e e learning

buggy whip makers

 the april big question on learning circuits blog is about content vendors and how to help them solve their problems in an ever more competitive marketplace, providing more customized content, which costs more but sells at lower and lower prices. 

around about 100 years ago, there were manufacturers who specialized in one thing - buggy whips.  fashion accessories of the second half of the 19th century, buggy whips served a major function in transportation of the time.  need to go a bit faster? crack!  off you go.  sudden stop needed?  crack! you stop on a dime.  the onset of the 20th century saw gas pedals and brakes replacing the need to get horsepower by cracking your whip.  unfortunately the buggy whip makers saw themselves as buggy whip makers, not transportation accelerators and decelerators.  as the demand for buggy whips died, so did the buggy whip makers.

flash back to the present and there is a strong parallel when we look at learning content vendors.  clearly a new paradigm of how learners learn and how they access the content they need is well on it's way to being cemented in place.  i left college textbook publishing after 14 very successful years of publishing and promoting course based textbooks.  i left and joined carol vallone and barb ross at universal learning technology (which upon merger became webct) because i just didn't see the established publishers making the radical shift that is being demanded by today's marketplace.

i have no interest in bailing out or bucking up content vendors who refuse to listen to what the marketplace is demanding.  so part of me agrees with tom haskins' leave a clean corpse post.  if you aren't changing to meet the market, you might as well send out your finest outfit to the dry cleaners and prepare for the day when people will ask, why did they have to pass now.

wendy  wickham voices the feeling of many learning professionals in what i need now.  this is not a whining varuka salt, i-want-it now plea, but rather an understanding that learning and development at the speed of business is a "solve today's problem today" proposition versus a plan for tomorrow environment.  perhaps we have forgotten that the rapid elearning movement wasn't created to eliminate vendors and instructional designers.  rapid elearning's impetus came from the realization that we were taking 12 months to develop a training course for a product with a 9 month development cycle. 

for years the content vendors had enough sway to make us learn and teach the way they felt we should. but it is no longer "buyer beware."  it's vendor beware.  if you don't want to provide what the customer truly wants, someone else will.  a classic example is the explosion is the number of cut-rate basic functionality lms's that have hit the market. in the past few years to compete against blackboard, desire2learn, and moodle.

that said, i agree with claudia escribano in thinking about big questions and valerie bock in formal learning: it's not dead yet! that there is a valid place for content and content vendors in the learningsphere.  high quality content that is priced appropriately has always been welcomed and appreciated.  such content is focused on customer/learner needs and provides an extension of what can be provided by other instructional means (ilt, online discussions, one-on-one tutoring, etc.).

 i'm a believer that good facilitators and good content serve as accelerators to the learning process.  providing best practices, case studies, compendia of relevant facts and resources, guides to prerequisite information to support subsequent content, access to experts in specific fields, are just some of the possible types of content that can be used by facilitator and learners alike to advance learning at a pace that is faster that what an individual could do if they sought out content to learn on their own.

certainly, content vendors are struggling with the change the face today.  that's to be expected.  it's also likely that some of them won't make it through the change.  but that's natural too.  those who understand what their customers want, are willing to drop their previous conceptions regarding what content development is, and embrace new types and forms of content will survive and, likely, earn the types of profits they yearn for today.  for those who are whining about not making enough profits or trying to convince us that we should change our approach to learning are just sitting being the steering wheel trying to figure out how to use their buggy whip to get this contraption moving.

Tags: content-vendors, do-it-yourself-learning, instructor-lead-training, content-vendors, rapid-elearning

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embedding learning into the workflow

in a webinar by jeffrey mann from gartner sponsored by interwise, mann discussed how to better integrate collaboration tools into the corporate culture.  one thing that drew my attention was his frequent use of the phrase "embed collaboration into the workflow."

my reaction  that this seems to be such an odd statement because collaboration is already a part of business processes - either formally or informally.  now i'm not clueless, so i get that mann was likely talking about embedding collaboration tools into the business process.  although he didn't talk much about it systems integration. the problem that concerns me is that my immediate reaction was to be dismissive of the rest of his message.  "if this guy doesn't know collaboration is a part of normal business processes, then what worth does everything else he have to say have for me." 

