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Evaluating Training Effectivenes

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    2 min read

    Sitting in a toilet cubicle on Friday morning break

    By Andrew Jackson on Thu, Mar 14,2024

    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. Lots of options and choice.

    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design
    2 min read

    Instructional design essentials: making learning meaningful

    By Pacific Blue on Fri, Feb 16,2024

    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.

    Our Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Instructional Design Success can’t teach you everything you need to know about instructional design in a dozen or so pages.

    What it can do is to set you on that alternative path. Steer you away from PowerPoint and talk. Guide you towards a better way of transferring knowledge and skills. Help turn your teaching, training or learning into something your learners look forward to, because they know it works.

    Get your free copy.

    Topics: Instructional Design
    2 min read

    Instructional design: using visuals to support learning

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, Jan 15,2024

    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.

    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design
    2 min read

    More tips for choosing e-learning software

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, Dec 18,2023

    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.

    Topics: e-learning e-learning software
    2 min read

    In-person training: helping adults learn effectively

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, Nov 13,2023

    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 download our free Essential Guide to Instructional Design Success.

    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design
    1 min read

    E-Learning games and gamification - avoid the 'weakest link' syndrome

    By Andrew Jackson on Mon, Oct 16,2023

    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 (see my previous email for link to a summary).

    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.

     

    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    E-learning games and gamification - part 2

    By Andrew Jackson on Mon, Sep 11,2023

    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 instructional design training programme.

    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    E-learning games and gamification - part 1

    By Andrew Jackson on Mon, Aug 14,2023

    "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 instructional design training.

    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    Choosing an e-learning authoring tool: more than just feature comparison

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, Jul 17,2023

    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 you are 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.

    Topics: e-learning e-learning software
    2 min read

    The trouble with PowerPoint

    By Andrew Jackson on Mon, Jun 12,2023

    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.

     

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

    Topics: PowerPoint and Visual Communication Instructional Design e-learning
    1 min read

    Saving lives with an e-learning team of two?

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, May 15,2023

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

    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.

    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning Rapid e-learning
    2 min read

    When a piece of learning isn't the solution

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, Apr 17,2023

    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.

    Topics: Instructional Design Performance Support
    3 min read

    Is rapid e-learning just a myth?

    By Andrew Jackson on Mon, Mar 13,2023

    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 authoring tool and you need some training for yourself or your team, take a look at our in-house and publicly scheduled training options.

    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning e-learning software
    3 min read

    Which is most typical of your e-learning: inform or perform?

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, Feb 13,2023

    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, take a look at our Effective E-Learning Toolkit.

    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning e-learning software
    1 min read

    E-Learning? I'm a classroom trainer, get me out of here...

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, Jan 16,2023

    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.

    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    Our very own LMS Boondoggle?

    By Andrew Jackson on Tue, Jan 10,2023

    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.

    Topics: LMS
    1 min read

    E-learning in-house development pros and cons

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, Dec 19,2022

    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.

     

    Topics: e-learning
    2 min read

    E-learning outsourcing pros and cons

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, Dec 12,2022

    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.

    Topics: e-learning
    2 min read

    Animation in e-learning: is it worth it?

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, Nov 14,2022

    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, check out our service options.

    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design e-learning
    2 min read

    Blended Learning: is it just about choice?

    By Pacific Blue on Thu, Oct 6,2022

    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.

    Topics: Instructional Design Blended learning
    2 min read

    Articulate Storyline Training: Use Freeform Interactions to Reimagine the Predictable

    By Andrew Jackson on Wed, Mar 31,2021

     

    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.

    Topics: e-learning e-learning software
    1 min read

    Articulate Storyline Training: Text Variables In Action

    By Andrew Jackson on Fri, Jul 1,2016

    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.

    Topics: e-learning e-learning software
    4 min read

    Articulate Storyline Training: Variables Explained - Storyline's 'Secret Weapon'

    By Andrew Jackson on Wed, Jun 22,2016

     

    In this next Articulate Soryline training blog post, we are going to focus on variables. If you were thinking about buying Storyline and trawled the Articulate website for product information about Storyline and its features, you’d be hard-pressed to find more than a passing reference to variables.


    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.

    Topics: e-learning e-learning software
    1 min read

    Articulate Storyline Training: Masters and Layouts In Action

    By Andrew Jackson on Wed, Jun 8,2016

    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.

    Topics: e-learning e-learning software
    3 min read

    Articulate Storyline Training: Masters and Layouts Explained

    By Andrew Jackson on Thu, Jun 2,2016

     

    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.

    Topics: e-learning e-learning software
    3 min read

    Custom E-Learning Design: Is Your Authoring Tool Holding You Back?

    By Andrew Jackson on Thu, May 26,2016

    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.

    Topics: Course Design e-learning
    3 min read

    Will Convergence Finally Kill Off E-Learning?

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Sep 17,2013

    I've recently been watching the much-praised series House of Cards produced by and starring Kevin Spacey. I was a big fan of the original BBC series and I think he's done a great job of adapting the story for the American political landscape.

    Spacey has also been in the news recently with his keynote address to the Edinburgh TV Festival. His main focus was encouraging new talent and innovation in the media world, but in talking about this, he made some observations that are as pertinent to the world of learning as they are to the world of the media luvvies.

    A couple of months ago I wrote an article about mobile learning for the TrainingZone website. My main point: despite all the hype from the vested interests (desperate to flog you their products and make their big investment gamble pay off), very few people are actually doing anything with mobile learning.
    Related to this, I also noted that it's become rather difficult these days to even define mobile learning given the blurring that's going on between different types of device.

    I've also written previously about how, in general, learning and development folk tend to obsess about delivery mediums and devices and not enough about instructional design the effectiveness of learning. How we get distracted by the technology. How we tend to see learning in silos.

    So my ears pricked up and my attention was immediately grabbed, when I saw this clip from Spacey's speech featured on TV (the bold text is mine, the block capitals are Spacey's):

    "One way that our industry might fail to adapt to the continually shifting sands is to keep a dogmatic differentiation in their minds between various media - separating FILM and TV and MINI-SERIES and WEBISODES and however else you might want to label narrative formats.

    It's like when I'm working in front of a camera…that camera doesn't know if it's a film camera or a TV camera or a streaming camera. It's just a camera. I predict that in the next decade or two, any differentiation between these formats - these platforms - will fall away".

    In the early 1990s, I remember reading Nicholas Negroponte's The Media Lab. At the time, it was revolutionary stuff. Most of what he was predicting back then felt like science fiction - most of it has now come true, of course. But his big idea was convergence. This was the idea that separate technologies like TV, radio and computers would all eventually blur together into a massive multi-media whole.

    Negreponte saw it all happening within a 10 year timespan. That was a bit optimistic. It's still a work in progress and as Spacey suggests, will probably take another decade of two. But coming it is.

