eel-learning

The blind leading the blend?

Today I was asked to speak to a group of management trainers about blended learning. Originally I'd been asked only about what elearning templates we could use, but I tried to open it up to a different view of blended learning.

I started by challenging the assumption that blended means online pre-course work (that usually doesn't get done).

I then suggested that given what we know now about the importance of 'little and often' and of repetition, both to get a message over and to build expertise, that the emphasis should shift from blended as means of preparation for the 'big day' to a view that the face to face bit sets the scene for a programme of workplace based activities as well as followup learning.

The role of the trainer is more like a salesperson or at least sales aftercare, promoting, supporting and keeping in touch after the event. I suggested it might be easier to motivate a group of people who have 'stormed, formed and normed' in a face to face event to continue online than to ask individuals to put time in for pre-work which may or may not be necessary. By putting the focus on followup they could be helping to embed the learning in the workplace. Or so the theory goes - I'm not talking from experience.

This opened up much discussion of forums, blogs and wikis (none of which we have in the company yet) and the trainers' experience of them on development courses they'd taken themselves. Most said they liked the idea but they hadn't worked in their experience. A minority said 'I just don't feel comfortable with using technology that way' but alluded to their kids taking it for granted at school.

At the end of my half hour I felt like I'd clarified for myself what I thought blended learning is about, and had a sympathetic hearing which might support my team's efforts to jump start the introduction of forums at least.

Not taking the plunge (2) - reporting back

I'd written here earlier about the disappointing uptake of the followup forum for a face to face course I'd been on. I set up a poll to find out why it had failed, with not much hope of a response, and said I'd report back on the findings. I say 'findings' as if it's very scientific. Only five of the twelve delegates responded and one of them was me! Here they are for what they're worth. I'll then say what conclusions I draw from the experience and invite you to correct me or add your own observations.

1. Did you intend at the end of the course to take part in any online post-course discussion?
            4 yes 1 no

2. Did you visit the forum in response to the initial invitation?
        5 yes  (so the ones who didn't visit also didn't respond)

3. Did you post anything - action points or just comments - to the forum?
        3 yes 2 no  (I was one of the 3)

4. What were the main things that worked against you taking part in the forum?
        - each of these was a 1-5 scale with 5 being high

        I didn't know how to find it: 3 x 1 (low), 1 x 3 (mid) 1 n/a
        I found it difficult to use: 4 x 1 to 3, 1 n/a
        I don't like online communication: 2 x 1 to 3, 1x 4, 2 n/a
        I don't have time for this kind of followup: 1 x 1, 3 x 3, 1 x 5
        I don't have time for any kind of course followup: same

5. Do you use any of these forms of social learning or networking outside work?
        only two responded, one being me. The other said s/he had used Facebook and Google and had looked up, but not contributed to, Wikipedia. So 3 out of 5 hadn't.

6. An open question:
Finally, what scope do you think there is for this type of forum to be useful in this organisation? What would have made you more likely to use it? What need would a good forum meet for you?

The answers:

I have never used any type of forum. I understand how they could be useful, but tend to contact people direct rather than at an open forum. think it needs to be something people either really need or are really interested in. Although agree that follow up after training is good, it still seems a bit like work - rather than a catch up over coffee when it may come up more naturally.

I think this kind of forum has loads of scope - we are all just not in the habit of using them. As an organisation we always seem to only ever use about 40% of any tools actual functionality. Time pressure is always an issue. If people felt they got something out of it they would do it .... but for that to happen everyone has to be involved and play - so it ends up a catch 22. If I knew that if I had an issue / problem and I posted it on a forum and 3 thought provoking ideas that I had not already considered came back to me - then I would use it. 

1) Great scope as we are all time poor 2) Greater use as a facilitator to team activity in achieving objectives i.e. if we had been set something on the course that we had to achieve as a team 3) Team training & support where team is geographically dispersed 

My conclusions:
Although everyone thought it was a good idea, sharing action points after the course wasn't a good starting topic. Too much exposure and fear of held to account. The other two topics, though, which I seeded with general reflections on the course and questioning the NLP element, didn't receive any comments. Three people did put their action points.

One suggestion that someone outside of this made was that the forum for a course should be for all groups who've ever done the course, not just one, and for the trainer (in this case the trainer was external so that wouldn't have happened.)

If people came to a forum where they could see evidence of discussion going on and questions being answered they'd be more likely to be engaged. It's like nobody wants to be the first, understandably. But how to start it off ?

My suspicion is that the way Sharepoint presents the forum didn't help - it doesn't look anything like the kind of PHP forum people may be used to. For example, the name beside the topic is that of the person who started it, not the last person who posted.

Finally, I think it confirms a lot of the critical opinions you find in elearning circles about face to face training and its poor carry-over into work afterwards. I'm sure the majority of the delegates probably didn't follow up in any way and the extensive folders of handouts are gathering dust. I'm not sure for myself I've reached even the 10% transfer that critics say is normal with formal training. 
        