malcolm gladwell tells us in blink that i'm not alone in making snap value judgments like this.  why do i bring it up here?  because in our profession we constantly take about embedding learning into the workflow.  i'm confident that our using this particular phrasing is working to undermine our credibility with the people we are most seeking to impress.

learning is already a part of the workflow.  employees are constantly looking for new resources and new ways to do things. good managers know it's their job to help employees understand their job and how the organization works. customers are patient with new trainees.  executives plan out organization change initiatives to help the company learn how to compete better.

language is a huge part of how we present ourselves and how others perceive us.  talking of "embedding learning into the workflow" likely makes us look clueless to our colleagues. how many of our colleague are tuning out our message because of what we are saying?

Tags: collaboration, communication, professionalism, workflow-learning, informal-learning

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the dark side reaches the blogosphere

while the timing tells you how far being on the news i am, imagine my surprise when, as i was sifting through my rss reader late last Sunday night working on a project due on Monday, my sleepy eyes stumbled across these four words:

death threats against bloggers

what the.....?  of course, i immediately clicked through to kathy sierra's creating passionate users to see what this was about. no, it wasn't another odd marketing technique from kathy.  it was a post announcing that she feels compelled to stop blogging because of the death threats and other heinous comments being made both to her blog and in posts on other blogs about her.

as i read the post, which she has moved off of creating passionate users and links to from there, i was in total shock.  shock that kathy has been enduring this hell for months.  shock that the outrage hasn't been louder (after all, i'm just now seeing it).  shock that one of the very best blogs in the blogosphere has been swallowed by the black hole of puerile pranks, at best, or a sociopathic stalkers in the worst case.

as i've previously written (see The Future of Media, Part 2 on Learning Circuits Blog) there are those who are predicting some dark times ahead for the internet.  perhaps, if they are correct, and i wouldn't bet against them, the anonymous threats against kathy are likely just the tip of a much larger iceberg to come.  why might i feel this way?

throughout history, whenever society was presented with new technologies, there was a ramp up time in which scammers and folks with other nefarious intentions were able to take advantage of a public yet unaware of how to identify the authentic from the fake or otherwise protect themselves.  when paper money was introduced, counterfeiters had a field day exchanging fake bills for real.  when i was a teen, the newly introduced, credit card-sized driver licenses were a  snap to fake. postal scams and telephone scams both were prevalent as those services spread to every household.  atm's and public phones had their dangers until we learned to silence the beep-boop-beep's that told the sharp eared scammer standing just out of sight that you pin is 3-2-3.

why would we think the advance of the internet isn't going to be the same or worse. most of the innovations i mention above were regulated as they were introduced.  but the internet we've created is regulated by no one. and we're proud of that.  we should be.  but let's not be naive and believe there won't be a downside to that freedom.  currently there is no way to truly verify that someone is who they say they are on the internet.  even those cryptographic "words" we have to decipher to enter a comment on this and many other blogs and websites don't keep out the spammer's robots (just look at the recent comments over there in the right sidebar and you'll see what i mean). in the discussion of tim o'reilly's blogging code of conduct, several people point out that requiring an e-mail address means nothing because there are numerous ways to get an email that doesn't identify you nor can be linked to you.  is it more anonymous for me to be "anonymous" or to be "diane armstrong"?  (even kathy suggests in her last post to her blog that she might create a fake persona to continue her blogging under.)

maybe we thought the blogosphere was a different part of the internet.  a safe haven from the ills of the world due to our collective commitment to authentic discourse and honest disagreement.  in many ways it is true. the rallying behind kathy has been much like a neighborhood watch being formed.  the blogosphere has shown it's compassion and willingness to protect it's turf.  but even neighborhood watches often can't do it all.  fortunately, organizations like sxip, openid, lid, oasis/saml, pingidentity, and others are working on solutions.  the question is, will they be just in time or a little to late to avert widespread scams?

tags: anonymity, scams, kathy-sierra, code-of-conduct, blogophere, identity, identity-management

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skewing the data

in my efforts to push the envelop on improving our professional image, I've been calling out gross instances of the type of work that makes us look bad to our peers and superiors thus harming our reputations and calling into question our professionalism. 