    So what would convergence mean for e-learning in particular and learning and development in general. Well, the death of silo thinking, I suspect. As the distinctions between the technology and devices we use to create and access learning become more and more blurred, I think the labels we currently use will become less and less significant or meaningful.

    This will be a painful shift. Plenty of people who have made plenty of money from the old ways of thinking will almost certainly resist convergence for as long as they can. People who use the old-style technologies will be equally reluctant to take on board a whole new way of doing things.

    And it won't be straightforward, either. As far as I can see, convergence in the media world will be a lot easier to achieve than in learning and development. Thinking about the learner experience in a world of convergence will be complex.

    But in the end, I suspect, it will be the learners themselves who will demand this change. As convergence becomes more and more normal in many other aspects of their lives, they simply won't put up with learning that is still packaged into silos.

    Towards the end of his speech, Spacey makes the following observation (the bold text is mine, the block capitals are Spacey's):

    "Is 13 hours watched as one cinematic whole really different than a FILM? Do we define film by being something two hours or less? Surely it goes deeper than that. If you are watching a film on your television, is it no longer a film because you're not watching it in the theatre? If you watch a TV show on your iPad is it no longer a TV show? The device and length are irrelevant. The labels are useless - except perhaps to agents and managers and lawyers who use these labels to conduct business deals. For kids growing up now there's no difference watching Avatar on an iPad or watching YouTube on a TV and watching Game of Thrones on their computer. It's all CONTENT".

    I couldn't agree more. For all of us in learning and development, in the end, it's all LEARNING.
    Topics: e-learning
    3 min read

    The 80/20 Principle and UK Articulate Storyline Training

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Sep 10,2013

    What is the 80/20 Principle exactly? Well the concept of 80/20 is based on the work of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto done in the late 1890s. It was popularised in the 80s by author Richard Koch with his book The 80/20 Principle.

    80/20 is about almost invisible divisions or patterns that exist in most things. It's based on the idea that 80 per cent of results flow from just 20 percent of causes. If you start to identify these patterns and their significance, 80/20 can help you to focus in on what's really important and not worry so much about the rest.

    So how does it work, practically? Let's take the example of learning a piece of software - specifically learning an e-learning authoring tool like Articulate Storyline. Typically, when we're faced with the prospect of using a new piece of software like this, we can feel rather daunted. So much to learn, so little time to learn it, as the saying goes.

    In other words, we tend to look at the whole and convince ourselves we will only be truly competent when we know everything there is to know about the software.  And a good many people will beat themselves up about not knowing all the features well enough.

    Equally, many managers and supervisors love to peddle this thinking and terrorise people over their inability to be good at absolutely everything in the software. Only when you reach perfection, their thinking seems to go, will you be considered a worthy employee.

    80/20 thinking, by contrast, is much more pragmatic and quite counter-intuitive. It's starting point is that aiming for the 100% is a terrible waste of your time and energy. You'll definitely burn yourself out in the quest for perfection. And you almost certainly won't get the best result approaching things this way.

    Much better to identify the significant 20% and focus more of your effort on that. By definition, this significant 20% ensures you will get a better return on your efforts. And by the way, the division doesn't have to be exactly 80/20. It'll depend very much on what you are looking at. Your 80/20 could be as much as 60/40 at one end of the scale or as little as 95/5 at the other end.

    And in case you're wondering, this is not an excuse for sloppiness. It's about the smart allocation of time and resources. When you focus on the significant 20%, you do it to the absolute best of your ability and give it your all - in recognition of the fact that this is where your time and energy is best directed.

    So back to learning Storyline. Where does this leave us? Well it means that the way we conventionally think about learning software is guaranteed to lead to heartache and strife. Typically, we think we should start at the beginning and work our way through from beginner to advanced.

    Applying 80/20 thinking, however, paints a very different picture. It highlights the fact that we only use about 20% of the authoring tool's features to produce about 80% of the results. In other words we only need to be really proficient in a relatively small number of key features that we use over and over again to get most of the results

    For the remaining 80% of the features (that only bring us 20% of the results), we should take a much more pragmatic approach. Because we use those features infrequently, we should be prepared to use a 'just in time', performance support-style approach to using them.

    So, in fact, you don't need to spend 5 days of training, learning every last detail of your new authoring tool. You will have forgotten all those cool, obscure features by the time you come to use them, anyway.

    Much better to get really proficient at the 20% you'll use over and over and worry about the rest as and when you need it. By the way, for an authoring tool like Storyline, I'd estimate it's more like a 70/30 division - but as I mentioned earlier, the principle remains true regardless of the actual percentages.

    And doesn't that feel good? No need to beat yourself up about all the things you can't do. Instead revel in the fact that you are now highly productive, because you have become super-efficient and effective at using those features that really deliver the most bang for your buck.

    If you've got a bit of time of the next few weeks, I can't recommend Koch's book highly enough. And of course you can apply 80/20 to reading it, - Koch encourages you to do this, by the way.

    No need to read the book from cover-to-cover. Identify the chapters or parts of chapters that you think will deliver you the most benefit and focus in on those.

    In times gone by I have heard some people wax lyrical about 80/20 and others rant about how stupid it is - hence my Marmite nickname for it. In my experience it rings true and provides an elegantly simple solution to how best to allocate your time and effort. And although it divides opinion, I've heard far more people praise it that damn it. So I guess the 80/20 principle applies to the division of opinions about it too.


    If you are in the UK and you want some Articulate Storyline training and you can see the benefits of applying 80/20 to that task, check out our 80/20 Productivity Fast Track courses. We guarantee not to teach you every last detail of Storyline!
    Topics: e-learning e-learning software
    3 min read

    E Learning Design: Lessons from Breaking Bad

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Sep 3,2013

    Great excitement and anticipation recently, as Netflix started to show the last 8 episodes of the US TV drama series Breaking Bad.

    If you're a fan of this award-winning series, you'll have followed Walter White's epic journey from high school chemistry teacher to creepy drug kingpin who 'cooks' the best crystal meth known to mankind.  The creator of the series Vince Gilligan describes this as a journey from 'Mr Chips to Scarface'.

    I've been a fan from the very first episode. And I'm sure, fellow fanatics reading this, can't wait to discover how the series finally twists and turns to its conclusion.

    If you've never even heard of Breaking Bad and you enjoy quality TV drama, then I'd encourage you to check it out. I'm pretty sure you won't be disappointed.

    And if you are already wondering what on earth any of this has to do with e-learning and instructional design, then let me explain.

    Like any good Breaking Bad fan, while I was watching the last batch of episodes on DVD, I just had to look at all the special features, too. The first one that caught my eye was called The Writer's Room.

    And how interesting it turned out to be. Apparently, on average, it takes a team of writers around three weeks to hatch an episode of this series.

    I'll just repeat that, in case it didn't sink it the first time. It takes approximately 8 people, 3 weeks to come up with just the outline for 45-50 minutes of television drama.

    The actual writing of that episode takes another 7 days or so. And the filming of the episode takes about 15 days.

