Learning design – Page 3

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Training or Learning?

In a recent post I asked the question “what really is blended learning?” after hearing many people describe it as being classroom plus eLearning. Well, before we can establish what blended learning really is, there are a few things I’d like to explore in more detail.

1. the difference between training and learning
2. what is good classroom

When asking various people how they would differentiate between training and learning, here are some of the responses they’ve come back with:

Training = formal, push information, very tutor focused, defined event(s), structured, something that’s done to them, interactive, just in case, series of events, step by step,

Learning = more learner-focused, longer term, continuous, ongoing, pull information, self-motivated, just in time, on-demand, supporting, mixture of formal, semi-formal and informal, sharing, experiential

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 2 years, you would have undoubtedly heard about how we deliver learning programmes needs to move away from formal training events and more towards more of a continuous learning process. This doesn’t mean we will be doing away with the formal training events but more about how we can use them more effectively.

When we talk about formal training events, we tend to think about classroom courses; that is, where two or more people are gathered together for a set period of time to be formally taken through a set topic relevant to their working practices. With even the most effectively designed classroom courses that engage, filled with activities, they can also be very inefficient.

Looking back over the years, great classroom courses have included a rich variety of learning activities or methods. So let’s take a look into the past and remember what we have used for great classroom experiences:

lectures
tutor-led discussion
group discussion
demonstrations
role plays
individual work
presentations
exercises
coaching
collaborating
case studies
problem solving games

A real rich mix of activities there. Hang on a minute? Isn’t that blended learning?

Well, not really. It’s blended training methods.

What it does confirm is that for effective learning our training needs to have an appropriate blend of learning activities. Today the emphasis is increasingly on learning through the conversations we have with each other. Despite classroom delivery being very effective (when designed and facilitated well) it’s often an inefficient choice.

Why? Because there is a limit to how many people we reach at any one time. There are different levels of experience in the room. There’s different speeds at which people learn and more reflection time needed by some. There are hidden costs associated with attending events such as travel and time away from job as well as the possible need to bring in temporary staff to cover.

Organisations have recognised that and are thinking of alternative ways of covering some of the learning traditionally done in the classroom. But is tagging this content on either side of the classroom as eLearning self-study the answer? Maybe – but before we can decide whether it is appropriate I have another question for you.

What really is eLearning?

Taking a SatNav approach to learning!

In Donald Clarks recent post, 7 tactics for training in a recession, I found myself agreeing with many of his thoughts.

Donald’s 7 tactics are:
1. Dump daft duplication
2. Last century courses
3. Courses too long
4. Tyranny of time & location
5. Crap evaluation
6. Non-scalable
7. It’s the technology stupid

He says:

“Achieve more with less to optimise limited budgets and time. The world has changed and we can be reactive and get dumped upon, or take it upon ourselves to reshape our own learning landscape. Fast access to learning needs to be available 24×7 at point of need. This is the norm in the real word and it should be the norm in learning. We need to provide Satnav help for learning journeys, not big, thick, fixed atlases. Flexible responses to your organisation’s needs, not fixed, repeated, timetabled courses. Focus on productivity and promise impact, not happy sheets and course passes. Reduce carbon footprint, reduce travel & meeting costs and above all scale – EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY.”

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last few years, it has been abundantly clear that learning and development HAS to change. The way we work and live has changed. We are constantly having to do more with less; find different and creative ways of delivering (and I don’t mean training here). If we need to know something what do we do? We ‘Google’ it – we ask a question from our wider networks via Twitter, we share our likes, our opinions, our expertise through blogs and harvest from RSS feed readers.

When are we likely to do this? At home, on the train, the bus but rarely at work. Why? Because we’re not allowed to. Or, if we are allowed to – we haven’t got a clue how we could harness this collaborative technology. Perhaps it’s because we don’t really understand their value. It doesn’t help when the media, in order to sell stories, write misleading (and even fabricated) headlines leading to businesses banning their use.

After all, do we start banning cars because the idiots behind the wheel are irresponsible? No! We all have to learn to drive safely. We take tests to prove we are capable. We know rules and the consequences if we break them.

