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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real challenge is threefold:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story brings home a hugely important point it's easy to forget - especially if you work in a large organisation

Organisations are not interested in creating a piece of e-learning, per se, but in meeting a specific organisational goal. E-learning is simply one way of helping achieve that goal. 

So at the very start of your e-learning development process, it's always a good idea to step away from the solution and focus on the organisational goal. This gives you the opportunity to assess the best learning solution to meet the goal. 

This simple assessment can potentially save you many hours of wasted effort and many thousands of pounds of mis-directed budget.  Use your resources as and when appropriate. Not all pieces of learning need to be created equal!

If you need help with designing your e-learning, check out our e-learning design options.

If you are an L&D manager or L&D team member, you’ll probably get bombarded with requests for training week in and week out.

If your L&D function is well-positioned and well-respected, then you’ll almost certainly be in a position to do some analysis before you simply acquiesce to the training request ‘as is’.

And there’s a good reason for wanting to be in the position to do that analysis. Because in many cases when a request for training is received, a little digging reveals that a new piece of training is not the solution at all.

Here's an interesting situation that we encountered quite a while ago that neatly illustrates the point. 

An airline wanted some e-learning to cover pre-flight safety checks and procedures for its cabin crew. They wanted the e-learning to be engaging, they said.

A little digging in the early stages of the project revealed the following.

The checks and procedures were slightly different for each type of plane the airline used. As cabin crew would fly on a variety of planes and might not be on a particular model of plane for several months at a time, it was unlikely they’d recall all the variations without a prompt. 

Nothing in the checks or procedures was particularly complicated. Everything the cabin crew needed to know and do was clearly and throughly documented already in a paper-based manual. They were supposed to carry this with them whenever they were on a flight.

Turns out many of them didn't. It was heavy. People didn't like carrying it. Some supervisors had stopped carrying theirs. So subordinates took their cue from their supervisors and stopped carrying theirs, too.

Over time, with no manual to refer to and to jog their memory, the checks and procedures were being carried out from memory and were not always being completed fully or accurately. 

The procedures within the existing manual were clear, concise and easy to follow. But the existing means of delivery (a big heavy manual) was clearly not working. However, the proposed solution was not much better. Starting up a laptop or tablet, firing up an e-learning programme and navigating to the correct place in the course to find the information you needed is hardly a frictionless approach.

In reality, this was a performance support issue. The solution lay in finding the simplest and least cumbersome way to provide those existing procedure steps to the cabin crew, in the moment of need.

Go round any learning technology-focused trade show or exhibition and you  won't be able to move for them. Who am I talking about? The sharp-suited sales people hanging around on those flashy, expensive stands, of course. 

These are the people promoting their latest rapid e-learning application. You know, the one that's going to help you build e-learning courses in no time at all, with no required programming. All your e-learning problems will be solved. All your Christmases will come at once.

When money's tight and everyone is finding it harder to make a buck, the promise of rapid e-learning is a deeply attractive one. Especially if you are the stressed L&D professional constantly trying to achieve more for less.

But what is rapid e-learning exactly? Is it an urban myth? And if it does exist, does it actually improve learning and performance? 

Put a bunch of e-learning practitioners together in a room and I'm not convinced they'd be able to come up with a definition of rapid e-learning they could all agree with. But let's live dangerously and see what we can come up with here.

For some people rapid e-learning is all about the software. In a software-driven paradigm, it's all about tools that allow just about anyone to create and publish e-learning courses with little or no programming knowledge. It's about the change from the early days of e-learning when you needed significant programming skills to achieve anything of worth.

For others, rapid e-learning is defined by the ease of the production process. In this view of rapid e-learning, just one or two people can wear many hats. Gone are the days of huge development teams and endless production cycles.

Whatever your definition, rapid e-learning needs an authoring tool of some description. And broadly speaking, development tools fall into two broad categories: free-form and form-based.

Free form: the name gives it away, really. Free form tools start with a blank screen which allows the e-learning author to create a structure s/he wants. Inevitably, this still requires some setting-up and choosing functionality.

Form-based: in a form-based authoring tool, the software does pretty much everything. All you have to do is add the content. The negative here, of course, is the forms. They only give you what they are designed to. If you want anything outside of this, you are back to needing programming skills.

But whatever tool you use (whether you consider it 'rapid' or not), there's no getting away from one central question: Just because you can create a course rapidly, should you? And one central problem: not everyone given an authoring tool (and the training to operate it) is going to develop a great course. In fact many will (and have) built truly awful ones.

The answer to the 'should you' question has to be answered by individual organisations. Only people in that organisation can best work out if e-learning is really the most suitable solution for them.

In answer to the second point, I'd say this. When the technology is new and exciting, all the focus is on the technology. This has been the problem with e-learning for too long now. 

In the software-driven paradigm I mentioned earlier, rapid e-learning was meant to democratise development. In many cases, all it did was empower lots of people to create online slideshows with little or no value or effectiveness. 

But now we seem to be moving into an era when technology is evolving again. It probably won't be that long before almost no programming skills are required to create sophisticated e-learning

For me, this moment can't come fast enough.  This could be the moment when we can finally shift from what I call 'point and click' thinking to instructional design thinking. Finally we can shift the focus to where it's needed to be all along:  not about how to programme, but about how to build better courses and more effective learning experiences.

If Articulate Storyline is your 'rapid' e-learning authoring tool and you need some training for yourself or your team, take a look at our in-house training options.