    I have no idea how this compares to other TV series, but it  really highlights how  creating a quality product is a major task.

    But most striking of all? The three weeks it takes to work out what is going to happen in the episode. And this is just working out the plot. Satisfying yourself that you are creating credible actions and reactions for the various characters involved.

    Of course, I couldn't help but draw some comparisons with how people typically go about creating a piece of e-learning.

    For a single episode of Breaking Bad, in very rough percentage terms, that three weeks of creating the plot ( effectively the instructional design equivalent of analysis and design)  accounts for about 45% of the total development time. That's pretty astonishing.

    Try selling that percentage of analysis and design time to an e-learning client, internal or external. Chances are you'll be laughed out of the room.

    Very few people would be happy to accept that percentage of a project's time devoted to analysis and design.

    Of course, plotting out a TV series is not the same as doing the analysis and design for a piece of e-learning. For e-learning, you probably don't need 45% of the time devoted to these activities. But you could comfortably spend quite  a bit more time on this stage, percentage-wise, than most people usually do.

    So often, skipping over the analysis and design is the norm. Everyone would much rather skip over that and go straight to development.

    Which is strange. Because as consumers of TV drama, we all know a poorly plotted film with a crumby script that rushes to production is a disaster.  Yet we are quite happy to live with a poorly designed, badly scripted piece of e-learning that gets rushed to development. With predictable results.

    As I wrote last week, as long as we allow authoring tools to frame the e-learning development conversation (and process) we are in trouble. With this approach and mindset, we will be turning out the e-learning equivalent of B-movies or a TV series destined for the afternoon schedules. And we know how embarrassingly bad most of those end-products are.

    For the minority, who are willing to get deadly serious about the analysis and design of their e-learning, popular, performance-improving courses are the gratifying end result.

    With just a small shift in thinking and approach, more Breaking Bad quality e-learning is perfectly achievable for a lot more people.


    Want to be a smart user of your authoring tool, making sure you are in control of the e-learning design decisions?  If you are just getting started with Articulate's Storyline authoring tool check out our Storyline Productivity Fast Track training.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning e-learning software
    2 min read

    ELearning Design: Analogue Instructional Design in a Digital World

    By Andrew Jackson on Tue, Aug 27,2013

    Recently, I spent some time working with an e-learning development team, who by their own admission, had spent years producing nice-looking, but very boring, page-turning e-learning.

    I don't want to knock these guys. They knew they were missing a trick and they were keen and eager to do something about it. And there's no question that after working with them for just a couple of days, they are now much better equipped to produce actual learning - that will have the added bonus of looking good.

    But it struck me. Here are people who are totally at home in the digital world, yet their instructional design skills (such as they were) were very definitely of the analogue variety.

    This is an extreme version of a scenario, I come across all too often. People acquiring and enhancing their digital skills exponentially, but leaving their instructional design skills (if any) trailing far behind.

    Several decades into a brave new world of everything becoming digital, we still seem to be remarkably naive (or hopeful) about software's ability to solve all our learning problems. It's almost as if when we're presented with a piece of software for developing or managing learning, the common sense part of our brain disconnects and we go all gaga.

    No need to think. Just follow the steps of the software procedure and all will be well, we seem to think. If only we can get good at using the software, we all delude ourselves, all will be well.

    Nowhere is this disconnect more apparent than in the world of e-learning. Yes, you can become a Storyline or Captivate super hero. Yes, you might have mastered variables, layers and states. Yes, you might have found a work around to an obscure software glitch that the developers haven't yet fixed.

    But all this blue-caped super-hero-ness comes to nothing if all you are doing is producing sophisticated but vacuous pieces of digital output that your learners would rather not be wasting their time ploughing through.

    And I wonder why we are still seduced by the promise of the software. No-one would be daft  enough to believe that being really proficient with a saw, hammer, chisel and screw-driver would be enough to turn you into a master furniture-maker.

    Proficiency in using these tools and nothing else, would probably enable you to cobble together some very rudimentary pieces of furniture.

    But you would only start creating highly functional and attractive furniture after you had mastered some very different (but nevertheless complementary) design skills.

    Creating e-learning is no different. Master your chosen authoring tool all you like. It won't turn you into a designer of truly effective e-learning. It will simply make you a highly-proficient software user.

    Master the software and apply some digital-world instructional design skills? Well, then there's potential genius in the making.

    As long as software development tools are driving the e-learning conversation, there'll be many a page-turner churned out - to the dismay of your learners.

    To finally deliver on the promise of e-learning, means re-aligning and upgrading your instructional design thinking from analogue to the digital.


    Using Storyline for your e-learning development? Find out about aligning your instructional design thinking with your Storyline skills.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    Courseware Design: When SME Rockstars Just Don't Rock

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Aug 20,2013

    We've heard quite a bit in recent weeks about our new 'rockstar' Bank of England Governor, Mark Kearney. Well, today, I have a 'rockstar' story of my own to share with you today. A story about a subject matter expert who was supposed to be the rockstar of his subject matter world. - in this case systems analysis

    It was 1997. And there was great excitement all round because this great genius was coming to my university to give a guest lecture. (I was studying for a masters degree in systems analysis at the time).

    In the world of systems analysis, he was renowned for thinking outside the box, challenging the conventional wisdom and coming up with innovative solutions to sticky problems.

    At the appointed hour, we all shuffled into the huge lecture theatre ready for a memorable 90 minutes.

    And it certainly was memorable  - but for all the WRONG reasons. Because after only a couple of minutes, it became painfully clear the 'rockstar' just wasn't going to rock.

    He was quiet. Rambling. Obtuse. After about 10 minutes, I was completely lost. No idea about most of what he was saying. Overall, the 'rockstar' was completely oblivious to the needs of his audience. Completely wrapped up in the complexity of his own little world.

    And this story is an interesting one, because it's an extreme example of some very flawed thinking: that the smartest person in the room must be the best and only person to teach us the subject, or design the courseware to teach us the subject.

    What a big mistake. In most cases, the subject matter expert is almost always the very WORST person to take on either of these roles.

    And if you've ever worked your way through a piece of e-learning designed by an SME, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

    Yet in the worlds of both business and academia, the thinking seems to be that your brain simply can't fail to benefit from being exposed to another brain that's much smarter than yours.

    But as my story shows, if the smart brain is so wrapped up in its own complexity and cleverness, nothing much gets communicated. Confusion, boredom and disappointment are usually the only outcomes.

    And, by the way, my apologies if you belong to that small minority of SMEs who are also naturally gifted teachers and/or course designers. If that describes you, trust me when I say you are truly an SME rockstar.

    So what about if you belong the the majority? An SME who doesn't possess natural rockstar status? The good news? There is still hope. It's perfectly possible to make your knowledge and skills more accessible and their transfer to others more effective.

    You'll need to learn some new skills yourself. And you'll need to recognise your wealth of knowledge has to be constantly re-worked and re-calibrated each time you are designing or delivering a piece of learning, so it is suitable for different groups of learners and different delivery mediums.

