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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking for some pointers to polish up your e-learning design? Take a look at our free 'Creating Boredom-Busting E-Learning Toolkit'.

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

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

This gives us L&D folk quite the dilemma.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The objections take a variety of angles:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking at improving the effectiveness and impact of the training you design and deliver across your organisation? Take a look at our free guide on Evaluating Training Effectiveness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ownership

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

Planning

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

Connecting

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

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

Focusing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modes 

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

Methods 

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

Instructional design 

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

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

Getting started with designing courses or feel like you need to strengthen your underpinning knowledge about all this? Our free Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Instructional Design Success is a great starting point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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