings home a hugely important point it's easy to forget - especially if you work in a large organisation

Organisations are not interested in creating a piece of e-learning, per se, but in meeting a specific organisational goal. E-learning is simply one way of helping achieve that goal. 

So at the very start of your e-learning development process, it's always a good idea to step away from the solution and focus on the organisational goal. This gives you the opportunity to assess the best learning solution to meet the goal. 

This simple assessment can potentially save you many hours of wasted effort and many thousands of pounds of mis-directed budget.  Use your resources as and when appropriate. Not all pieces of learning need to be created equal!

If you need help with designing your e-learning, check out our e-learning design options.

If you are an L&D manager or L&D team member, you’ll probably get bombarded with requests for training week in and week out.

If your L&D function is well-positioned and well-respected, then you’ll almost certainly be in a position to do some analysis before you simply acquiesce to the training request ‘as is’.

And there’s a good reason for wanting to be in the position to do that analysis. Because in many cases when a request for training is received, a little digging reveals that a new piece of training is not the solution at all.

Here's an interesting situation that we encountered quite a while ago that neatly illustrates the point. 

An airline wanted some e-learning to cover pre-flight safety checks and procedures for its cabin crew. They wanted the e-learning to be engaging, they said.

A little digging in the early stages of the project revealed the following.

The checks and procedures were slightly different for each type of plane the airline used. As cabin crew would fly on a variety of planes and might not be on a particular model of plane for several months at a time, it was unlikely they’d recall all the variations without a prompt. 

Nothing in the checks or procedures was particularly complicated. Everything the cabin crew needed to know and do was clearly and throughly documented already in a paper-based manual. They were supposed to carry this with them whenever they were on a flight.

Turns out many of them didn't. It was heavy. People didn't like carrying it. Some supervisors had stopped carrying theirs. So subordinates took their cue from their supervisors and stopped carrying theirs, too.

Over time, with no manual to refer to and to jog their memory, the checks and procedures were being carried out from memory and were not always being completed fully or accurately. 

The procedures within the existing manual were clear, concise and easy to follow. But the existing means of delivery (a big heavy manual) was clearly not working. However, the proposed solution was not much better. Starting up a laptop or tablet, firing up an e-learning programme and navigating to the correct place in the course to find the information you needed is hardly a frictionless approach.

In reality, this was a performance support issue. The solution lay in finding the simplest and least cumbersome way to provide those existing procedure steps to the cabin crew, in the moment of need.

Go round any learning technology-focused trade show or exhibition and you  won't be able to move for them. Who am I talking about? The sharp-suited sales people hanging around on those flashy, expensive stands, of course. 

These are the people promoting their latest rapid e-learning application. You know, the one that's going to help you build e-learning courses in no time at all, with no required programming. All your e-learning problems will be solved. All your Christmases will come at once.

When money's tight and everyone is finding it harder to make a buck, the promise of rapid e-learning is a deeply attractive one. Especially if you are the stressed L&D professional constantly trying to achieve more for less.

But what is rapid e-learning exactly? Is it an urban myth? And if it does exist, does it actually improve learning and performance? 

Put a bunch of e-learning practitioners together in a room and I'm not convinced they'd be able to come up with a definition of rapid e-learning they could all agree with. But let's live dangerously and see what we can come up with here.

For some people rapid e-learning is all about the software. In a software-driven paradigm, it's all about tools that allow just about anyone to create and publish e-learning courses with little or no programming knowledge. It's about the change from the early days of e-learning when you needed significant programming skills to achieve anything of worth.

For others, rapid e-learning is defined by the ease of the production process. In this view of rapid e-learning, just one or two people can wear many hats. Gone are the days of huge development teams and endless production cycles.

Whatever your definition, rapid e-learning needs an authoring tool of some description. And broadly speaking, development tools fall into two broad categories: free-form and form-based.

Free form: the name gives it away, really. Free form tools start with a blank screen which allows the e-learning author to create a structure s/he wants. Inevitably, this still requires some setting-up and choosing functionality.