This analogy brings me nicely back to Donald Clark’s SatNav help for learning. Perhaps we should start thinking about how we can help learners continue to learn, and support them in their roles. But before we can do that, we need to learn how to drive this new technology properly ourselves. Until we know what they can do, we will never be able to understand how they can be used for learning and collaboration in the workplace. I think this is where L&D can really become indispensable.

Trainers need to be more than trainers concerned only about single events and tick-box exercises to appease the gods and become learning consultants helping others navigate their own learning journeys. Before they can help others they need to help themselves to reduce their own skills gap, open up their minds and try these tools out for themselves – take control of their own development and experiment. I realised very quickly, if I was to survive in the world of learning I would have to embrace new technology.

OK – I’ve always had more than a little interest in how technology could make my working life easier having moved from manual typewriters, to electronic then to the clunky early PCs (oops – giving my age away there!) but I would never describe myself as a techy geek. I guess this continued interest in technological progress helped and I acknowledge that there may be others who are totally disinterested. But just like it’s now almost essential to be able to drive to widen our employability, it will be essential to learn to use these tools to the same end.

There are plenty of resources available out there. Jane Bozarth’s book ‘Social Media for Trainers‘ is one great resource to start with. Keep visiting for a review as well as some extra tips for using new learning technologies. In the meantime – go on – dip your toe into that water – there are plenty of learning technology lifeguards out there to help you (me included).

Putting the learning back in eLearning

Creating engaging eLearning Part 2

What do most people complain about when faced with the prospect of ‘doing a bit of eLearning’?

Boring – mind numbing and tedious. Slide after slide of text – why do we do that? Why do we reproduce pages of text in an authoring tool when that same information has already been produced and is sat in a Word document or PDF somewhere on the intranet? Are these walls of text there just to provide an excuse to have a multiple choice quiz at the end to ‘test’ their knowledge? Why do we give ourselves that extra work?

Last week I compared retail design to eLearning design. In this article I am going to explore more about what we need to consider when creating eLearning so it’s a great learning experience.

If we decide that it IS important for them to read the company policy then why not provide a link to it or make sure they know where to get to it and save the duplication? Better still, if it’s ‘e-information’ you want to create – be up-front about it and, please, put a little more thought into how engaging it looks for readability on screen.

A lot can be learned from all those remarkable SlideShare presentations and YouTube snippets. But if we are talking eLearning – now that’s a whole different ball game. Learning is about experiencing, thinking, doing and making decisions.

“I’d rather be in the classroom!”

Before we even start thinking about eLearning, perhaps we should first remind ourselves what good learning really is. Let’s think about classroom learning – and I mention classroom learning because that’s what most learners cite as a preference instead of ‘doing some eLearning’.

Why is It they prefer classroom? Is it because a good classroom experience no longer consists of ‘death by PowerPoint’? Good classroom design and delivery involves the learner from the beginning. It includes critical thinking, scenario activities that are realistic and work related with a good balance of questioning and information.

All these are delivered skillfully by the facilitator drawing out learners’ opinions, thoughts and ideas. It involves opportunities for learners to apply their knowledge with practice and checking activities on work based projects or case studies. It allows them to apply critical thinking – not just answering multiple choice questions. Great classroom learning provides learners with the opportunities to collaborate discuss and share experiences as well as providing each other with support.

My question is why does this have to stop when we are designing eLearning? Why is it that all we know as learning specialists is forgotten or ignored when we are tasked with creating eLearning? It seems the learning has been taken out of eLearning (if it was ever there in the first place). Instead, we have been focusing too much on the ‘e’.

As learning designers, we can easily come up with superb, engaging activities that make the learners think critically such as scenarios, role plays, analysing data, and exercises. We know how to ask the right sort of guided questions to help our learners think more carefully about their answers. We know it is important to break down the activities in the classroom to bite sized chunks so they refocus and are able to work with each other in teams. The good news is we CAN make this happen in eLearning. We just need to be a little more creative in our thinking.

What would happen if we sat our learners down in a room and made them sit through dozens of screens of bullet points spewing out copious amounts of information? Or worse: being read to by the tutor? (Please don’t tell me you do that in your classrooms!)