I hope this is useful to someone and if you think I've missed the point anywhere please point it out. This is definitely part of my learning!

Not taking the plunge: some micro research into 2.0

In my last entry I described a face to face course I went on. At the end everyone was keen on setting up a forum - a facility that's completely new in our organisation, not even 'officially' rolled out. It's Sharepoint 2007. I set one up with three topics:

1. How to use this forum

2. General reflections on the course - what did you think?

3. Your action points - share them and share your progress.

There were ten delegates apart from me. Since the forum was set up, three have shared action points and nobody has posted to any of the other discussions (apart from me venturing some instructions in 1 and opinions in 2). Nobody has set up new topics.

E-Learning Alliance Conference 2008 (1) - changing methods and media

This was a successful event, held at Scottish Widows in Edinburgh. Here are accounts of some of the presentations:

 

Clive Shepherd gave the opening presentation, about the pressures for change in corporate learning. He started by making a distinction between methods and media: methods - role-play, q&a, lecture, reading, coaching etc- haven't really changed since the earliest days of schools. We use the same methods regardless of whether we're online or in the classroom. Media, however, are changing rapidly. In the last five years there have been more choices to make in media than in the last three thousand years. Blended learning in Clive's definition is selecting methods for their effectiveness - will they help learning? - and media for their efficiency - speed, economies of scale etc.

 

Clive then outlined the forces for change in methods - new science, particularly neuroscience (taking a potshot at pop psychology such as learning styles and NLP on the way), new expectations (those of Generations X and Y), cost pressures, time pressures ( a 2005 report said those surveyed suggested 72% of training interventions were time-critical) and environmental pressures, particularly the call to reduce business travel.

 

As for the pressures for change in media, there were new tools:

• the explosion of open source, free and cheap tools and equipment such as broadcast quality digital video recorders
• web 2.0 and the ability to have user-generated content and collaborative working ('Content is no longer king', said Clive, 'Collaboration is.')
• virtual worlds enabling realistic meetings, collaboration and simulation

There are also opportunities afforded by new mobile devices and increased bandwidth.

The biggest barrier to progress in most companies was not finance or IT but L&D departments who cling to old theories of learning, pop psychology and 'the course' as the main paradigm.

Online forum: implementing learning2.0 technologies part 1

I said I'd report on how my questions and reservations were met by this and so I shall.

First a general note about the experience of the forum. This is the third one I've done. The quality of the speakers and presentations has always been pretty good and yesterday's more than kept up the standard. But it's very tiring - although it's morning for the presenters, here it starts at 4:30pm and towards the end of the evening I was wilting, having been sat in front of my screen since 8 in the morning. Nevertheless a lot of things fell into place and and I was given a whole lot of new ideas. During the last talk I even ducked out to create an iGoogle home page for myself (a mixed blessing I think, which I'll write about another time).

Now the talks. I can't do justice to everything they said, just pick out a few points from each that struck home for me.

Creating roleplay scenarios (2) scripting

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.

Creating roleplay scenarios (1) planning

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:

1. planning
2. scripting
3. coding      and prototyping

This isn't about the authoring tool - we used in-house templates consisting of simple HTML and Javascript.

Big Question for December: what did you learn about learning in 2007?

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!

Giving the info without clutter

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. 

Rabid Authoring

I attended a short session yesterday on Rapid Authoring, run by the eLearning Alliance in Glasgow. The main speaker was Bill Ward, whom I'd seen before, an engaging and animated presenter. His topic was 'Rapid Authoring - friend or foe?'.  Bill's a big flag-waver for everything web 2.0, so there wasn't much 'foe' in the presentation. And it's hard to argue with the idea that it should be possible to produce useful learning material faster than ... well ...  than what? Than we used to produce it?  That was one suggestion. Than the big elearning vendors produce it? That was another. Bill mentioned how one large and well known UK firm completely dismissed the idea of rapid authoring several years ago but is now offering a rapid authoring product.

When Bill had finished there were questions from the floor trying to probe what he meant by rapid authoring. He'd mentioned only 'Adobe' (I'd previously seen him speak at an Adobe roadshow) and 'Powerpoint on steroids' . The initial suggestion seemed, therefore, to be  the familiar one of Subject Experts Create Own Learning Material. But very soon the suggestion came from the floor that the tools are easy but you need some pedagogy/instructional design/learning psychology to make it effective.

So if RA means just the current glut of new software tools, there's nothing new in this idea. As long as I've been in this business software vendors have been saying ' no need for messy programming, our product will have you creating effective and engaging elearning as easily as ...' - well, they tend to say Powerpoint now. (I'm old enough to remember TenCore Producer!).  They'll always be saying that and I'll always be not quite believing it.