Form-based: in a form-based authoring tool, the software does pretty much everything. All you have to do is add the content. The negative here, of course, is the forms. They only give you what they are designed to. If you want anything outside of this, you are back to needing programming skills.

But whatever tool you use (whether you consider it 'rapid' or not), there's no getting away from one central question: Just because you can create a course rapidly, should you? And one central problem: not everyone given an authoring tool (and the training to operate it) is going to develop a great course. In fact many will (and have) built truly awful ones.

The answer to the 'should you' question has to be answered by individual organisations. Only people in that organisation can best work out if e-learning is really the most suitable solution for them.

In answer to the second point, I'd say this. When the technology is new and exciting, all the focus is on the technology. This has been the problem with e-learning for too long now. 

In the software-driven paradigm I mentioned earlier, rapid e-learning was meant to democratise development. In many cases, all it did was empower lots of people to create online slideshows with little or no value or effectiveness. 

But now we seem to be moving into an era when technology is evolving again. It probably won't be that long before almost no programming skills are required to create sophisticated e-learning

For me, this moment can't come fast enough.  This could be the moment when we can finally shift from what I call 'point and click' thinking to instructional design thinking. Finally we can shift the focus to where it's needed to be all along:  not about how to programme, but about how to build better courses and more effective learning experiences.

If Articulate Storyline is your 'rapid' e-learning authoring tool and you need some training for yourself or your team, take a look at our in-house training options.

Not all e-learning is created equal, that's for sure. If you are a 'big guy' with a team of designers and developers and a fairly sizeable budget, the e-learning you produce will look markedly different from the courses produced by a team of two with an authoring tool and not much else.

If you're the team of two (and that's much more typical that you'd imagine), it might not feel ideal. But, in fact, with good instructional design approaches, the team of two are just as capable of producing really effective e-learning as the big guy.

(And let's not forget, the big guys get so distracted by all the clever things they can do, they frequently end up creating a flashy looking course that seems impressive, but is largely ineffective).

Regardless of your available resources or the size of your team, the most important question for everyone developing e-learning - what are you wanting to achieve with your course?

Once again, not all courses are created equal. If you need to make a big difference to some aspect of your organisation's performance, the kind of course you create will need to be different from the one that is just updating people on changes to their working conditions.

The former is about changing behaviour and thinking. The latter is about sharing information. Which brings us to that all-important distinction that many e-learning courses fail to make: inform or perform.

It seems like a simple enough distinction but it's one that, in my experience, is largely forgotten or side-stepped. And there's good reason for this. Because if your e-learning really, truly needs to focus on perform, it raises a whole host of difficulties. 

Creating perform e-learning is a real challenge. Thinking of ways to develop practice activities that move beyond predictable multiple-choice and true-false questions is hard. Especially hard with a basic authoring tool - but still problematic even with a high-end one

And if your development tool really is basic, your budget and resources really limited and your timelines ridiculously short, then the challenge you face is even greater still.

No surprise then that many people just throw in the towel at this point and go the conventional route - creating boring slides of content with a few tests and quizzes added along the way.

If you then throw into the mix, subject matter experts with no previous experience of developing e-learning, deathly dull, page-turners are almost inevitable.

A conventional approach might tick some boxes somewhere and satisfy the bean counters, but it's pretty much a disaster for the learners. Time and again, they are desperately in need of a course which helps them improve their performance, but they end up with something that just gives them lots of information. 

So when you know your focus needs to be on perform, but you are tempted to just inform, you really need some kind of instructional design framework to guide you through. 

A simple framework can shift you away from the default  present-then-test approach that most people take and that most authoring tools push you towards. It can focus you in a different, more task-focused direction. 

Even if you are stuck with a very basic authoring tool, an instructional design framework can help you think imaginatively about how to harness the capabilities of your authoring tool to create more authentic, job-realistic practice activities.

An instructional design framework isn't like a magic wand that you can wave at your content and your learners to miraculously solve all your e-learning problems. Applying a framework successfully requires some effort. You'll be finding ways to balance the needs of the learners against the limitations of your authoring tool, your own skills and available resources. 

You'll almost certainly pursue a few ideas that lead nowhere. And you'll probably experience a few false 'eureka' moments. But it's almost always worth it. Because in the end, the result is a more-effective, more learner-centred approach. 

