e-Learning Leadership Blog

Your Back-to-School e-Learning Shopping List

by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

Well, it’s “Back-to-School” time.  Ads all around are urging students of all ages to get new jeans and new notebooks and pencils and crayons.  Often our children, if not heading off to entirely new institutions of learning, are almost certainly joining new classrooms and meeting new teachers and schoolmates.  There’s something wonderful about this annual opportunity to start afresh.  We can leave the problems of a few months ago--tattered notebooks, ill-fitting clothes, seemingly pointless subjects (I just read about the controversy whether cursive writing is obsolete and should not be taught), annoying teachers—behind us as we try new things.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a similar opportunity to start fresh in our professional training activities in creating e-learning. We are so bound by traditions set in place years ago--tools and models selected by others to fill out-of-date needs, design processes that are relics of an almost incompatible instructional paradigm, technical standards that have not been revised in too long—that we don’t have the opportunity to stop, retool, and start again.

If we had that luxury, what would be on my back-to-school required shopping list for e-learning?

• Stock up on supplies.  Honestly reassess your Authoring tools.  As you become more experienced, it is very likely that tools that were right for you earlier no longer serve their purpose.  Think about what you want to accomplish and determine if your tools are holding you and your organization back.  Adding new tools with expanded capabilities will not make your previous work unusable, but will allow you to grow in what you can provide your learners.  The investment in purchasing new tools is relatively insignificant compared to the investment in sheer man hours that your organization makes in using them.
• Update your wardrobe.  Don’t be afraid to come up with a new look. Update your templates, create a new graphic mood, explore new technologies to add flair and value to your lessons.  The visual impact of your lessons is one of the strongest voices you have in communicating with your audience. Circumstances, business drivers, strategies, job titles, and any number of other factors in the work environment may have changed in the last year for your leaners.  What message does it send when your training materials are still packaged and presented in models created 3 or 4 years ago?
• Hire a new teacher or two.  I don’t mean that you necessarily have to hire new people, but you should seriously reassess how you want your e-learning to facilitate learning. Most of us necessarily start out with relatively simplistic ideas of what we can do with e-learning—usually a lot of telling and simplistic testing. That might have been acceptable as a starting place, but we need to be able to move on from there.  Unfortunately it can be difficult to break out of routines, once they are set, but if we cease to explore new and more effective methods for engaging learners, we can’t expect to remain relevant and instrumental in creating value for our organizations.
• Join the Chess Club.  Get involved in your e-learning community. There are several really excellent organizations and networking opportunities readily available to the training community.  Plan to attend a national conference or become involved in local chapter activities. Enroll in online webinars that are offered for you to join right from your desk.  Or even make a resolution to take up some other activity that will have some carryover in what you bring to e-learning design.  e-Learning is such a multi-disciplinary field that almost anything can provide useful inputs.  Painting or drawing, theater, story-telling, tutoring, web-design, cabaret-singing, or any number of other skills can provide surprising insights into making e-learning more effective.

So think about the smell of brand new Levis…and the feel of sharpening a new pencil into a precise point…and the delight of opening a new textbook for the very first time…and the first time you got your new locker combination to work…and the mystery of what that new teacher is going to look like.  And then take your back-to-school shopping list and create all that same excitement in your e-learning projects.

What's Your Recipe for e-Learning?

by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

Last week I conducted a series of online sessions about designing e-learning and had a chance to field questions from e-learning designers and developers from all over the world.  As is often the case, there were a host of questions of this sort:

 

“Ok, but what am I supposed to do when my company…

• only gives me a few days to do this?”
• says I can’t use photos, clipart, or hire an artist?”
• says that every lesson has to have this exact structure?”
•  [you fill in the blank]?”

Of course, there are strategies to employ to try to get around these impediments, but in many ways, I think these patching efforts really just add to the problem. 

If we are serious about actually teaching through our e-learning and making our efforts count, I honestly think a different approach is called for.