this example is from the report on training administration and operations just published by expertus and trainingoutsourcing.com.  you can get a free copy of the report if you are a member of trainingoutsourcing.com.  membership is free.

take a look at this graphic and think about how you would write or talk about the data set that it represents.

now you might say something like a majority of programs estimate that their percentage spend on administration and operations is under 20%.   or 8% have cost control problems.  right?  Here's what the survey's report says about this data:

Survey Highlights

• Results show that administrative expenses are high in most organizations:  7.6% of respondents said their companies spent more than 50% of their training budgets on administration and operations; 10.2% spent between 36 and 50%; and 29.3% spent 20 to 35%.

what!!!!!  what about the other 53% of the respondents.  47% does not constitute "most" of the respondents.  what's the break down of the 53% of organizations who are below 20%.  for all we know, cost could be running under 10% for half the respondents.  but then again, that wouldn't be good for an organization who is in existence to promote the efficiencies that outsourcing can bring to an organization.

this ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is a particularly mangled attempt to skew the presentation of the data to make it look more favorable to one's own position, no matter what the data actually says.  usually skewing the data will be seen by your audience and will undercut your credibility on this and future topics. 

if you do research in hopes of supporting your position, but end up with data that harms your position you might be able to pretend that there was no research was done or that some how the study was compromised.  but the best thing to do in the long run is to study what you have found and change your position accordingly.   you might lose the current battle, but you will earn a level of respect that will pay dividends well into the future.

what's wrong with workplace learning?

in my previous post i talked about how jay cross' observation that training, like psychology, has historically been a field built on a cornerstone that we come to understand and improve human abilities by identifying weaknesses and deficiencies and fixing them.  psychology is slowly being brought out of this negative perspective by the positive psychology movement and the discoveries enabled by new brain imaging technologies.  but what of training?

as I began writing my follow up post, my ideas expanded and i realized that I had two posts (at least)  to play out, so here's a post on what's wrong and I'll follow it with a solution.

well, first we need to understand what the desired change is. for the purposes of this discussion i'll put forward this overarching goal for learning:

to serve our organization as a integrated strategic contributor helping to drive profit and shareholder value by assuring that the workforce has the necessary knowledge, skills and abilities to meet their individual and collective performance goals.

obviously, i'm addressing the strategic aspects of the learning function as a whole. while there are specific issues to be addressed by course designers and developers, facilitators, delivery support personnel, technologists and the other specialist who work under the learning umbrella, i believe there is a critical need for a rethink of the underlining purpose and orientation of the role of learning in the organization. one of the things that came out of learning circuit blog's december big question was that as a profession we are generally unsure of who we are and what we are supposed to be doing. until we know what we are trying to achieve, we'll never bring an end to this occupational cakewalk we're in.

are we a m*a*s*h unit?

employees are shipped off to us when they can't do what they need to do. when something goes wrong, a good day or two of training is just what the doctor ordered. stat! we've gotten darn good at triage and meatball surgery. working with impossible deadlines to create learning instances just in the nick of time is our forte. we know it's not the best that can be done, but we happily take the pat on the back for having pulled it off again.

but while we are operating in this crisis management mode, we're falling into a trap of having to do more with less yet faster. don't believe me? let's look at the numbers according to astd's 2006 state of the industry in enterprise learning report - considered by many to be the standard source for industry data in our field.  t+d magazine trumpeted that US organizations spend $109.25 billion on learning and development. while the huge amount of money spent on learning each year is remarkable, the reality is that  we are being pushed to produce at a rate greater than the increase in investment.

(note that I am using these numbers as possible indicators of issues that may exist, not as facts.  they are compelling, but more definitive and precise research needs to be conducted to consider any of this to be factual.  My point is this summary data points to issues to be explored further.)