If you'd like to find out more about a simple but highly effective instructional design framework you can apply to your e-learning, a great starting point is our on-demand webinar called Re-Frame Your E-Learning to Increase Workplace Impact and Performance.

You might not be 10,000 miles away in the jungle. But maybe you feel like you've just been landed with your very own training version of a bush tucker trial.

The one where they call you into their office and tell you the 'good' news. The news that starting next month, they're going to begin moving some of your training courses to e-learning.

And the 'even better' news? They won't be making you redundant, but they will be expecting you to systematically turn your classroom courses into e-learning ones.

And probably after that, you didn't hear much else. All the corporate L&D speak about the benefits, the technology and the systems. All just background noise, as your heart pounded and your head throbbed and you broke out in a cold sweat just thinking about the prospect of suddenly becoming an e-learning designer.

When you are faced with a 360 shift in your world like that one, what do you do? Where do you begin? 

Without question, you have to think differently. A new start. A new paradigm. Trying to take the classroom skills you've honed for years and graft them onto a computer screen simply won't work. And in your heart of hearts you know this.

You've sat in front of those deathly dull e-learning courses that page turn their way like a user manual. The ones where they sometimes have you dragging things pointlessly across the screen. And set you insultingly stupid quizzes and tests every 10th screen. 

So where do you start? To begin with forget about content. Sounds crazy, but it's not. You must shift from thinking about content first to thinking about context first. This is your new starting point. Where your learners are at. Their reality. Their environment. 

This is the key shift in your thinking that will grab their attention. This is the key shift in your approach that will draw them in. This is the key shift in your learning design that will help them practice and retain new knowledge and skills.

This is the shift that will break you free of the boring e-learning so many of us have been subjected to, for far too long.

Need some help with the transition to designing for e-learning or remote learning? Take a look at our instructional design training options.

Before Christmas I posted on LinkedIn about how many of our clients often vent their frustrations about their existing LMS.

I mentioned that we have been having our own LMS growing pains and promised an update on this. 

As small business, our LMS is primarily about providing access to learning materials for our clients, rather than internally for ourselves. So our need for an e-commerce element is greater than for many. 

The companies that I would call legacy corporate LMS providers tend to have a basic e-commerce offering and almost always go with the conventional pricing model of charging per user account (sometimes combining that with restrictions on the number of courses you can upload).

None of these mainstream offerings really suited our particular needs, so we started casting a broader net. Which has resulted in us settling on a Wordpress-based LMS plug-in.

We have run our website using Hubspot for the best part of 15 years now, so Wordpress was not a product/community we had any first-hand experience of. 

Now I’ve had some exposure to Wordpress, my view is that the core Wordpress software is a clunky old dog that doesn’t exactly provide a winning user interface.

However, if you can get over that poor back-end usability issue, you find yourself in an astonishingly innovative marketplace of plug-ins and extensions, all offering a huge variety of add-on functionality.

Like any thriving marketplace, there’s the good and the bad and we certainly test-drove a couple of horrible LMS plug-ins before settling on the one we did.

Is our chosen option completely perfect? No. Has it been a project and a half to get it to do (more or less) exactly what we want? Absolutely. Will it be a massive improvement for us on what we have been using up until now? Most definitely. Have we avoided our very own LMS boondoggle? Thankfully, yes.

Which, I think, verifies the point made by one of the commenters on my LinkedIn post. That is, that LMS needs vary dramatically from business to business. So just because one LMS works well for business A, it might be the worst possible LMS solution for business B.

In other words, unless you are super-clear about what you need to achieve with your LMS, you may well end up with a solution that you are cursing, not far down the line.

That’s why, you’ll notice, that I haven’t named any names in this post. Given how much needs can vary, it seems very unfair to publicly call out products that may not have been suitable for us but could be perfect for you.

If you are interested in talking with me more about our Wordpress LMS experience or the specific products we tested, I’m happy to do this offline.

In our most recent post, we looked at the pros and cons of outsourcing your e-learning development. In this post, we take a look at the pros and cons of keeping your development in-house...

