My friend Mark offers an alternative recruitment and selection method:
What happens is you split your pile of respondents’ CV’s into two and throw one of the piles randomly into the bin.
The ‘binees” might claim this is unfair but surely you wouldn’t want to employ anyone as unlucky as them - no matter how good they were.
Would you?
My employer is suffering a restructure (sorry, a 'transformation'), with the result that everyone's having to demonstrate evidence of competencies. The heart sinks. You not only have competencies, you have sub-competencies under them and, tucked under them suckling away for all they're worth, behaviours. In other words pages upon pages of nested bullet points. So the question for me is 'Was that project three years ago a good example of this competence? Well, I seem to remember a lot of that behaviour, which fits under that competence over there. But then I don't have anything for the first competence, although if I stretch the definition a bit I suppose that ....' It becomes a game, wherein you waste a couple of hours knowing that across the organisation hundreds of others are doing the same thing with the same degree of scepticism. The prize, however, is a job and yes please, I'd like one of those.
Continue reading "Are competencies competent? (off-topic)" »
This is part 2 of my description of the first e-learning scenarios I've worked on.
This is best done face to face with more than one SME, and possibly recent trainees who know the likely mistakes all too well. You have to allow a couple of hours at least for the first one. Later ones may not be so difficult.
The output from this stage is a Word script that shows each question, numbered. For each choice in the question, there will be the number of the question or screen that choice leads to. There will also be a note of any tracking that needs to be done.
Continue reading "Creating roleplay scenarios (2) scripting" »
These two posts are an outline of the procedure I used for creating my first e-learning roleplay scenarios for an internal client.
It’s not the last word on the subject, just a summary of what I’ve learned so far. If it's useful for anyone else, great. If anyone wants to debate any of it, that could be helpful too.
There were three clear stages:
This isn't about the authoring tool - we used in-house templates consisting of simple HTML and Javascript.
Continue reading "Creating roleplay scenarios (1) planning" »
On reflection, here are a few things:
Courses v Resources
I learned what seems to be a way of defining the relationship between courses (sequences with learning objectives, questions etc) and resources (informal, on-demand, banks of information), something that causes a lot of debate at my work. What was new to me was the idea that it doesn't have to be either/or courses can be used as a doorway, hook, motivator, agenda-setter for banks of resources. That if behavioural change is required the courses are where that is defined and, to some degree, monitored, but the resources can be drawn on by the course designer for their purposes, and the learner for their own purposes, which might not be the same. So this might help me to clarify it to my customers who still don't really get elearning - they want 'courses' but give me 'resources'.
Templating
We've had a first successful year of using the 'rapid' javascript/CSS templates (for structured one-pagers, page-turners, roleplay scenarios and interactive modules) I created to make a quick content-to-web route, and overcome the network restrictions to which we were subject (50k per page, no Flash). Feedback from my fellow developers and customers has been good and productivity has risen a lot. Now the network restrictions have become much less severe and we are allowed Flash and PDFs so we're working on integrating Raptivity interactions into our templates.
Missing the point
I've learned how much so-called elearning or training in a big company is just a matter of ticking compliance boxes, and how when I rattle on about making learning more effective, internal customers are (in most cases tactfully) trying to tell me I'm missing the point. 'We have to put this information in front of them and prove that they've seen it.' My response, more and more, is to take the side of the end users, see them as my customers and my 'customers' as providers - with questions like 'How would you like to sit through page 37 of 72?'. So far they haven't hit me, and my manager would hit them back anyway ;-)
Dump the Drone
Cathy Moore's little tirade against corporate-speak was a revelation for me - not the message which I'd bought into long ago, but the way she put it over, with a minimum of words and maximum of drama. It's got me into endless trouble with SMEs but I love it!
Reading the Rapid eLearning Blog's latest entry on What Steve Jobs can Teach you about eLearning revived a debate I've been having with myself (and my customers) about decluttering elearning screens. I've long preferred Powerpoint presentations that had no text, or only a few words and relevant images; but in these cases the message is being delivered by the speaker.