    You'll also have to learn how to carefully structure and refine your knowledge and skills to make sure what you are designing or delivering actually results in useful, effective learning.

    But if you are up for the challenge, there's almost certainly a great piece of learning  or two inside of you, just waiting to get out.


    If you are you an SME designing courseware or delivering learning and you feel like you could do with some help and guidance, check out our Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Instructional Design Success.
    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design
    2 min read

    Multimedia E-Learning: Cut That CEO Video Right Now

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Jun 18,2013

     I recently listened to a great interview with Jonathan Hall. Jonathan spent years working in TV, starting life at Australia's ABC. Later in life he also worked as a learning executive at the BBC.

    These days, one of the many things he does is to teach and advise people in learning and development about how to make great videos for use in training.

    If you've ever been involved with using multimedia in e-learning, at some point in your career you will almost certainly have come across the senior person in the organisation who is determined to get his or her face onto the start of an e-learning package.

    You know the kind of thing. One of those 'inspirational' pep talks that is supposed to motivate the learners to work their way through the deathly boring e-learning that's about to follow.

    Now, we all know, most leaders are absolutely c**p at these kinds of videos. Cheesy doesn't even come close to describing how embarrassingly bad most of these efforts are.

    But because the person in question is the leader, no- one can tell them the awful truth. Or worse still, deep down, they know they are c**p, but the bevy of obsequious lackeys who make up their inner circle just egg them on to do the deed.

    Jonathan had some very clear advice for anyone thinking about doing one of these introductory videos: don't. Unless you are an absolutely gifted speaker or your message is so utterly compelling and relevant that people are desperate to hear it, you are wasting everyone's time.

    And the reason for this? These videos are plain boring. Most people will lose interest within about 8 -12 seconds. As Jonathan explained, there is no way you can make these videos interesting - only moderately less boring.

    Another reason for not using a talking head -  people quickly forget what has been said. Jonathan cited the example of a weather forecast. Apparently people do remember the maps and the graphics they see during the forecast, but most can remember very little of what the forecaster actually said.

    This is because, surprise, surprise, video is about showing things happening. And with a talking head, nothing much is happening. People don't watch a video to see nothing happening. Hence the low retention and rapid turn off of interest.

    And TV people know this very well. Mostly, when a talking head is used in a TV programme, either, the shots will be very short; or, you'll hear the voice of the person, but see shots that illustrate what they are saying.

    So next time you are faced with the prospect of including a talking head video in your e-learning, try using Jonathan's advice as an argument for not going that route.

    And if you are absolutely forced to include it, here are a couple of tips. Make sure you shoot with two cameras - one with a long shot and the other with a close up. That way you can at least cut between the two shots to provide some kind of movement and interest for the poor old viewer. See if you can shoot some interesting footage that illustrates what is being said, so you can cut to these shots at various points during the video.


    Need help with multimedia or any other aspect of developing your e-learning? Check out our popular Instructional Design Training programmes.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    Scenario-based E Learning Design: Participant or Observer?

    By Andrew Jackson on Tue, Jun 11,2013

    It's mid afternoon on the second day of an in-house instructional design course. We've been focused on e-learning for the whole two days.

    One big problem this client of ours is grappling with: how to make product information effective and memorable. They are from a graphic design background and sort of fell into creating e-learning a few years ago when a major client asked them if they could.

    They are in an industry where glossy, sexy and downright over-the-top and in your face is the order of the day. They would be the first to admit that up until now their e-learning has been shed loads of style over not very much substance.

    To help them move away from glossy, attractive page-turners full of click to reveal and drag and drop, I've asked them to flip their thinking. We've spent the last hour thinking about how their learners might actually use this factual product information, rather than about how to make its presentation "engaging" (their usual focus).

    This has been extremely hard for them. They are several steps removed from the learners. It's never occurred to them to try to get closer. This alone has been a major 'light-bulb moment'.

    We've been slogging away, getting ideas on the flip chart. As they are several steps removed from the learners, some of this is just guess work. So a major post-training activity is to validate these ideas. Find out what the learners actually do with all the product info that currently just gets stuffed into a page-turning course. But overall, they are doing well.

    As we are going through this brainstorming process, I've been slipping in examples from pieces of e-learning that show product information 'in action' rather than as page-turning, factual content.

    After seeing several of these examples, Geoff, one of the course participants, came up with an interesting question. If you're creating scenarios that reflect how the learners actually use the product information, do you make the learner one of the active participants in the scenario or do you 'show' them a scenario and get them to evaluate it.

    We stop to consider this for several minutes. Putting the learner fair and square in the middle of the scenario makes the learning highly relevant and authentic. Unlikely your learner would fail to see its relevance. Great, also, for learners who can't wait to roll up their sleeves and have a go.

    On the other hand, some learners might be all too well aware of the hands-on from their day-to-day experience. They might actually value the opportunity to take a step back to consider what they do.  From this more reflective perspective, they would probably prefer to watch the scenario unfold and evaluate what's going on, as it happens.

    The only way you'll truly get to a decent answer to this question is with a good sense of how the majority of your target learners are likely to respond. If you work inside an organisation, you have a fair chance of really getting to know your learners.

    If you are a supplier, you may simply be blocked from doing this every step of the way. In which case you'll have to make some intelligent, educated guesses or build both approaches into your course.

    Knowing your learners can end up sounding like such an old cliche. But as this story shows, it's always a key element in creating authentic, effective e-learning.


    If you are grappling with making dry, factual information authentic and relevant for your learners, take a look at our free Effective E-Learning Toolkit:

    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    Instructional Designer Essentials: Making Learning Meaningful

    By Pacific Blue on Tue, Mar 26,2013

    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 largely 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. Clueless 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 think 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 compared with 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.

    Our Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Instructional Design Success can’t teach you everything you need to know about instructional design in a dozen or so pages.

    What it can do is to set you on that alternative path. Steer you away from PowerPoint and talk. Guide you towards a better way of transferring knowledge and skills. Help turn your teaching, training or learning into something your learners look forward to, because they know it works.

    Download your free copy here.
    Topics: Instructional Design
    2 min read

    Why So Much E-Learning Feedback is Just Pointless Rubbish

    By Pacific Blue on Thu, Mar 7,2013

    One of my pet hates about e-learning authoring tools is how hard they make it to create meaningful feedback. For years now, we have been stuck in a world where 'Correct' or 'Incorrect' are the default options.

    Learners would (quite rightly) soon have something to say if a trainer stood at the from of the room and offered only these two responses. So why is it okay for these to be the almost universally accepted standard for creating feedback in e-learning?

    The good news? There are lots of ways to create effective, meaningful feedback for your learners in an e-learning package. The bad news, you might have to work a bit harder to get the responses in place. And you might have to avoid (or adapt) some of the ready-made interaction templates to get a better result.