Internal development: Pros

Total control over development

Unlike an outsourced team, you will have complete control over an in-house team and can manage the development process to a much greater degree, if you desire.

Organisational culture, content and processes

Members of an in-house team (assuming time served in the organisation) will have a much deeper understanding of all aspects of the organisation's culture, content and processes.

Less need for SME involvement 

Building on the previous point, you may not need to involve SMEs at all.

Internal development: Cons

Hiring and training team members

If you are creating a team from scratch or building on a small existing team, the time and costs involved in hiring new people, getting them trained and ready to go can be huge.

Team members leave 

Even with a good team in place, people can leave, go sick or otherwise leave you in the lurch just at a critical moment in the development process. You might find yourself repeating some of the activities and spending just outlined in the previous point.

Buying development software

As well as the cost of hiring and training, new software will have to be assessed, selected and bought. More time and money.

Speed of development

It may be that a small team simply can't go as fast as you would like, whereas an external supplier can scale a development team up or down according to need.

Keeping team members fully occupied

On a similar point, if you are spending money to create a new team, will there be a sufficient supply of work to keep them occupied and to justify the cost of hiring and training?

If you are just getting started with e-learning or thinking about using e-learning for the first time, check out our E-Learning Getting Started Guide.

There is never a one-size-fits-all solution to the question of whether to develop e-learning content in-house or to outsource to a third party.

If you are looking at moving over to a predominantly e-learning delivery model or you have experimented with e-learning delivery and now wish to ramp up development levels significantly, it's likely that investing time and money in getting the right software and creating your own in-house development time would be well worth your while.

However, for scenarios where you are just starting out with e-learning or you know you will only need limited amounts of content created on an ad hoc basis, you may well be better off outsourcing your production.

Either way, here are some of the pros and cons of outsourcing vs internal development:

Outsourcing development: Pros

Easy getting started

Although you will have to spend some time up front preparing a brief and communicating this to your chosen supplier, once this has been done and a timescale for development agreed, the project pretty much gets started without much fuss and bother

Minimal time and involvement 

Although you will clearly need to be involved and available, the project will effectively be run by one of the supplier's project managers. Your main involvement will be to review and request changes and liaise regularly to make sure all is going to plan.

Rapid development time

If you are in need of a speedy turn around, an external supplier can usually scale up their development team to meet a tighter deadline.

Scalable expert teams

Instructional designers, content writers, developers and designers are all involved at some point in the development of a piece of e-learning. An external supplier will have all these skilled resources readily available. 

Last minute changes

Although good planning should minimise the need for last-minute changes to content and interactivity, if they are necessary, an external supplier is likely to be better equipped to provide any additional skills or software that might be required.

Outsourcing development: Cons

Development costs

Under a supplier arrangement, you might ultimately reach a point where you had spent more money paying the supplier than if you had done the work in-house.

Potential for disappointing results

At the point you give a contract to a supplier, you will be confident in their ability to do the job. There is, however, always potential for disappointment. Perhaps things don't quite work out as expected or the quality  of the work is not quite up to standard.

Less control over development team

While a clear advantage of outsourcing is that you don't have to be so involved, if you are the kind of person who likes to micro-manage down to the last detail, this will undoubtedly  cause you frustration because you won't be able to do this to the same degree with an outsourced team.

Preparing a project brief

You will need to spend some time in the early stages creating a clear brief that is easily communicated to your supplier. However, it is likely you would need to do this with your in-house team, too.

Subject Matter Experts availability

Depending on the the kind of content being developed, your supplier may need frequent access to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in your organisation to understand or clarify specific aspects of that content.

If you are thinking about outsourcing your e-learning, why not take a look at our Effective E-Learning Project Pack to get a clearer idea of what might be involved when working with a supplier like Pacific Blue.

Now, here's an interesting point that came up on one of our instructional design programmes recently. Is using animation in e-learning really effective? 

A good question. It's time-consuming to produce and depending on the length and sophistication of said animation, it may not come cheap. So should you bother? 