If we use the expenditure per employee as a baseline number and compare it's year on year percentage increase to the rate of increase (or decrease) of the data that relates to the workload of learning professionals, we begin to see some interesting data. in mosts cases the increased demand on the workplace learning professional is substantially greater than the increased investment. For example, in bmf companies from 2005 to 2006 astd projects a 25.54% increase in the number of hours of learning that will be provided per wlp staff member. but astd is projecting less than a 1% increase in expenditure per employee at the same companies. you might assume that much of the increase in the number of hours will come via reuse of digital content, but the report projects a 16.13% increase in repurposing of content.

similarly, while there is a decrease in the number of employees each wlp is hypothetically responsible for, the increase in the number of hours received by each employees results in an overall increase in the workload for wlp's.

these productivity gains are, on the whole, a positive for the learning function.  in large part, our ability to decrease costs and increase efficiency is what improved our standing with in the organization and got us "a seat at the table."  but an alarm went off in my head when we discussed our instructional models back in november on lcb.  most of the suggestions were for cutting back on parts of the models we use.  cut back on assessment or reduce design efforts.  much of the thrust of the rapid elearning movement is to cut out development time.

all of this feels like it comes from a very strong focus on project management.  decrease the scope, cut the budget, lessen the time to delivery.  all tactics to increase efficiency and productivity.  true, we work in a business environment, but efficiency and productivity really don't have much impact on human learning.

not assessing what needs to be learned makes designing an effective learning experience a matter of random luck.  developing content without the expertise of someone who understands adult learning will likely lead to demotivation of the learners.

we are so busy fixing problems, reducing costs, and increasing productivity that we may be missing the boat on what we need to be doing to insure our corporate survival.  tending to the wounded is all well and good, but i'd rather avoid finding myself in a similar position as hawkeye pierce on m*a*s*h was, when overworked and under appreciated with no sign of let up, he went awol to go to the frontlines to get them stop fighting. 

the learning needs of our organizations will only increase in the future.  for our own sanity, we have to find a better way to meet them.

training is a negative science

like many other people, i've long kept a list of quotes that i find inspirational, insightful, or  just plan funny.  some are from famous names in history, other by common folk who just happened come up with a sound bite that made it far enough for me to see it, while others are contemporaries of ours who have great thoughts.

in this last category i've got a quote from jay cross that i lifted from a post of his on the internet time blog some time ago.  jay wrote:

"Training, like psychology, is inherently pessimistic. Both fields are built on a core belief that people are deficient or dysfunctional."

to be honest, it's always struck me as odd that I put this one in my collection.  it is insightful for sure.  psychology,until recently, has determined what normal is by studying abnormalities.  particularly in the arena of how our brains work.  if sam has damage to a part of his brain and he can no longer add 1 + 1 and know that the answer is 2, then that part of the brain must be responsible for mathematical reasoning.  not surprising the number of things we were wrong about now that we can look at the brain's activity during normal functioning via imaging technologies.  however, the positive psychology movement, led by respected researches like marty seligman, mihaly czentimihaly and barbara fredrickson along with neuropsychology's discoveries is shaking the psychology world to it's core.

training too is guilty of focusing on our deficiencies.  every major design and development model has some version of a needs analysis and most focus on identifying a learning or performance gap.  this gap is no less that an analysis of how deficient or incapable current employees are.  our job has been to fill that gap or at least create events that everyone agrees will be sufficient.  given the various studies that have been done, i'd guess that 50% of the time more the folks in the learning group have no idea whether their beautifully designed and developed program will be successful or not.  but it doesn't really matter since most of the time the challenges will have changed and nobody will be held accountable.

so is there an equivalent to positive psychology in the learning world?  check out my next post for my answer.

 

getting all worked up about similarities

in his post corporate elearning strategies and development: the february big question! brent schlenker raises some soul searching questions.  but upon further reflection it's not as strong an argument as at first read. before i go further, i do agree that his questions are good ones to ask.  it's his assumed answers that I find  objection to.

in comments to the post, karl kapp and mindy make many of the specific arguments i would make. 

karl defends the value of isd work and i totally agree.  isd is not automatic.  yes, some of the specifics may not be unique to isd, but no one ever claimed isd was a separate academic research field. learning professionals have long been alchemists of sorts. we take concepts from where ever we can find them and meld them together to  lessons and materials that advance human knowledge. simply throwing pieces of content together  with no concern for design ultimately doesn't work for the majority of learners.  the rapid elearning folks who advocate this "eliminate design" approach will soon realize this.