Let me tell you a true story.  I grew up working on our family’s strawberry farm. During May and June, we did nothing from dawn ‘til dusk picking strawberries (and also going to elementary school!).  For a few years my sister, Ida, was in high school, she often had to stay in town for school activities and thus was relieved of a bit of the field labor.  Feeling like she wanted to contribute to the family enterprise, she would often use her 4-H training to cook a meal to be ready for us when we returned home late at night.  She wanted to make a dessert to complete the meal, but was handicapped by the fact that Mom, during these days, had little time for grocery shopping and so we often had a larder that was inconveniently bare.  In particular, we rarely had extra eggs in the house.  Ida had discovered a recipe called a “Banana Splizza” (I’ll let you imagine what that could possibly be) that was quick and easy.  It called for an egg, but one evening in desperation she tried making the splizza without an egg.  It turned into something only vaguely resembling a cake.  She served it and we ate it.  Was it any good?  Honestly, I don’t think any of us paid attention, or if we did, we were hungry enough at the moment not to care.  It had ice cream and chocolate on it and it was served up when we expected there to be something that was sweet and so we ate it.  Being frugal-minded, Ida then regularly got into the habit of making the splizza without eggs, and having no other evidence, we quit expecting that a splizza could be any better than that.

Well, then came the day when we had no milk in the house either.  Out came all the ingredients and a splizza was made without egg and this time with water substituted for the milk.  Let me tell you, it was crazy bad, but it was still edible. We pried it loose from the pan and we ate it.  For about three summers we suffered through various renditions of that dessert, each suffering in odd ways because the “tradition of the splizza” somehow required that Ida attempt to make it no matter what limitations were imposed on her.  Ultimately we quit calling it dessert and instead called it officially “The Surprise.”  It may be humorous, in hindsight, but this whole enterprise had some very significant bad effects.  We really came to (unfairly) devalue my sister’s skills as a cook.  These things she created were sometimes laughably bad, but not really through fault of her own.  We also, oddly, came to view dessert more as something that you were required to work your way through, no matter what it was, rather than anticipate it with pleasure for the delight it provided to the end of a meal.  And it became the fodder for mockery and something that could never be taken seriously.

I hope the parallel to the questions posed at the beginning of this post is clear.  It is dangerous to remove a critical component of e-learning from your development tools, and yet somehow think that there is a reasonable way to still have significant impact.  Two of the strongest benefits of e-learning are its capacity for integrating media into uniquely compelling presentations and to provide an interactive environment in which the learner can explore.  Yet these are two of the elements that organizations seem very content to skimp on.  Limiting your tools to restrict using graphical elements in your design is not far off from thinking it reasonable to bake a cake without an egg.  Accepting a development timeline that makes it impossible to design even the slightest bit of interaction that varies from one or two preset question formats is necessarily going to create an experience of really poor quality.  There isn’t some magic bullet that somehow makes these things irrelevant.  Unfortunately, instructional designers so often have to operate under rules that were implemented for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with learning, but those restrictions clearly get in the way of teaching. Each time a necessary element is removed, we have the choice to say, “Ok, we’ll do what we can without that” or instead to say “Well, that means that e-learning really is no longer a solution.”

The business factors that drive e-learning are complex.  And every single project, even when you have unlimited resources, requires a series of compromises.  So I’m not advocating a philosophy of demand for premium budgets in all circumstances.  And often it is the constraints that are responsible for some of the most creative solutions.  But sometimes, the limits imposed on your design create a situation where it becomes impossible to create e-learning of significant value.  And the cumulative effect of operating in this way is to devalue e-learning and training in general.  So while you are doing your best to work around limits on your access to instructional graphics or dealing with the unreasonable time frames that make actual design efforts impossible, you also need to be working to convince decision makers that these are unreasonable limitations to place on the design team and still expect results.  Because some business demands have created situations where “anything” online will suffice, many organizations have forgotten how much they are sacrificing by adopting these constraints for their expectations of e-learning.  Just as my family was no longer being served a dessert, even though “The Surprise” was presented as one, online programs lacking key instructional elements should really cease to be counted as e-learning, both to be fair to the learner and of the designer/developer.

Who Cares About e-Learning for Compliance Training?

by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

Each time I teach the ASTD e-Learning Design Certificate courses, I’m reminded of how many organizations look to e-Learning as the vehicle for delivering compliance training — training that for legal or regulatory reasons the organization is required to conduct and document.  Compliance training often is related to certification or accreditation, and failure to comply may result in hefty monetary fines or restrictions to even operate.

It seems that organizations rush to use e-Learning in these situations for two major reasons:  the burden of teaching this bureaucratic information consistently through other means is too onerous, and the reporting of completion data through an LMS greatly simplifies the effort to document compliance.