While I’d always counsel caution when it comes to looking at research, there are a couple of interesting studies done on this. One by Narayanan and Hegarty and the other by Mayer, Mathias and Werzell. 

In each study, two sets of learners were given identical lessons explaining a process - with one difference. One lesson showed the process using an animation and one showed the process using a sequence of still diagrams. At the end of the lesson each set of learners took the same test. 

What is so very interesting about this is the test results in both studies: no significant difference between the two sets of learners. In other words, the use of an animation didn't have any major impact on the effectiveness of the learning. 

Can we extrapolate out from that and say animations make no significant difference whatever the subject matter? That's probably a bit of a stretch. 

What we can say with some certainty, however, is that if your aim is to teach someone a process, spending a lot of money on creating an animated version of that process certainly doesn’t guarantee a significantly better learning outcome. 

However, what I find most interesting is that there was no significant difference between using still and animated visuals. This is not a case of saying, ‘don’t bother with well-designed and integrated graphical presentation’. 

What it does seem to be saying is that super-charging that graphical presentation, by animating it, won’t actually make a significant difference. 

When we talk about e-learning we can all get carried away with talk of making it engaging; and animations are one way we might choose to achieve that engagement. 

It’s always worth remembering that spending big on additional multimedia bells and whistles won’t necessarily have the positive impact on learning outcomes that we might wish for.

If you are looking for help with designing and/or developing a piece of e-learning that only uses multimedia when it really counts, check out our service options.

A current societal obsession is the need for choice. More choice, we are told,  is automatically better. Sometimes true but not necessarily always. 

In the case of blended learning this is sometimes distilled into a focus on simply providing a variety of delivery mediums. This focus is often driven by the belief that because some learners learn better through different mediums, the same piece of content or learning must, therefore, be available in all possible mediums. 

A noble approach. But one that will keep you duplicating content for ever and a day. And which usually  ends up being an unsustainable burden. An unfortunate one, too.  Because there's a whole body of research which has established that, broadly speaking, as long as the learning is instructionally sound, the delivery medium makes little difference to the overall learning outcome.

This research was carried out before people were really taking account of any accessibility needs, so that is one factor that could definitely change the overall picture.

But in most cases, the ability to choose from a menu of delivery mediums will probably not make that much difference to the learning outcome.

Better to be thinking about providing a well-thought through programme of learning that gets results. A programme that looks at what needs to be taught and identifies the most pragmatic medium for delivery for  a particular part of that programme.

For example, core elements of a given piece of learning might benefit from classroom delivery, but beyond that other delivery channels might be better. For a refresher session, a virtual classroom or webinar-style session might be the perfect delivery medium. For complex skills where only a subset of the total  is used each time, short, highly-focused videos available at the point of need might be a suitable option.

Working all this out isn’t necessarily easy, which is why we have developed our Frequency, Complexity and Shelf-Life Matrix to help take some of the guesswork out of these decisions.

The key point. It is learning needs, aligned with the complexity, frequency and longevity of content that should guide the blend of delivery channels you choose.

If you are grappling with instructional design for a particular delivery medium or creating an effective blend, take a look at our in-house and publicly scheduled instructional design training.

This Articulate Storyline training blog post, fouses on Storyline’s freeform interactions.

But you may not know that totally flexible versions of these interactions are also available – and only a mouse click away.

These flexible freeform interactions completely transform your ability to create really authentic, context sensitive activities that are a world away from their pre-formatted siblings.

And knowing about these freeform interactions is crucial if you want to produce more authentic, task-based e-learning. Why? Because, by definition, the pre-formatted variety can only ever be about an abstract style of practice activity.

By contrast, freeform interactions are only about the functionality. It’s entirely up to you how you apply that functionality. In other words, you have complete freedom in how your interaction looks and what skills or knowledge it gets your learners to practice.

Suddenly (provided you are prepared to think a bit differently about your e-learning) you can use the interactions’ functionality to make your practice activity seem authentic and meaningful to your learners.

And by the way, if you need some help in thinking differently about your e-learning, check out a free 12 page boredom-busting e-learning guide here.

Freeform interaction benefits

So what about other benefits of using freeform interactions? Crucially, they allow you start with the instructional idea.