related to this is the concept of trans-disciplinary practitioners that mindy brings to the conversation.  the aspect of this concept that mindy doesn't stress is that what type of practitioner you end up being is determined by the mix of disciplines your bring to your practice.  the uniqueness then comes from the different aspects, not the similar. because scott mccloud uses the concept of text-near-graphics in comics, I may use it in a job aid, a web designer uses it in a catalog, and a street sign maker uses it for traffic control doesn't mean we are all text-near-graphics practitioners.

so to answer brent's ultimate question, what do we bring to the party?  my response is that we bring the same thing every professional brings to the table - a unique set of knowledge, skills and abilities that enable us to bring unique value to our interactions with others.

now let us back up to his first question, why us? simple because we are those unique individuals who seek out the answers to the mysteries of human learning.  now, if we don't do a good job of letting people know what it is that makes us unique that makes us bad communicators and marketers.

asking questions

the topic for the february big question at learning circuits blog is probably the biggest question we can ask of ourselves as learning professionals - what questions should we be asking?  i even had the advantage of knowing what question we were asking a few days ahead of time and i still find myself struggling with where to begin.

some of the large-in-scope questions i believe we need to be asking include:

• what does it mean to be a learning professional?
• how do we earn the respect of our colleagues so that we can be professionals?
• how do we get out ahead of the practical day-to-day challenges so that we can be more strategic (and I believe more valuable to our organizations)?
• how do we gain support for exciting informal learning learnscapes in our organizations?
• how should we evaluate our efforts to assure that we are credited with having impact (assuming we truly do)?
• in the end, if we are successful, what will we have done to change our organizations?

i could go on, and i will in the future, but i've decided to try to drill down on one of these questions because it's been on my mind recently.  it's the third point above.  rephrased in the spirit of the big question, i'll put it it this way:

what questions should we be asking to put ourselves in a more strategic posture?
and who should we be asking?

• i'd like to learn more about your business, could I spend a day or two shadowing you or some of your key people?  (to my line of business partners)
• my goal is to help you achieve your goals, how could i be doing that better than i have been in the past? (to any of my stakeholders)
• what's your biggest concern regarding your team being ready to meet your strategic goals a year from now?  two years from now?  (to any of my stakeholders)
• are you willing to participate in our organization's learning by developing the skills it takes to facilitate your employee's and others' learning both in the classroom and day-to-day in meetings and casual encounters?  (to every manager in the organization beginning with the ceo)
• are we willing to accept that unless there is a clear business imperative for learning, then no matter how good what we create "on paper" is, it's a waste of resources for the organization? (to myself and everyone involved in  the learning group)
• will you support new  methods designed to leverage the latest in  technology and human resources to deliver learning to more employees faster at the same cost or cheaper than traditional classroom learning? (to key stakeholders, especially my executive sponsors)

i'm not being naive here.  i'm fully aware that these are tough questions to ask.  they require political saavy and organizational standing.  but these are the questions, or questions like them, that we should be asking.  if we don't have the skill or position to ask them, then that's our learning gap that needs to be filled.

 

make our garden grow

konrad glogowski recently shared his personal disappointment caused when he realized that he had been shutting down the  blog communities of his 8th grade classes each june at the end of the school year.  his post, i will be a gardner is worth reading both for what it has to say about building communities but also as an example of the power that honest introspection  conducted before the blogosphere can hold.

as the blogmeister for learning circuits blog, I've been looking at ways to nurture an online community as well.  konrad's thoughts regarding building a communal history and building the means to assure that  contributions to the community will not evaporate for some trivial reason (the end of the school year for example) are well taken.  he further says he used to think of himself as the architect of the communities his students formed but has changed his metaphor to that of a gardner.

having lived in boston, the home of urban communal gardening, i think the metaphor of gardening is a apt one. 

konrad's points are well taken.  when leading or seeking to build a community it's important to let the individuals explore the topic(s) at hand freely and openly.  but at least as importantly, they must be able to explore their own growth path as a member of the community.

konrad's thoughts jive well with a great blog post i recently stumbled upon by bud gibson on the community engine entitled high octane blogging — how to form business community.  gibson sets out three dynamic components he describes as vital to building a vibrant community.