Unfortunately, there are two common attributes of the resulting e-Learning that virtually guarantee failure: company-wide acceptance that compliance content is by definition “boring” excuses the worst sort of useless page-turning as the instructional model for the learning modules, and the “check-box” reporting mentality creates simplistic and meaningless interactivity that begs to be ignored by the learners.  (And this check-box mentality is coming back to haunt organization as many overseeing entities have realized the meaningless nature of this kind of reporting and have begun to validate training through site visits and more challenging qualitative evaluation methods.)

This is a good example of how positive motivators for one group can be at best neutral or even de-motivating for others. While one hopes that individual businesses value the positive impact on the individual worker of these training topics (like sexual harassment, workplace diversity, or even something as practical as emergency preparedness), the primary motivation for the organization to comply with these training requirements is a matter of administrative duty.  They have no choice if they want to continue operating.  

This administrative duty does not really transfer with the same impact to individual employees, yet I am amazed at how often the sole “welcoming” message to the learner that opens a compliance training piece is essentially, “The only reason we’re making you do this is because we have to.”  This message is reinforced when the learner gets into the “training” and is subject to the tedious and inane page turning and trivia activities that result from this sort of design approach.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  As twisted and misguided as some of these regulations have become in their official implementation, there is usually a valuable idea at the core.  Workplaces really do function better when there is a shared respect for diversity; no worker wants to be the victim of sexual harassment, and it is in everyone’s interest to be able to proceed safely in various emergencies.  

These topics touch each learner in very personal ways, and any training that is going to be successful is going to have to tap into how each employee is responsible for the work climate.  The motivators that are going to engage the learner by necessity will have to address attitudes, personal consequences, and elicit specific memories of past experiences that can be tied to the objectives.  This will not happen unless the designer of the instruction creates interactivity that will lead the learner in that direction.

Creating bad e-Learning is just as expensive as creating good e-Learning. Actually it’s probably more expensive when you take into consideration the wasted training time and the ill-will and distrust that it builds while not teaching.  Just because we think of the course as required teaching doesn’t mean that learners process it as required learning.  The necessity for creating meaning and relevance is probably even greater than for the other training projects we face.

e-Learning Design: Less is More

by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

"You can't teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know when they need to know it."  - Seymour Papert

These are words that most e-learning designers would do well to take to heart. One of the biggest problems with so much of the e-learning I encounter is that it is simply bloated with too much content.  I think this is a result of two primary factors:

 

• Subject-matter experts demand that everything they know be included in the training for immediate mastery (forgetting that it probably took them 10-20 years to master that much content).
• Designers are used to using actual training materials as "documentation," relying on classroom instructors to provide the filters for what really is necessary to learn. Learners working on their own can't make that judgment.

 

A really useful method I've found for deciding what to include is to first be very specific in deciding what immediate performance outcomes are expected from the training.  Then using these outcomes as a strict filter, separate the content into two buckets: "Need to Know" to achieve the performance outcome and just "Nice to Know."  Most people (including your SMEs) will be astonished at how much of what is viewed as essential content really is just "nice to know."  Then build your instruction around just the "Need to Know" content.  Usually, this turns out to be an achievable goal, even though the prospect of teaching the originally-proposed content scope would have been impossible (or at least unbearable).

In some cases, if circumstances require that all content be included for other reasons, then just put the "Nice to Know" content into a structured reference area, accessible to the learner via a "I'd like to learn more" button, but don't burden the learner with seemingly irrelevant content, and by no means should you be testing on it.

My own slant on the sentiment  expressed in the quote from Papert is to remind myself that the objective of most e-learning is not to create an Expert, but rather that make someone minimally competent.  True expertise must develop over time with experience and with extended interaction with knowledgeable colleagues.

Designing Learner Interfaces - Unity, Liberty & Charity

by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

Last week I commented on the idea that "learner interface design" perhaps suggests different strategies than traditional "user interface design"--that some of the user design standards that are in place to facilitate the automatization of standard operations, speed up actions, reduce decision time, etc. may not do much to actually enhance learning.

(I need to be clear that this discussion applies specifically to lesson designs that embrace the concept of instructional interactivity.  If the lesson is primarily an information dump with inserted comprehension questions and tests, which is really more about information delivery than about creating learning experiences, then user interface principles may well be sufficient.)