What is it you ideally want to create to help your learners get authentic practice in the skills you are teaching?

You can sketch the idea out, share it with others, get their feedback and then refine it a bit. Only then do you need to think about which of the interaction type will best help you to achieve your goal.

This is in complete contrast to the pre-formatted variety of interaction, where you are simply having to fit your content into a pre-existing approach, format and layout. Little or no creativity, authenticity or context. Highly abstract for the learners. Very dry. Extremely predictable.

Using freeform interactions: in summary

Just to recap, you start with your idea. Sketch it out and (where possible) share this with your colleagues and some candidate learners to get feedback and refine the idea.

Create the idea either as a standard Storyline slide or in an external tool such as PowerPoint and then import the content into Storyline.

With your slide all ready to go, choose the Freeform Interactions button in the XX menu. From the list that of interactions available, choose the one suitable for your needs.

Set the interaction’s functionality as required for your activity. Remember you van toggle between the slide view and the interaction’s back end form view as much as you need.

Once all the settings are complete, test your interaction.

So in summary, freeform interactions give you all the kind of e-learning interactions you know and love already – they simply provide you with a powerful, new way to apply them to your learning

This article first appeared on the Training Zone website.

In the previous Articulate Storylline training blog post, I explained what Storyline variables are and why they are so important. I also wrote about the three types of variables available for you to use.

In this blog post, there's a video which takes a look at an example of creating one of these three types of variables – a text variable: 

In summary, then, variables give you the power and flexibility to start thinking about how you can link you design across an entire course and break free of the restrictions of just designing on a slide-by-slide basis.

This video was first published as part of an article on the Training Zone website.

In some ways, this is not surprising. They are invisible to the learners (so don’t make for very glossy website visuals). They are a little bit abstract (not an easy thing for light and fluffy marketing types to get their heads around). And learning to use them takes a bit of concentration and effort (not exactly a great sell if you’re trying to persuade prospective clients that creating e-learning is quick and easy).

Which is a pity. Because one of Storyline’s greatest assets barely gets a mention most of the time.

Why variables are so important

So what are these things called variables? Before I explain that it’s worth mentioning why they might be so spectacularly useful and important.

 Most of what people focus on when they are creating e-learning with Storyline happens at slide level.

 In other words, you are using tools and features to control elements on a specific, individual slide. Of course, this is really important. The more functionality and control you have over what happens on an individual slide (or one of its layers) the better.

But imagine if you want to control what happens between slides. What about if your instructional design thinking is moving beyond a slide-by-slide focus. What about if you want to design your course in such a way that what a learner does on slide 5 has an impact on what they can do or what they can see on slide 25, for example?

This is where variables come into their own. Because variables operate at a global level within your Storyline course. They are available to you at any point in your course from any slide. 

Variables explained

So what are they exactly? Well, first of all, there are three types: text; number and true/ false. Think of the first two as containers and the third as a switch you can flick on and off.

As the name suggests, text variables allow you to store and retrieve a piece of text the learners type into it. Number variables allow you to store and retrieve a number or changing numbers that are relevant to your course. True/False variables can be set to equal one of two different values. It will come as no great shock to discover that the values you can switch between are (you guessed it) true and false!

If this is all still a bit, too conceptual for you, let’s take a look at a simple example of how you might use each one. 

Text variables in action

Let’s start with text variables. We all love it when something is “all about us”. Making something about us – personalisation – always goes down well. This is just as true for a piece of learning as for anything.

So a text variable is a great way to personalise your piece of learning. First you create your text variable and give it a name. At the start of a course, you can ask learners to type their name into a special text field. This automatically stores whatever name they type in the field inside the text variable you created.

While the course is running, this piece of text (in this example, the learners’ name) is available to you at any time on any slide – you just need to retrieve it.

So, for example, instead of an instruction on a screen saying, “Please select the best response”, it could say “Debbie, please select the best response” (assuming Debbie was the learner’s name).

When you create the text box with this instruction in it, you would just make sure you insert the name of your text variable at the start of the sentence. This way, you are telling Storyline to retrieve what’s stored in that variable and display it at the start of the sentence. 