    But in my view, if you think 'Correct' and 'Incorrect' are perfectly fine and that's all the feedback you are prepared to provide for your learners, maybe it's time to re-think your career?

    If you are up for the challenge of more effective feedback, what can you do?

    As an alternative, there is intrinsic feedback. This is something we are all familiar with. Insult your boss, swear at his wife, kick his dog across the car park and you'll get some pretty harsh intrinsic feedback. In this example, it will almost certainly be: the sack.

    Cross a busy road without checking the traffic first. You may get lucky and receive no feedback at all. But chances are your intrinsic feedback will range from a a few bruises, to broken bones, to serious injury or even sudden death. Ouch. There's some serious intrinsic feedback for you.

    Okay, some extreme examples here, but you get the idea. And think about it for a minute. Almost any action we take in life will have some form of intrinsic feedback. For instructional designers there's an important lesson. This kind of feedback is highly effective (unless it kills us, that is). We usually remember it. And in its more extreme varieties, it instantly changes our behaviour or thinking forever.

    In e-learning, if you put your learners in a realistic context or scenario, then you definitely need to be think about the related actions or decisions they could take and the intrinsic feedback you could provide based on what they do.

    So intrinsic feedback is a great alternative to just correct/incorrect, but it isn't always enough. This is where instructional feedback comes into play.

    First you get the authentic, contextualised intrinsic feedback which demonstrates the consequences of your decisions or actions. Then you get some more detailed guidance on why or how your decisions or actions where good or bad.

    In the case of the good, you provide some positive reinforcement. For the bad, you can highlight what to avoid in future and what to do instead. Here's a simple example:

    Situation: you have a sales prospect who fills in an enquiry form on your website about one of your services.
    Action:  The learner contacts the prospect 6 days after they have  filled in the form
    Intrinsic feedback: The sale is lost. The prospect has already signed up for a competitor's service
    Instructional feedback: When people are searching for a product or service online, it usually means they are in serious buying mode. The stats bear this out. There is a direct link between the speed of responding to a website enquiry and the likelihood of the enquirer becoming a customer. So when an enquiry comes in, deal with it fast. Or you will quite likely lose the sale to a competitor.

    Combine intrinsic and instructional feedback to help your learners really understand why their actions and decisions are correct or incorrect.
    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    What Reality TV Can Teach Us About E-Learning

    By Pacific Blue on Wed, Mar 6,2013

    If there's one thing we've been bombarded with over the last decade or so, it's reality TV. Love it or loathe it, you can't escape it. Or it's popularity.

    Of course, you might argue it should actually be called UNreality TV, given that many of the situations participants find themselves in are completely contrived. But there's no escaping the reality of the raw emotions  and reactions the participants exhibit as they work through the situations they've been placed in.

    So could we learn a thing or two from reality TV when we are designing e-learning? This might seem a bit of a stretch to some of you, but I think the answer is 'yes'.

    Why do I say that? Well first off, there's the big problem with e-learning: too much focus on knowledge of content, not enough focus on its real world application. And we all know the result. Deathly dull screens of content and a few predictable interactions, all guaranteed to bore your learners to death.

    While learning isn't always about doing, in a workplace setting, it's pretty rare for you not to have to do something with the knowledge or expertise you learn.

    So this is where the parallel with reality TV comes in. Reality TV is all about situations and how people respond to them.

    While we probably don't want our learners sobbing at their computer screens or plotting to do down their fellow learners, putting them in some reasonably authentic settings and scenarios and challenging them to respond to those situations, is a reality TV method we should most definitely think about adapting for our own e-learning purposes.

    And, by the way, this is not about creating expensive simulations or virtual reality worlds. With a bit of thought and imagination you can easily turn potentially dry content into interesting, realistic activity.

    As an example, last year I was working with some consultants in the retail sector. They wanted to create some e-learning to teach their learners how to carry out a process to analyse if potential clients were actually worth approaching.

    Their assumption at the start of the development was that the most we could do was tell learners  about the process and then test them on their knowledge of it.

    Instead I had them focus on what the learners actually needed to do at each stage in the process. No surprises, this turned out to be a handful of tasks each time. Then we worked out how to best re-create each of those tasks in an e-learning environment.

    In some cases it didn't take long to come up with an easy-to-create solution. In other cases, there was a bit of head scratching while we worked out how to simplify and adapt things within the constraints of e-learning.

    But the result? A very different package from the content-centric one they had initially envisaged. Not only did the learners  find out about the process, they also had chance to practice it. Just like they would have to back in the workplace.

    So a bit of reality e-learning provided relevant practice (not just testing of knowledge). It enabled learners to try out their newly acquired knowledge in a supportive, structured environment. And it meant learners went back into the workplace far better prepared than if they had just been told lots of stuff  and then tested on their knowledge of it.

    Topics: Instructional Design e-learning
    2 min read

    Beyond Simple Likes and Dislikes: How to Really Evaluate E-Learning

    By Andrew Jackson on Wed, Mar 6,2013

    I don't know about you, but the word evaluation can send a shiver down my spine. For many of us in learning and development it's a word that can have so many negative connotations, we sometimes fudge or avoid thinking about it completely.

    I think these negative associations are because, typically, we take too narrow a view of the word.  For most people evaluation is about whether or not the learners liked the course or the trainer - or the chocolate biscuits served up at break time.

    This kind of evaluation really gives us little more than broad, hard to quantify opinions about something. What we really need to do is start  thinking  about evaluation as a means to really identify what's effective about a piece of learning. And what's not.

    If we adopt this broader view of evaluation, then it has a place through the entire design and development process, not just at the end. This is true for any kind of learning, but is especially true for e-learning.

    I say that because unlike classroom training, e-learning is more time-consuming and more expensive to refine once it's been created. If you are evaluating its potential effectiveness at every stage in the design process, it's much more likely to hit its target first time, avoiding the need for costly revisions.

    We can take a leaf out  of the usability designers book here.  They do something very close to what I'm about to describe with website design. It's a simple, practical exercise which frequently gets overlooked or skipped over in a typical e-learning design process.

    Work 1-to-1 with some typical learners
    This is something you should do while you are still in the prototype or storyboard stage of development. The only difficult parts are getting access to a learner or two and co-ordinating diaries. I say 'only'. I know those can be two major difficulties. But it's worth persisting, because the dividends this exercise  pays are tremendous.

    Sit with the learner. Have them evaluate the prototype or storyboard and give you their feedback. There are various things you can look at. How clear or understandable is the content?  Are the proposed interactions or activities relevant and meaningful? Can they make sense of the overall interface and the specific navigation?

    Do this with a handful of learners and you'll very quickly get a sense of what is problematic or confusing for everyone and what is just a subjective opinion held by a single individual.

    You'll need to be a good note taker. Because you'll usually get plenty of valuable comments which you won't want to forget. Better still, (with the learner's permission) you might consider recording what they have to say.