The graphical elements of an interface can be exceptionally powerful in creating a meaningful and memorable experience in the learner's mind, but the more general and unspecific those elements become, the less useful they can be in conveying instructional meaning.  Distinctiveness for instruction must be balanced with principles of user interface design to achieve an interface both functional and meaningful.  For example, here are two screenshots. One is from the Employee Security modules I’ve mentioned before; the other is a course on Substance Abuse that comes from the same course.

At first glance, these screens look vastly different. The first uses a bird's-eye-view to represent a dynamic environment in which the learner holds great control; the second use imagery to represent filing folders containing employee records, implying a more extended, thoughtful response.  The first is symbolic and illustrated in style; the second is realistic and photographic in style.  The first uses rollovers and drag-and-drop as the multiple choice answering mechanism; the second uses quite markedly different hot spots and popup menus as the multiple choice mechanism.  But learners seem to have no difficulty managing to succeed within the variability of these interfaces.  Partly this is because the interfaces share many common conventions, even though they present highly distinctive interfaces. In both cases: the scenario description is found in the upper left corner; the title is found in a distinctive font in the upper right; identically-formatted blue hypertext links provide access to resource materials; font sizes and styles are identical; a curved graphical framing device cradles the learning interaction; a standard menu bar of lesson options anchors the bottom of the screen.  But additionally, it is because the actual gestures for each interaction feel like natural responses to the context and challenge established in each case.

I’m not advocating randomness nor abandonment of rigor - but designing learning interfaces requires the same sort of openness that good teaching requires. Learner interface design is really a combination of art and science. I like to look across disciplines and traditional boundaries to find meaning. 

There’s an adage that has been part of my consciousness since my earliest memories, and I use it to keep the importance of design balance in mind.  I grew up a member of the Grange (or Patrons of Husbandry), a lovely organization with roots in nineteenth century rural America. That is largely irrelevant except that each month the Illinois Granger newspaper arrived in our mailbox, and I would read the masthead slogan “In essentials Unity, In non-essentials Liberty, In all things Charity” regularly, and now it seems to bear curious significance to the design problem.  How does this apply to learner interface design? 

For me, “In essentials Unity” means that those interface elements that create the core framework of the learner experience need to be uniform so there is no question of how to proceed, how to perform standard operations, how to gather critical information, etc. “In non essentials Liberty” means that some freedom and variety is usually necessary and instrumental in conveying specific contextual elements that will increase the active engagement of the learner.  “In all things Charity” simply means that the design must above all be kind to the learner in striving to be both functional and interesting. 

It’s an admittedly odd metaphor, but I find it exceptionally helpful as a philosophical guide in addressing the continuing challenge of achieving balance in a learner interface. 

Going Mobile: Will Accessibility Bring Better Learning?

by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist

I am spending most of the day in airports returning from a completely unexpected (but delightful) business trip to Netherlands Antilles.  I'm trying to be productive during all this waiting and sitting time that is consuming my day, but I am struck by how really inconvenient mobile technology can be in human terms. 

Sure, it is amazing that connectivity is POSSIBLE nearly everywhere, but it takes considerable resources and determination to actually connect.  I'm only halfway home, and if I really wanted to have had Internet access for my possible work time today, so far it could have cost me $35 spread across several providers to co be connected as many opportunities as I wanted, and also meant sitting in corner of the floor for awhile to get the signal and also crammed uncomfortably into a coach seat with a my laptop on an undersized tray table. The better, yet actually pretty horrible, alternative is that I'm tapping this out with my thumb on my iPhone. 

I'm not writing this as some kind of "woe is me" plea for sympathy, but I can't help but think how I might be feeling if I were trying to complete e-learning modules as a student under these conditions. In this odd marriage of human and computer activity, I feel like I'm compromising my natural inclinations to the uncomfortably contrived constraints of technology.  It's almost a cliché to talk about how great it is that mobile devices and universal network access can make anytime/anywhere e-learning possible.

Perhaps that's true from a human perspective it's hard to imagine a situation less conducive to learning.  It accentuates how the design elements that create meaning, context, and motivation in a learning activity are absolutely essential to counteract all the factors getting in the way of my attention and thought in this situation -- yet so often, those are exactly the design aspects that are scrapped first when designers start simplifying and stripping features of e-learning programs to make the learning compatible with universal access.