This means you could pepper your course with personalised references to the learner using the learner name stored in the variable. Note that once the course is finished, the name stored in the variable is lost, so if the learner returned to the course a second time, they would have to type their name again at the very beginning. 

Number variables in action

Similarly, number variables can store a number, retrieve it and display it at any point. You can also add, subtract, divide and multiply any numbers stored in your number variable.

So you might, for example, want to keep track of the number of times a learner clicks on a particular button on a slide and when they reach a pre-defined number of clicks either show them a specific piece of content on that slide or take them to another slide. 

True/false variables in action

Finally, as previously mentioned, true/false variables act as a kind of switch. You can choose to start the ‘switch’ at either true or false. When the learner does something (like click on a button) you could set their action to flick the ‘switch’ to the opposite of its starting point (i.e. from false to true or from true to false).

When the learner reaches a slide later in the course, you might decide to show one piece of content on the slide if the variable ‘switch’ is set to false and a different piece of content if the variable ‘switch’ has been flicked to true.

In conclusion

In summary, then, variables give you the power and flexibility to start thinking about how you can link you design across an entire course and break free of the restrictions of just designing on a slide-by-slide basis.

This article was first published on the Training Zone website.

In the previous post on this blog about Articulate Storyline training, I wrote about Storyline masters and layouts, their uses and how they are different from templates.

There's also a short video to help explain the concept.

Below you can watch another short video showing masters and layouts in action:

If you'd like to watch more short videos providing training on Articulate's Storyline application, go to our YouTube channel.

This video first appeared as part of an article on the Training Zone  website.

Many people are familiar with the idea of a software template. This is a great way of providing some pre-existing structure for the creation of documents, PowerPoint presentations or pieces of e-learning.

And like many authoring tools, Storyline has template functionality, allowing you to create a high degree of consistency in how your courses look and function. In short, templates get plenty of attention – for very good reasons. 

However, software features that get lots of attention aren’t necessarily the only (or the best) way to achieve your goals. Many people using templates might be better off using a Storyline feature which tends to be overshadowed by templates: namely masters and layouts. 

Spot the difference

So what’s the difference between the two features and why would you bother with masters and layouts when you’ve already got templates to help you.

The key thing to remember about a Storyline template? It’s a way to save and share ALL elements of a Storyline project. When you decide to save a project (large or small) as a template, absolutely every element of that project is saved within the template – not only content, but also things like triggers, navigation, variables etc.

So you would use a template when you want to save the exact structure and functionality of your project. When you want to lock-down design and restrict flexibility. When you want to provide a complete course blueprint that others can work from. In short, templates are an easy and robust way of sharing a complete project and all its elements.

But what about if you like the idea of being able to create some time-saving consistency, but still need a reasonable degree of flexibility in how you create and populate slides within your project.

If this sounds like your goal, then masters and layouts may well be a better option for you than a template.

Masters and layouts explained

You’ve probably heard of a master slide and may already be clear about it’s function. But its likely you’ll be less clear about layouts and their function. So before we go any further here’s a quick video for you to watch explaining exactly what masters and layouts are all about. 

As you will have gathered from the video above, a master slide and its associated layouts provide an easy way to consistently set the placement of slide content and then apply it to selected slides within your course.

Let’s just take a minute to review masters slides first, followed by layouts

All about master slides

Master slides are great for any global content that needs to appear on every slide in your course. A master slide can save you going through your course and manually putting the same pieces of content onto every slide. And because the content on a master slide is managed centrally, the placement of that content will be precise and consistent throughout your course.

So master slides are extremely useful, but a little bit limiting. The reason for this? There is probably not that much identical content that will need to appear on every single slide of your course.

However, it’s quite likely that you will have quite a bit of identical content that does need to appear on certain individual slides, say, or all the slides in a specific scene. 

All about layouts

That’s why you can add layouts below your master slide. The real power of the master slide comes with its associated layouts. Layouts give you targeted control over and flexibility with the content that needs to appear on a given individual slide or slides in a scene.

