We've heard quite a bit in recent weeks about our new 'rockstar' Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney. 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.


Are you an SME designing courseware or delivering learning and you feel like you could do with some help? As a first step, check out our Instructional Design Essentials Checklist to find out your current strengths and weaknesses.

 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 e-instructional design modules.

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.

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.

 

Want to find out how your e-learning feedback (and more) stacks up against some best practices we cover in our impact and instructional design programme? Take our Discover Your E-Learning Impact scorecard to find out. It's completely free, only takes a couple of minutes to complete and you get personalised results almost instantly.

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.

Like to discover more about making your e-learning authentic, relevant and applicable to your learners? Check out our on-demand webinar on this very topic: Re-Frame Your E-Learning to Increase Impact and Workplace Performance.

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.

Thinking about how more practice might help to make perfect within your learning design projects? Check out our impact and instructional design programme options. Flexible and modular. ITOL accredited.

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.

If e-learning design and its overall effectiveness is something you are concerned with or responsible for, why not take our E-learning Impact Scorecard to help you benchmark where you might be with your overall e-learning design approach and any associated tools and techniques. It only takes a couple of minutes to complete and it's entirely free.

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 new to the world of learning and instructional design (or want to enhance your existing skills) then our modular impact and instructional design programme is very focused on practical tools, techniques and principles designed to get you better results from the training courses you design. The programme is ITOL accredited too, so you have the option to get a meaningful certificate or diploma from it upon completion.

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.