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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cammy Bean
Read between
October 9, 2017 - January 17, 2018
She said that well-rounded, e-learning professionals need to be versant in some very different areas if they’re going to be successful in this business. There are four slices in a big pie, with each piece representing a critical part of the profession: learning, creativity, technology, and business.
The most successful e-learning initiatives pull all these pieces together: they have a clear vision of what the audience needs to learn and how to best achieve that outcome; a creative design that looks enticing, creates interest, and sustains attention; the right technology that stands up to the delivery needs; and a solid connection back to the overall goals and objectives of the organization.
Scott Abel, in a post on content strategy, “Content Strategists Must Become Engineers of Content-Driven Customer Experiences,”
look this up.
Ask people what they think. If they’re really being honest, you might get responses that will take your breath away. More importantly, I hope you get responses that will inform and possibly change your direction in a real and meaningful way.
“Art can exist for art’s sake. Design cannot.” The difference is that design must have a purpose.
three pillars to design: purpose, intention, and content.
Purpose dictates that every element of the design should contribute to achieving a goal.
Intention refers to the thoughtful consideration and placement of every element and all the details. It’s having a reason for specific choices—from where a button is located, to the size of the font. What is your intention behind each screen and activity?
Content functions as the framework—it’s the lens through which the design is focused.
Design is not solely about making things aesthetically pleasing, although that is part of it. Design, at its core, is about solving problems.
designers strive to help users solve their dilemma in the most convenient, simple, and elegant way.
Well-designed e-learning programs look good. They please the eye and invite the learner in. They make the person feel like someone actually spent time and energy to create the program, and that, therefore, the content must really matter.
For e-learning programs, think about the purpose of the program and approach the content with that in mind. How do you want people to feel after completing your program and what you want them to do with that emotion?
The most critical element of design is, does it solve the problem? Does it produce the desired outcome?
“Why is so much e-learning so boring? Because we’re obsessed with designing information when instead we should be designing experiences. We need to focus on what people need to do, not what they need to know.”
coaching a SME who directly authors
Spending this time up front to lay out expectations, agree to tasks, and plan a schedule that you can all stick to is the key to staying on time, on budget, and to creating a successful training outcome.
eLS basics
walk our client project teams through a Working Together Guide. It describes the overall process we’re going to follow, introduces key deliverables, and sets expectations for how much review time and involvement we’ll need from them at each stage of the process.
eLS basics
set clear expectations about what’s going to happen. He needs to know what to do and how long it’s going to take.
You can help by providing lots of examples of deliverables and the final product early in the design process.
Share as much as you can so he will be able to understand the connection between the early documents and deliverables to your final e-learning product.
Explain key concepts, relate it back to Mark’s own online experiences, and be sure to provide plenty of examples.
Remind Mark that he is an expert—experts have lots of deep knowledge and typically don’t remember what it was like to learn a subject matter for the first time.
your aim is to create a focused experience that doesn’t overwhelm people with too much information.
Brain Rules, John Medina tells us that 10 minutes of focused attention is really as much as the adult brain wants to take in.
Aim for one idea per slide.
course design: one idea per page
It’s better to have more slides overall that are shorter and sharper, as opposed to fewer slides that are crammed full of content.
“We need training on this because we want people to know all the information.” Instead, you should try to get him to focus on what people need to do with the information. Does the process change? Do they need to change their behavior? Or is this really just an awareness-raising piece?
the purpose of e-learning can’t be to create expertise, because expertise takes years to develop. Instead, we should be aiming to create minimal competence. So ask Mark, “What’s the least that you want people to do?”
What are the three key takeaways that you want someone to get out of this program? This question helps with prioritization. Get
What mistakes do people most commonly make? Where do they get things wrong? If all you had time for in your program was to focus on the mistakes people make—to prevent them in the future—then you’d make a difference and have fulfilled your purpose in life; or at least proved your worth as an instructional designer.
Can you tell me a story about this content? How did you get into this area of expertise? What mistakes have you made along the way? Be sure to ask questions that get to the heart of the content—this is where the humanity lies. In a classroom session, the sidebar stories—the ones that don’t make it onto the instructor’s facilitator guide or the PowerPoint deck—are often the bits that make all the difference.
The argument for this model is that it saves time and speeds up development. By empowering experts to author the content directly, we can more quickly get the necessary information to our employees so they can do their jobs better. On the other hand, most SMEs don’t know much about adult learning and instructional design. Their expertise revolves around content. With such a narrow focus on the details and intricacies of their content, SMEs typically don’t have a sense of the big picture or the expertise to structure content and activities in a meaningful way to teach skills and transfer
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The learning model is essentially the design approach you’re going to use.
Using a learning model when developing rapid e-learning allows you to accelerate your writing and development by giving you a repeatable structure to follow.”
save time, save money.
learning blueprints, design approaches, instructional methods, and instructional strategies,
A design pattern documents some best thinking around solving different types of problems, giving the designer freedom in how to implement the pattern. For instance, software designers might refer to a design pattern that describes an approach for logging into a system or creating an address entry field. The design pattern shouldn’t be confused with templates or set screen types. It is not a template or a finished design that can be transformed directly into code, but rather a general description for how to solve a problem.
instead of a template
there are three main reasons for a learning experience: • to inform or raise awareness • to improve knowledge and skills • to solve complex problems and change attitude or behaviors.
My favorite question is, “What do you want the learner to be able to do after completing this program?”
Information and awareness models are appropriate: • when the content is simple and easy to understand • when the risk of making mistakes is low • when information can be easily accessed through performance support tools like job aids at the moment of need • where true practice isn’t required.
“People aren’t successful because they have information. They’re successful because they know how to use it!”
means giving employees the tools and skills they need to apply all the information you’re handing to them.
Knowledge and skills builder models are appropriate to use when: • teaching new processes or procedures • teaching soft skills like communication or leadership • practice is necessary in order to reinforce the skills.
So, the question is: Do you want to know what the goal of the training is, or do want to know what training is designed to actually do? There is a difference in intent versus execution.
what is the course/content intended for? what does it actually do?
How will you align your intent with your execution?
I find that it’s generally not the learners or even their managers who are most skeptical, but more likely it’s the people who have been performing “training” for years. Some completely refuse to entertain new ideas and pull up their 100-slide deck of bulleted PowerPoints.
I think there is still a real disconnect in the learning industry (not just in my organization) between what people talk about, say they believe, and what they really deliver to learners.
Within a structured e-learning program (a.k.a., a “course”) you can provide an open framework or menu structure that people can dip in and out of at will.
They can drill down into that process and learn more about each step, but you don’t lock them into a set flow.
Most adults like to explore and don’t want to be treated like children. An open and exploratory...
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