It should come as no surprise, then that planning is the key to success with both masters and layouts. To get their real benefit, you need to have your course well planned out in advance, so you are clear from the word go which pieces of content will consistently need to appear where.

Some extra points to remember

There are a couple of other important points to make here. The first is that masters and layouts are not just about the consistent placement of content. You can also add triggers to the content on your masters and layouts making this functionality available on selected slides as well.

The second point is about the flexibility I mentioned earlier. Even when you have applied a master or layout to a slide, you can still add more content, triggers or layers to that individual slide.

So you’ll often end up with individual slides which are a flexible combination of preformatted content and triggers drawn from a master and its layouts and content and triggers which are specific to just that individual slide.

In summary, if what you need is flexibility and creativity and not the locked-down, restrictive approach that templates are designed to achieve, then masters and layouts are likely to be for you.

This article first appeared on the Training Zone website.

Increasingly, if you are working in a learning and development role associated with designing and developing e-learning, you’ll probably be expected to have some ability in using an authoring tool.

This should be good a thing. It increases your overall skill set and more important, it enables you to create more effective learning for your learners.

But what about if this isn’t what is happening. What about if your e-learning authoring tool is actually holding you back?

This might seem like an odd question to ask. Surely an ability to use an authoring tool will mean you are creating really effective e-learning. Not necessarily.

First, it’s your instructional design skills that should determine the effectiveness and quality of the e-learning you create.

But what about if you are not going down the road your instructional design leads you because you find yourself thinking, “No point in doing that because I’ve no idea how to implement it in my authoring tool. Better stick with a less ambitious design because I know how to do that.”

Hey presto, before you know it, your authoring tool is most definitely holding you back. The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way.

The problem with legacy authoring tools

Going back 10 or 15 years, most easy-to-use authoring tools were so limited in their functionality, they really restricted truly creative instructional design thinking.

Only if you were lucky enough to work in an organisation with a massive budget for creating e-learning and unrestricted access to programmers could you really pull off much that was original or really effective.

This is one of the key reasons we have had years of deathly boring e-learning. Lots of slides with dense text and stock photos. A Back and Next button applied to each slide – and not much else.

The emerging new breed of tools

Fortunately, the world of authoring tools is changing. While there are still far too many rubbish ones out there, we are seeing a new breed emerge. Much more powerful. Fantastic functionality. Much fewer limits on what you can achieve with your e-learning.

So here’s the rub. Lots of people using one of these new style of authoring tools don’t really know about some of the more powerful features available to them. Instead they are still churning out e-learning, barely removed from the deathly dull variety just described above.

What a pity! This is like owning a Porsche and only ever driving it around your local neighbourhood at about 20 miles an hour.

Getting the most from your authoring tool

So what’s the solution? Well, it’s twofold. First, you really need to make sure your instructional design thinking is up-to-date and fit for creating e-learning that is more focused on delivering practice of skills, than delivering screens of knowledge.

And, by the way, if you need some help with this, you can download a free 12 page guide to creating boredom-busting e-learning here.

Second, it’s time to up your game and start learning about the more powerful features of your authoring tool.

To help you with this, I’ll be writing three more articles focused around one of the most popular of this new breed of authoring tool, Articulate’s Storyline.

Why focus on Storyline?

Why the focus on Storyline? It may not be absolutely the most sophisticated and capable of all the tools out there, but it does offer a great balance between being relatively easy to learn and achieving well above average functionality and interaction.

In each of the articles that follow this one, I’ll be focusing on a different Storyline feature. Features that you’ve quite possibly heard of or maybe even used a little.

But you may not be aware of their real power and how they can help you create much more effective e-learning. Features which can really help liberate your instructional design thinking and save your learners from the boredom of endless knowledge presentation.

The best bit of all this? Once you feel confident in your ability to get your authoring tool to implement your instructional design ideas, it really will be your instructional design thinking that drives your development and not your authoring tool.

This will almost certainly make your role as an instructional designer more interesting and satisfying. It will also turn you into an e-learning hero in the eyes of your learners. Don’t underestimate how much they will thank you for NOT making them sit through hours and hours of dull, sleep-inducing e-learning!

This article first appeared on the Training Zone website.