    Jakob Nielsen tells a funny story about how website designers react the first time they do an activity like this. The first user is wheeled in and starts to look at the design. Some things just don't make sense. 'They must be a particularly stupid user, not to get that" thinks the designer.  Then the second user is wheeled in. Same problem with the design. Then the third. Same problem again. And so on. Until the designer 'gets it' and the penny drops: their design is the problem. Not the intelligence of the users.

    And that's the beauty of carrying out an exercise like this, during your e-learning development. It strips out any ego that might've found its way into the design. It forces you as the designer to really see how the learners react to it. In the end, this helps you make changes that your learners will only thank you for.
     

     

    Topics: Instructional Design Measurement and evaluation e-learning
    3 min read

    An Olympics confession, Improving Performance and the Power of Kaizen

    By Andrew Jackson on Tue, Aug 21,2012

     It's time to confess. July 2005,  when we learned we would be the hosts of the 2012 Olympic Games, I wasn't that fussed. I wasn't anti. But not being much of a sports fan, the excitement mostly passed me by.

    Little did I think, 7 years later,  I would be cheering Team GB along and delighting in the fantastic achievements of the winners and empathising so much with the losers.

    In case you're wondering, I haven't suddenly become a devoted sports fan, but I couldn't help being swept up by the interest we all have in seeing truly remarkable individuals succeed. And the L&D bit of my brain couldn't help be fascinated by how this group of people had achieved so much stunning success.

    Actually, my interest started a couple of weeks before the Olympics with Bradley Wiggins winning the Tour de France. (Another confession - I'd never heard of the bloke until about a week before the Tour de France started).

    In the deluge of press coverage following the competition, we started to get some insights into how that fantastic win came about.

    Several things grabbed my attention. First, when Wiggo and team announced their ambition, most people thought they were bonkers. Second, not only have they proved those doubters wrong, they have done so far sooner than even they had imagined they could. Finally, 2011 had been a truly abysmal year for them and anybody looking on from the outside would probably have laughed even louder at the possibility of them achieving their stated ambition.

    So what changed? What turned things around so rapidly and so decisively?

    I can't claim to have the absolute scoop on all this, but here's what I gleaned from watching interviews on TV and reading articles in the press.

    That truly abysmal year I just mentioned was the catalyst for change and, ultimately, success. It was reaching a terrible, crushing low in their performance that forced the team to step back, re-asses and re-think their entire approach.

    They went against conventional wisdom. From what I can understand, the conventional wisdom in the cycling world is that you get better by being in lots of competitions. That seems intuitive doesn't it?  Practice makes perfect, after all.

    They decided to go for the counter-intuitive. Cut back on the number of competitions and focus instead on training and preparation for competitions they were going to enter.

    They completely re-engineered their approach to training and preparation. This involved breaking the entire process down, examining every aspect in detail and squeezing performance improvements out of every last bit of it.

    This, it turns out, is the secret of Team GB's success, too.  They refer to it as 'the science of marginal gains'. Dave Brailsford sums it up nicely in a recent BBC interview:

    "The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together. There's fitness and conditioning, of course, but there are other things that might seem on the periphery, like sleeping in the right position, having the same pillow when you are away and training in different places. They're tiny things but if you clump them together it makes a big difference."

    The Japanese were the pioneers of something very similar in the world of business  - you may have heard of  kaizen. It's the 'continuous improvement of working practices'.

    Two things strike me about all this. First, most employees in most organisation are taught to fear failure in their day-to-day work almost as much as they fear receiving a redundancy notice. In fact, for many, the two are inextricably linked. If the first happens, the second will almost certainly follow.

    Yet, as the example of team Wiggo shows, failure is sometimes the most powerful motivator for subsequent success. Nobody wants or sets out to fail. It feels awful when it happens and it can be soul destroying. And I'm certainly not suggesting organisations should go around encouraging their employees to fail.

    But, I'd bet a fairly large sum of money that organisations which take a grown-up view of failure are better places to work and, overall, end up being more successful.

    Second, because employees fear failure so profoundly, most follow conventional solutions. So in many organisations, everyone just chugs along in quiet desperation. Everyone knows it could be so much better, but who's going to rock the boat and suggest outrageously unconventional change? Only a brave soul, but oh boy, the ones who do are likely to reap the benefits.
    Topics: Instructional Design Learning Psychology Measurement and evaluation
    1 min read

    Instructional Designer Training: Integrating Practice in Your Design

    By Pacific Blue on Fri, Mar 16,2012

    When we struggled to learn things or carry out new tasks as children, it's more than likely that our parents or teachers reminded us that 'practice makes perfect' or told us to keep going and to 'try, try, try again'.

    As adults, we might find those phrases irritating (or down right annoying); but, you know what, hate to have to admit it, but mums and teachers really did know best!

    This is borne out by some research into the use of practice activities in e-learning. It should be interesting to anyone involved in instructional design or instructinal designer training.

    Comparing learning from two versions of an e-learning course, (one offering more practice activities than the other) researchers found that the version with more practice activities increased learning for both higher and lower ability learners.

    In this study, both lower and higher ability learners scored 15% higher on end of course tests compared with those who had taken the version of the course with fewer practice activities.

    So it does seem that if higher learner achievement is a key goal (and surely it will be), broadly speaking, more practice will mean better learning outcomes.

    The other key point in relation to practice activities is the pacing of learning through a course. A good many studies have been carried out around this. The research has consistently highlighted two key points:

    First, that spacing practice activities through a course really is more effective.

    Second, the benefit does not show up immediately. Longer term studies have revealed that over a period of several years, spaced practice leads to much better long-term retention of learning.

    Need more instructional designer training like this? Check out our flexible, modular programme.

    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design
    3 min read

    The Trouble with the Virtual Classroom - Logged in and Gabbing Away

    By Andrew Jackson on Mon, Mar 12,2012

    It's 10.30 at night. I'm sat in front of my computer logged in as a participant on a webinar being run in the US.

    No idea how many other people are taking part in this 'training' - but after two and half hours of non-stop lecture and 30 minutes to go before we reach the finishing line, my attention levels are at a low point. I've already snuck off to the loo a couple of times and made several cups of tea.

    While the overall quality of the content is very good, the presentation is terrible and the interaction with the presenters zero. They  spend so much time labouring each topic, it's easy to slip away for a couple of minutes and not to have missed much by the time you come back.

    If you've had an online 'training' experience like this one, you'll understand why there is frequently such a gulf between an organisation's enthusiasm for the virtual classroom and the learners' lack of willingness to engage with it.

    And organisations seem to be very enthusiastic. In 2009 an ASTD survey revealed that 23% of companies surveyed were using online learning compared with only 10% in 2003. An IITT survey here in the UK last year showed that 44% of companies surveyed anticipated making greater use of live online learning.

    You can understand why. The cost and time savings are compelling and the technology is relatively cheap and easy to deploy. "What's not to like?" would be the question on the lips of many advocates.

    In theory it should be attractive to learners, too. The opportunity to get more focused, bite-sized training with minimum convenience would seem like a no-brainer.

