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.

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.

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.

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.

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.