Transfer this to eLearning and the equivalent is the minimalist-text-plus-recorded-voiceover that is the staple of 'rapid' elearning. And it's good, infinitely preferable to 'read these 17 paragraphs and press Return for another 17'. But what to do where audio isn't an option i.e. our intranet?
The way we've approached this in our in-house templates is to set a recommended maximum text for a page (250 words) and pages for a 'chunk' (16 - so that the learner doesn't have the prospect of 'page 1 of 30'); in practice these get stretched a little but our authors are managing to temper the expectations of our SMEs a bit, and screens are definitely looking better. But they're nowhere near the minimalism of, for example, Cathy Moore's lovely Dump the Drone.
Tony Karrer commented:
I'm at DevLearn right ... and your post makes me wonder ... if you were here, having coffee with me right now, what would we be talking about? And who else would you want to sit with to have those conversations?
Interesting question. I suppose one thing is a current job I'm working on: a lot of standalone multimedia PCs in my company are being decommissioned, and expensive CD ROMs training modules are being trashed. My team has been given the task of creating web-based 'versions' of these in a desperately short time. Sponsors and subject experts aren't delighted at this turn of events and don't want to put time into creating something new out of it. They want the 'content' (whatever that means) online and available asap and the paradigm they're thinking of is 'copy and paste'. We've developed our own quick and easy templates for short page turners with a limited number of interactivity types - what some writers call, perhaps disparagingly perhaps not, Power Point Plus. Several of us have been pretty much pasting the text content of these courses into these templates, trying to chunk them better and sneakily reword them into less pompous language as we go.
I started this blog as a learning tool. Inspired by Karyn and some of the others I read - that by writing about what I was doing and how I was doing it, I'd clarify for myself what I understood and didn't understand, and some of it might be of use to others.
I now find I don't write here very often. Why? Because I don't feel I have anything in the way of 'answers' and that to write an intelligent question takes time and effort. When it comes up against the deadlines of work due, I think that half an hour should go towards my employer's demands rather than speculation on the blogosphere. How I envy elearning bloggers who seem able in (and I'm guessing here) half an hour or less to write something that seems to put a new slant on an old idea or introduce a new combination of ideas.
This is indeed part of my learning: learning that I have a lot more to think through before I become a 'writer' on elearning. That I feel my previous posts have asked enough questions and now I shouldn't write until I can deliver something.
I also notice from time to time that bloggers write in fits and starts - daily posts for some time then weeks go by. Perhaps it's the same combination of work demands, self-censorship and and simply being 'dry' of the juice.
But at the same time here I am with a job description and a daily task list that reflect the title 'elearning'; so even if what I'm doing seems compromised, unoriginal or small fry, it's still likely that others are doing that kind of thing and I may have done something they haven't. So my resolve is to make the effort and just describe what I'm doing and any associated thoughts that may be helpful to someone desperate or idle enough to read them!
Tony Karrer suggested some of my deliberations in the previous entry may be relevant to the Learning Circuits Big Question this month.
The question, and the article 101 reasons to be freelance, also prompted me to appreciate my current position. I have the relative security (all security is relative, hence the discussion that prompted the last post!) of a salaried position, but a lot of the benefits of working freelance: working from home, in a 'distributed' team, with a role that blends strategic direction for eLearning, instructional design, straightforward web design and hands-on coding. I love the variety. I'm also spared the routine meetings that come with being based in an office. The team of which I'm a member is seen as a group of mavericks and innovators, but our managers have the skill to ensure our contribution is recognised and, occasionally, to rein us in. It's like a company within a company, and we're all serious about learning how to do this well as we go along.
Following a conversation in my team of 'what would you do if it all went belly up next week' I had think about what skills I should be developing. My employer is quite generous and encouraging about self-directed learning and would probably help. But what to study?
Various colleagues and websites I've looked at suggest as an elearning professional I should know about
° Flash
° HTML
° XML
° CSS
° Javascript
° SQL
° Databases in general
° SCORM
° .net
° ASP .net
° game development
° PHP
etc etc