As we move more and more toward this paradigm for e-learning deliver, I hope we don't continue in the same mistaken idea that ACCESS = LEARNING.

Why is software training so boring?

by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist 

“It’s impossible to make software training interesting” is one of the most frequent complaints I hear from designers. 

At the risk of sounding like Mrs. Robertson, my 7^th grade speech teacher  who repeated  “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” way too many times, when I say that software training provides a unique opportunity to create especially engaging instruction in e-learning—if we’d only take advantage of it.  One of the biggest hurdles in e-learning is that usually you can’t recreate actual performance activities within the limits of keyboard and mouse input.  Software training is the one domain where we can actually have the student do in training precisely what must we want them to do in the performance environment. 

Further, most software training is procedural in nature, and we know pretty confidently what has to be done to teach a procedure: let learners practice both the individual steps and also practice chaining the steps together without interruption.  So a lot of our design decisions are already taken care of for us, which should really let us focus on creating more engagement rather than less.

This is not to say there isn’t a great deal of repetition and tediousness surrounding software training that’s hard to avoid.  Our failure comes, though, in being too focused on the uniformity and not enough on the variety within the context of software use.  Real life scenarios that drive software processes are where interest in the e-learning can be excavated.  For example, years ago at Microsoft I was designing training for database functionality within the Microsoft Works for the IBM-PC product. Instead of just organizing the lessons as a list of arbitrary tasks, the whole training course was centered on an evolving story told through newspaper articles.  Each article provided additional clues that the learner needed to use to drive searching and sorting actions within the database to ultimately identify a criminal.  This “pulp fiction” context served the general audience in that case well, but there are similarly juicy scenarios we can draw from in our work environments in order to create meaning, memory, interest and elevated significance for what is too often treated as irrelevant drudgery.

Click to see an example of contextual software simulation training.*

*You must register to view. 

The Wrong Content for e-Learning

A New Path for Learning

by Michael Allen, CEO, Allen Interactions

I don’t think you often see a turning point as you work through it; rather, it appears certain only in retrospect. But I think I’m beginning to see that we have turned onto a new path in e-learning. And that turning point may have happened as recently as in 2009.

The new path I think we’re on is actually turning to e-learning not just as a cost-saving measure, but as a strategic tool to accomplish competitive corporate objectives. Fantastic!
 
It’s not that there haven’t been articulate advocates. Many years ago, my esteemed friend and industry colleague, Clark Aldrich, delivered a conference keynote presentation that was as insightful as it was entertaining. He pointed out that few training directors become CEO’s. Training hasn’t been the path to the top. Rather than having “a seat at the corporate table”, training has been considered an inconvenient necessity and expense to be conveniently cut in bad economic periods. Many followed Clark’s admonishment that in order to have influence, trainers need to talk not in training terms but in financial and strategic corporate language just to be heard.
 
Training budgets have traditionally been the first budgets to be cut as we would have expected to see again during these frightful economic disasters, but as we look back at the year—a year of opportunities with many major new clients and exciting strategic e-learning projects, we see corporate leaders actually beginning to talk our language: behavioral change, content mastery, collaborative learning, informal learning, and performance enhancement. Wow! Are we seeing training budgets actually increase in order to meet important challenges and goals? It appears so!
 
Was 2009 the year that training finally became a member of corporate leadership, not just an unfortunate expense? I guess we’ll see in 2010. Keep your fingers crossed!
 

 

I wish everyone a healthy and profitable 2010! It’s looking like an exciting year, indeed!
 

Are "You" in the e-Learning Department?

by Lisa Stortz, Strategic Relationship Manager 

We have been fortunate enough to be teaching the ASTD e-Learning Certificate Program for over four years. We typically hear the phrase, “I am the e-learning department.”  We truly understand the challenges and struggles that go along with this situation. 

We’d like to learn more about some of the design challenges you’re facing. How are the challenges affecting your day-to-day development of engaging e-learning? Just simply share a challenge or two with us.  In return, we will pick several and put our proven strategy to work and offer some design ideas  to you.  Just  reply back to this blog posting. 

No cost for our thoughts ---- We'll learn a lot from you and want to give back in return.

Love to hear from you!