    In practice, as my experience as a participant shows, for many learners online training is little more than a live, scheduled version of a deathly boring e-learning module - with minimal interaction.

    But, as always, it doesn't have to be this way. There are three key factors involved in making live online training successful:

    1. Is it a meeting, a webinar or a training session?
    Seems obvious when written down in black and white, but many people planning and running live online sessions are not particularly clear on what type of session it  is they are running.

    An online meeting is a virtual equivalent of a face-to-face session where issues are discussed, information is shared and decisions are made.

    A webinar is much closer to a live seminar or lecture - largely presenter focused with potentially large numbers of attendees and  limited interactivity between presenter and audience.

    A live online training session should aim to replicate what happens in a classroom. Trainer led, but with plenty of opportunity for activities and interactions between trainer and learners and between learners working in pairs or small groups.

    2. Is your trainer ready for the challenge?
    Understandably, many trainers feel that they can never replicate the real classroom  experience online. You can't see the participants, you can't read their body language. They can't see you. How can it possibly work?

    The reality is different. Taking exactly the kind of care you would over preparing and running a classroom event, it's perfectly possible to run a throughly engaging, effective and successful online event. It does take time, however, to adjust to a very different medium and understand how to do things somewhat differently in the virtual classroom.

    3. Do you understand how to fully operate your virtual classroom?
    One critical success factor is familiarity with the software you are using to deliver your virtual classroom event.

    Unless you understand all the features and functions available to you, you'll never be able to design and deliver the best event you could. And this is no different, by the way, from taking into account all the different facilities,  equipment and aids you have available when designing and delivering a classroom course.

    One final point - not all software is created equal. Some systems have more sophisticated ways of enabling interaction than others - something to be very aware of when making a buying decision.

    If your organisation is one of the 44% thinking about making use of (or perhaps wanting to make better use of) the virtual classroom, and you'd like to get best practice principles and hands-on experience of running a virtual event, this is one of the modules available in our instructional design programme.
    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design Train the Trainer
    2 min read

    How Instructional Designers Can Manage Out of Control SMEs

    By Andrew Jackson on Fri, Feb 24,2012

    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 we usually know lots about this topic. We can frequently talk about it for hours without getting bored. We can tell anyone willing to listen about its every last detail. In that sense, we are all subject matter experts (SMEs) in something.

    As instructional designers, when we have a talkative SME in front of us and limited time to get the information we want, it's worth remembering how our own passion for a particular subject matter can allow us to get carried away.

    So aside from being more empathetic to a talkative SME, is there anything else we can do to make our time with them more productive? I think there are four areas to consider when gathering content from SMEs. By the way, 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 your 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 work before, during and after your content gathering, the analysis phase of your project need not be an out of control nightmare.

    If out of control SMEs are your current nightmare, check out our the Analysis and Planning modules in our instructional design programme for help on dealing with this problem.
    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design e-learning
    1 min read

    Does Compliance E-Learning Have to Be Boring?

    By Andrew Jackson on Tue, Feb 14,2012

     At a conference a year or so ago, I noticed a seminar that drew a good crowd was entitled, "Who says e-learning compliance training has to be boring?". Well not me for sure.

    Perhaps, I'm a bit naive, but even now (after many years in the world of learning) it shocks me that some people can shrug their shoulders and say., "well this material is pretty dry and boring, so we'll just have to accept that the way we deliver it is dry and boring". To me that's a bit like the designers at a car company saying, "well it's a bit difficult to design a really comfortable car seat, so we'll just fit the car with uncomfortable wooden benches and the passengers will have to lump it."

    Perhaps the acceptance of poor quality compliance training is linked to the box ticking mentality that often accompanies the dreaded 'c' word. We have to do the training  -  even though nobody wants to, so let's just collectively hold our noses and all be bored together - designers, trainers and delegates. Oh yes, and let's make it even worse, by delivering it as the most boring, sleep-inducing piece of e-learning you have ever seen.

    From this point of view, you'd think that compliance in a particular job role or organisation wasn't something anybody really needed to know or do. Yet it most definitely is.

    So rather than treating it as a dry abstract topic, why not relate it back to the context or contexts in which learners need to be compliant? Why not provide the learners with challenging, life-like scenarios and activities that require them to think about what they actually need to do to be compliant. How about some intrinsic, contextual feedback that vividly demonstrates the consequences of not being compliant or trying to cut corners.

    If you find yourself nodding your head and you are about to embark on creating some compliance e-learning (or any kind of e-learning for that matter) and you would like to read more about the four-pronged approach to e-learning development just described (context, challenge, activity and feedback) take a look at our free  'Effective E-Learning Toolkit'.
    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design e-learning
    1 min read

    In E-Learning Is it User or Learner Interface Design?

    By Pacific Blue on Wed, Jan 25,2012

    It was the late Steve Jobs who said: "Design is not what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." Classic Steve. In just a couple of sentences he sums up one of the fundamental factors in Apple's phenomenal success.

    But you don't have to be the producer of uber-cool computers and gadgets to find relevance in his words. They could be equally applied to aspects of e-learning - particularly with regard to the interface we devise for learners.

    In my view, there's an interesting distinction to be made here between User Interface Design (UID) and Learner Interface Design (LID). The first is probably a more familiar term than the latter.

    In an e-learning context, UID is about total simplicity and focusing on the ease of use of a course. Good UID shouldn't leave people pondering the outcome of alternative actions. It generally aims to minimise mental involvement. The overriding imperative of good UID? "Don't make the user think".

    Now here's the difficult bit. LID, by contrast, has exactly the opposite imperative. It's totally about helping learners to think, learn and perform. Designing a learning interface is about getting learners to engage their mental faculties in order to learn. And this might involve confronting them with problems, challenges and issues.

    In designing a learner interface, the focus should be on making it relevant and motivating. Something that will help the learner remember and implement what they learnt long after the learning event.

    So, the challenge for e-learning developers is two-fold. First, being clear about the difference between the two concepts. Second, understanding where and when to apply one or the other.

    Topics: Course Design e-learning
    1 min read

    Designing Training Programmes: What About Learner Self Awareness?

    By Pacific Blue on Mon, Jul 18,2011

    When we are designing training programmes, how much should we consider learners' self-awareness of their learning preferences?

    At the risk of doing a Donald Rumsfeld (he of the 'known unknowns'), one of the things that I find fascinating about learning and knowledge transfer is whether we know what we know.

    In other words, how much are we really able to assess our own learning needs and preferences?

    On this topic, I offer you a fascinating piece of research carried out by a group of people with the snappy surnames of Schnackenberg, Sullivan, Leader and Jones.

    In their research, a group of learners taking an e-learning course, were given a survey about their preferences for the amount of practice they do when learning - either high or low.

    The learners were then assigned to two different e-learning courses one with a high level of practice, the other with minimal practice.

    Half the learners were given the version of the course that matched their preference, the other half were deliberately mismatched.