• creating an information space where participants can see each other as well as other related information from outside the community.
• giving participants their own soapbox where they can say what they want and getting them to say it.
• giving participants feedback so that they know what they are writing is having an impact.

while they are a bit broad in nature, i think we're seeing evidence in conversations around The Big Question feature at LCB.  (more no that in a post on LCB soon.)  add to this list, konrad's emphasis on archiving a communal history and I think you have a solid set of guidelines for community building.

I'll close with the lyrics from the finale of bernstein's classic opera, candide, which see quite apropo.

We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow.
And make our garden grow!

quality vs. speed - we've created a monster!

over on learning circuits blog the january big question is about instructional design and the trade offs between wanting to build the best possible learning experiences and the continual pressure coming from rapid e-learning efforts. 

while i'm a tad slow off the starting line for this month's big question, it's been nice to have a chance to read through all of the great posts already written in response.  as I was trying to solve the technical snafus that blogger, cocoment, and mysyndicaat threw at me, i did have the chance to check out what everyone else was saying.

one of the things i have enjoyed about the big question in it's first few months on lcb is the diversity of thought and opinion being expressed side by side.  this month has been no exception.  so the bulk of my answer will stitch together some of the thoughts I agreed with from the other replies.   sort of a frankenstein's post if you will.

i'm with geetha krishnan who questions whether quality is really a variable.  i like his definition of quality:

quality in e-learning is something that delivers what the learning objectives necessitate, what the content merits, and what the learner needs.  it is about the nature of the learner's experience with the learning product.

tom haskins uses cool charts and graphs to make the argument that the best scenario is when there there is a concensus in favor of usability amongst stakeholders of a project.

along the same lines, anil mammen has a great statement about the focus of learning materials development:

Whatever be the instructional challenge, the focus should be to find the most appropriate learning solution that can be rolled out in “reasonable time” (when the content is still relevant, when things have to be addressed quickly, before costly mistakes are made...)

karyn romeis takes the argument that quailty is quality when she says:

Even when the schedule is tight, the end product must WORK. It must deliver the goods, or it has been time (and therefore money) wasted.      

she argues that when confronted with a schedule that is too tight perhaps learning professionals need aggressiveness training to help them push back for more time. 

david wilson turns the debate in discussing the role of technologies in shortening time on task which has a positive impact on development.  the downside of rapid technologies is to take the wrong people out of the process

A collapsed development model also means collapsing the expertise involved. With SME production that means minimal e-learning or even learning expertise (e.g. instructional design). It also often means limited technology understanding or knowledge of the tools and associated standards.

to this point, my frankenstein's post has a tremendous amount of strong advice and direction for us to consider on future projects.  it seems we are very focused on solving the problem within the project management framework.  but i really don't think it ultimately is the answer as it stands now.  no, my creation needs something more than more than refined project management skills.   igor, bring me the brain!

as have some of those i've quoted above, clive shepherd feels there is a need to think outside our bigger-better mindset.

Don't worry about creating sophisticated interactive multimedia materials - create a 'spark' in the form of a short thought piece, case history, quotation, picture or whatever and then allow learners to reflect on this collaboratively with their peers using forums, blogs, wikis or chat facilities. Much quicker and much more likely to have an impact.

to my mind clark quinn sews the key knot in my creation.

The point is that we need to be looking at a broader space of solutions than just elearning courses. If we move to a performance focus, we’ll see that there are times where just an update of how things have changed is sufficient, or we only need to change the references or job aids, and sometimes we have a need for a major change to skill set.

stitching all of these pieces parts into one coherent creation is quite a daunting task.  i've argued that what is required is an entirely new mindset to our creative efforts.  karyn hinted at one primary change - we need to be more willing to push back.  more importantly, if we get further out in front of the problem, more willing to be proactive  in building new consensus with our stakeholders we can avoid those schedule cutting, scope increasing problems.  we can find higher quality solutions, with less expense and in less time.

i'm not convinced that we have reached anything close to our potential when it comes to  leveraging available assets, technology and process improvements.   as clark argues, we simply can't expect different results if we keep doing the same things over and over, but just a bit faster and a bit cheaper.   Yes, what i'm proposing is risky, but then again, the stakeholders and learners are at the gates with torches and pitchforks in hand.  what do we have to lose?

technorati tags:project_management, rapid_elearning, performance, instructional_design, quality, speed

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