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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can all feel our pulse quicken, our emotions rise when we get chance to talk or write about a topic that engages us totally.

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

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

So aside from being more empathetic to a talkative SME, is there anything else we can do to make our time with them more productive? I think there are four areas to consider when gathering content from SMEs. By the way, the greater the quantity of content you need to gather, the more you are likely to want to formalise the approaches below.

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

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

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

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

Focusing
Set an agenda in advance of the meeting clearly stating goals and expectations.
During your content gathering sessions, regularly paraphrase, clarify and summarise what you have covered; use closed questioning techniques if your SME has a tendency to go off on tangents. After the session, collate the content into a structured document you can share with your SME for review and feedback.


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

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

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

If out of control SMEs are your current nightmare, check out our the Analysis and Planning modules in our instructional design programme for help on dealing with this problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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