    I've written previously about the significance of practice activities in learning, so you may not be surprised to discover that regardless of their preference, those who took the version of the course with more practice scored significantly higher on a post-course test than those who had taken the version with minimal practice.

    First of all, this highlights the importance of practice activities in learning. But the results are important for another reason. They chime with quite a bit of other research that points to a frequent mismatch between what we think we want as learners and what actually produces results.

    In other words, our perceived preferences about how we like to learn are not always good indicators of the way we actually need to learn.

    If you are involved with designing training programmes and what to learn more about instructional design (or get help with creating a course) take a look at our instructional design programme.

    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design Learning Psychology
    2 min read

    Does Motivation Play a Role in Our Learning and Development

    By Pacific Blue on Wed, Jul 6,2011

    Is a successful learning experience purely about external factors or do our own internal beliefs and motivations play a part?

    We've all had good and bad learning experiences, so this is a fascinating question. How much is that success or failure purely down to external influences?

    If we go back to the 1930s, Thorndike's Law of Effect holds that a correct answer needs a response to reward the learner. A "Well done, that's the right answer", from the trainer helps strengthen the association between the question and the correct answer and increases the probability of a similar correct response the next time around.

    I think most people in the world of learning and development would broadly agree with this view. But this emphasises the external environment. What about if we also put an individual's beliefs into the centre of the picture. It's likely that we then have several other factors to take into account.

    1. Beliefs about yourself
    Do you believe you can succeed and acquire the knowledge and skills you are setting out to learn? This level of belief varies tremendously and is influenced by existing knowledge and experience. Go outside of familiar territories and domains and it is likely our self-belief and confidence will plummet.

    2. Beliefs about the learning content
    Is the content interesting? Genuine personal interest makes learners far more willing to engage with content - even when dull and boring. If personal interest is low or non-existent than we need to create situational interest. In other words, grab learners' attention and interest by making sure the learning content is well-crafted and engaging.

    3. Beliefs about the success or failure of learning
    Do learners believe the outcome they achieved was under or outside their control? Do they believe it was a poor trainer that caused them to fail or sheer good luck that they did well? Whether the outcome is positive or negative, research into something called attribution theory suggests a learner who believes an outcome was caused by factors outside their control, is far less likely to be motivated to succeed in the future.

    By contrast, a learner who attributes success or failure to their own effort (or lack of it) is far more likely to be productive and put in more effort next time around.

    This suggests it is hugely important to foster an environment that encourages learners to understand (and believe) that the success of learning outcomes is clearly within their control

    Of course, all of this is just scraping the surface of an immensely complex (and very interesting) area. But it's a good reminder that we shouldn't just focus on external factors (important as they are) when thinking about how to achieve successful learning.

      

    Topics: Instructional Design Course Design Learning Psychology
    2 min read

    Evaluating Training 2: Wear the Red Pants with Pride

    By Andrew Jackson on Fri, May 27,2011

    Last time, I shared Jim Kirkpatrick's story of 'red pants (trousers) syndrome' to illustrate how difficult it can be to get people to change the way they do things if they are unsupported after a training event.

    The Kirkpatrick four levels are all about minimising outbreaks of 'red trousers syndrome'. They encourage you to start at the end of the learning process, identify the results you want to achieve and figure out what kind of learning needs to take place to make that happen.

    Key to all this is not taking the 'sheep dip' approach to learning. In other words, the 'figuring out' of what you need has to take account of the fact that traditional approaches to designing learning are not necessarily the most effective.

    This is borne out by some astonishing results Jim shared with us. They are from long-term research carried out by Rob Brinkerhoff, comparing the benefits of a fairly traditional approach to training (emphasis on a one-off event) with a more collaborative approach (more balance between a training event and follow up activities). Here's a summary of the results.

    In a traditional approach to training design, 90% of the time is spent on design and development of the training event and only 10% on pre and post development activity. In this approach, typically the following happens to learners:
    • 15% do not try the new skills
    • 70% try to implement the learning but fail
    • 15% achieve and sustain the new learning
    In a more collaborative approach, the training designers work very closely with the client and 25% of time is devoted to pre-training prep and 50% to post-training follow-up. (Note: only 25% of the time is devoted to the training event itself). In this approach, typically the following happens to learners:
    • 5% do not try the new skills
    • 10% try to implement the learning but fail
    • 85% achieve and sustain the new learning
    This is one of the most compelling pieces of research-based evidence I have seen for a long time. It has made me realise that here at Pacific Blue we should make much greater efforts than we currently do to encourage, you, our clients to engage in this kind of collaborative approach.

    There's no question this is a more complex approach. It involves the co-operation of colleagues and managers who may not be taking part in the training event. But look at the results.

    The good news, (as I've mentioned in previous emails) - we think some of the pain of getting colleagues involved can be minimised through some aspects of mobile learning. This has the potential to provide quite personalised follow-up for learners and to enable virtual support networks and communities without taking up vast amounts of colleagues' time.

    If you are interested in discovering more about effectively evaluating your learning, check out our courses and services.
    Topics: Measurement and evaluation
    2 min read

    Evaluating Training 1: Would You Wear the Red Pants?

    By Andrew Jackson on Fri, May 27,2011

    I had a great day recently at the Training Zone Live event. The highlight of the day for me was Jim Kirkpatrick's session on his (and his Dad's) four levels for evaluating the effectiveness of training.

    Jim was feeling a little jet-lagged, having just flown in from Australia the day before - but he ran an inspiring session, nevertheless.

    At one point, he explained to us that his Australian audience had introduced him to 'red pants syndrome' (that's pants in the American sense, by the way, so 'red trousers syndrome' for us Brits).

    So 'red trousers syndrome' is where you go on a training course and learn to do something in a particular way, then go back on the job and start implementing what you've learned. Only to discover that no one else much is bothering.

    In other words, it's a bit like wearing a pair of red trousers to work everyday, when everyone else wears black ones. You come in on the first day, feeling pretty pleased with your new look. But you quickly realise people are staring at your new trousers. Maybe over time they start to comment negatively on your appearance. Perhaps they even start avoiding you.

    In that situation, how long are you going to hold out? How long will it be before you start wearing black trousers, too?

    A nice metaphor to highlight the big problem that exists in many organisations. The one where the training happens, everyone feels enthused, but within a relatively short time they all go back to doing things in the same old way.

    Jim is pretty clear on what the consequences of not addressing this problem will be: training departments as we know them will eventually become obsolete.

    But as Jim explained, if you start at the end and identify the results you want to achieve and work back to work out exactly what you need to achieve those results, you can greatly minimise an outbreak of 'red trousers syndrome'.

    Next time, I'd like to share the results of some long-term research carried out by one of Jim's colleagues. This shows how avoiding 'sheep dip' training can have a massive impact on changing behaviours and embedding learning.
     
    If you are interested in discovering more about effectively evaluating your learning, check out our courses and services.
    Topics: Measurement and evaluation