eel-learning

Media in Learning (Trainer1)

A couple of colleagues and I attended this one-day course last week, given by Neil Lasher.  Although we've been experimenting a little with audio and video at work (and I've been doing a little video editing at home) we had little concrete knowledge to go on, living as we have been in a world of text and (small) images. Not that anyone's actually told us our intranet is opening up to allow more media, it's just that other people have started to do it and not been slapped down. Not yet anyway.

Neil is an engaging man but one with strong opinions, and there were lots of interesting digressions into the history of elearning since the early 90s (he believes we're coming full circle into a re-appreciation of the simple page turner) and the questionable delights of SCORM.  Neil's company Trainer1 has invested a lot in research into the views of users of elearning in the public and private sector. Some of it will be published, some not. But we went fully into the different file types and formats of video, and their advantages and disadvantages, and various useful bits of hardware and software were demonstrated. It was a good use of the face to face training session to breathe a bit of debate and controversy into what might have been a dry topic on a blog or information site. 

One topic he emphasised repeatedly, preaching to the  converted in my case, was brevity. Videos and elearning modules don't have to be 5 or 10 minutes, but the environments in which they're deployed do not lend themselves to anything longer, even 'immersive' training that really is engaging. If you're going to do the practice and 'rehearsal' that will make new information stick, then among other things you need freedom from distraction, and in most places I know that simply isn't available. Learning Centres and cybercafes seem so last decade and they probably are, but the 45 minute elearning module belongs there, not in a busy office or - worse - the customer-facing desktop. So the move towards using these media for motivation, overviews and short practice scenarios is appropriate. 

Course over, I came home and today responded to an email telling me of some Mandatory Training that had to be completed by today. It had sat in my to-do list for three weeks. ('Mandatory Training for Q1' is such a motivator, isn't it?)  I found myself entering a module estimated as taking 30 minutes, followed by a test. After 10 pages I hadn't found anything relevant to my role, except in terms of ' you work in a bank so you should know all this ', so I ducked out and took the test, achieving 19 out of 20 with ease by following the giveaway cues. A world away from the kinds of things we'd been talking about with Neil, and a long way to go. At least they hadn't given us a 30m video.

Cognitivemedia and visual thinking

As a fan of Dan Roam and ‘visual thinking’ I was pleased to come across this site. I’ve dabbled in cartoons before and used a comic strip approach in a very small way here and there in elearning, but this is on a different scale, using very talented cartoonists to represent a conversation or the argument of a book. But isn’t this so much better than the average ‘interactive’ module?

http://www.cognitivemedia.co.uk/

Informal learning and performance support

Last week I tuned into a webinar from the Elearning Guild by Con Gottfredson. It was a summary of his book with Bob Mosher Innovative Performance Support (http://performersupport.com).  Here's a brief outline:

Formal learning tends to follow the sequence learn > practice > apply > review

Con's Performance Support model attempts to address some of the weaknesses of this model e.g.

• the forgetting curve
• the disconnect between the learning environment and the workplace
• memory overload

It looks at five 'moments' when learning is necessary:

1. new (what's this?)
2. more (I thought I knew enough about this but I don't)
3. change (oops - that's different!)
4. solve ( what's going on here? )
5. apply ( how do I do this)

The central idea is that you design for the 'moment of apply' and everything else follows from there.  The moment of apply has three phases, for which you can provide support:

Before - (reference material, elearning, wiki, community of practice)

During - (sidekicks, job aids, context-sensitive help, FAQs, coaching, Twitter equivalents)

After - (checklists, self-assessment tools, the feedback loop - 'lessons learned')

A good selection of these is the focus of design, with any formal training being around how you use them.

But you don't create everything for every operation: to target the design you use a critical skills analysis / risk analysis approach that says 'this task is high frequency, low risk and that task is low frequency, high risk', so one would merit a simple job aid and the other some reinforcement in formal learning.

He also posits the idea of a digital performance support broker, a kind of context sensitive intervention that links you to relevant Twitter feeds, blogs, formal learning and books.

Echoing many of the talks from Learning Technologies, this argues that 'Just in case' learning is pretty much wasted time, and in the words of Harold S. Geneen,CEO of ITT (International Telephone and Telegraph: Performance is your reality - forget everything else!

More at (http://performersupport.com). 

Reader, my life was changed!

Reading the blog of person using a new bit of software and discovering belatedly that it doesn't autosave as you go along, and feeling her pain, as they say in pain-filled California, I remembered the lesson I was given by someone (sorry I can't remember the name) who taught me Desk Top Publishing way back in the 80s.

    'Small success? Ctrl + S'

In other words as soon as something goes right - Save It!  Probably the best habit I've learned in 20 years of computer-bashing.

Reflections on Learning Technologies 2011

I enjoyed this year's conference, perhaps more than previous. In previous years I've listened to the suggestions of the Brave and the Bold with the familiar sinking feeling of ' I'd never be able to do that at my work '.  The reasons would range, depending on the speaker, from bandwidth to management inertia to lack of skills. This year, however, I went empowered by fact that we have a new management team in place who want to push new ideas, have been given a mandate to do so, and have given me a mandate to bring in new thinking and proposals for them to consider. So my feeling at the conference was different.

One session that I particularly enjoyed was that of Itiel Dror and Chris Atherton on 'Learning and the Mind'. I had a minor shock during Chris's talk when I realised this is my territory. I'm not claiming I know much about it, but my realisation was that this is where my interest lies in the whole field of online learning - memory, motivation, learning load, attention and so on. If you like, the interaction between an individual and the material presented. Or as Chris put it when I approached her in a rather burbling enthusiastic way at the end, user experience. Since I first learned about instructional design in the 80s that's what's got me reading and thinking, and that's what I am most critical of in the elearning I see at work.

Which led me to consider why it's rarely discussed at my work. I saw that all the vast majority of the effort in our team and the L&D team in general goes into efficiency - delivery, LMS, management information, portals etc - and not much into effectiveness - what actually works?  And when you ask that question it's usually thought to be the realm of 'evaluation' and 'ROI' and all the conundrums and cliches that brings with it.

I've been given a remit to pull together a community of practice of all the people involved across our Group involved in some way with elearning - developing it or commissioning it - and that's where my enthusiasm can find its place.  I want to share ideas and debate with these people the quality and effectiveness of the material and experiences we offer people, rather than getting bogged down in the mechanics of how we get it to them. I feel more at home in work than I have for ages and thanks to those talks by Itiel and Chris I understand why.