“But we have built interaction in!”

OK, so what if we give the learners the power to stop us and rewind as many time as they need? Will that help them? I think not! How soon would they fall asleep? Pretty likely if you ask me! If we are lucky, they may stay to the end only to be faced with a few pages of multiple choice questions. That hardly tests their application of the theory to anything meaningful.

Most of us know how frustrating this experience can be so we try and improve it. We know that interaction is the key to good eLearning but our idea of interaction is clicking a button to move a screen forward.

We might go a little further and acknowledge that learners don’t want to see copious amounts of text on a screen all at once. So we hide it behind roll-overs. Now the interaction is a click combined with a slight movement of the mouse to reveal……. wait for it …….. more information.

Whilst this is acceptable in small doses it is still only information. True – it does make it more visually interesting but there is no real critical thought. OK, OK! Some people may learn like that but where is the application – where is their decision making?

We think that by ‘tarting’ up the slides so information is hidden behind cleverly thought up graphics or charts, this makes it ‘engaging’….. think again. It is a little like handing out envelopes in class for learners to open one by one just to discover a few more facts. Admittedly, it’s a little more fun than death by PowerPoint – but only just.

There is, however, light at then end of this eLearning tunnel. If we would normally ask guided questions in a classroom to gain an opinion we can do exactly the same in an eLearning module. The difference being that instead of waiting for someone to answer, we may have to give some realistic options for the learners to choose. In part three I’ll be looking at ideas for creating exciting and engaging eLearning and continuing on I’ll explore ideas on how we can think more creatively when introducing activities in eLearning, how we can help get the most out of our learners and encourage motivation.

Part 3: Engaging eLearning- as easy as CSI

Blaming the trainer?

If you can, do; if you can’t, teach. That phrase has always sat uneasy with me. I first heard it from a fellow student while studying art in Herefordshire College of Art and Design. He was referring to how the tutors at the college wouldn’t be there if they were any good at their calling. I always felt that was rather unfair – it is so hard to make a living as an artist (you only seem to make any decent money after you’re dead!).

Recent reports have brought into question the quality of L&D departments which reminded me of that phrase – and again, it sat uneasy with me. I think trainers are being given a rum deal from the anti L&D fraternity. It is clear that things need to change but is it really all the fault of L&D? Clive Shepherd, in his recent post “Rather than getting depressed, get going”, looks further than L&D at possible causes. In fact, I started penning this before Clive’s was posted but he is so much more eloquent than I.

I know I may be biased, but I also feel the need to come to the defense of our trainers out there so I’ll continue with what I started before I read Clive’s post.

The speed of change is such that trainers do risk becoming the dinosaurs of the learning profession (see “Trainers of the Future” by Nick Shackleton Jones). If they continue to stick their heads in the sand (mixed metaphor but you get the gist) and fail to adapt their skills to become more learning facilitators rather than trainers they do themselves no favours. The future is more about helping people learn to learn and to support performance – and continue doing so.

I have heard first hand from trainers saying that they have been given the directive to design and deliver a training programme when they aren’t sure there is actually a training need. They try and convince the powers that be that it isn’t possible to deliver the amount of subject matter to an audience that large in such a short space of time but have no choice but to ‘work miracles’. They know they are not providing the best learning experience that they could deliver given half the chance, all too often they have their hands tied. I feel their frustration, they are full of enthusiasm to put new approaches into action only to realise that without the support of others in their organisation they will find it like swimming through treacle.

Nick Shackleton-Jones’ post also refers to trainers becoming more active in seeking out ‘the good stuff’. It is true we can’t carry on delivering the same old same old when information is at our fingertips (YouTube, Google, Twitter). I also believe that ‘learning professionals have a central role to play in the organisations of the future’.

However it is also the responsibility of the Company Owners, Directors, Team Leaders, Managers and Supervisors to provide the necessary support. They must empower learning professionals to create a streamlined learning culture, after all it’s their organisation that will benefit in the long run.

Let’s cut trainers some slack and give them the support they need to move forward.