Action Mapping in Action

I found these slides by Cathy Moore Design Lively elearning with Action Mapping that illustrate the concept of action mapping most precisely . I thought this information to be valuable for most of the industry, as we often tend to lose focus on the business goal and what learners really need in order to perform their job better. Some of the points that I highlighted, in this months big question on learning circuits, speak about how learner-centric design, reference-hybrids, and learning outcomes will become more important in future work places. So though the term 'action mapping' seemed new, Cathy's slides made it evident as to how focus, focus, and more focus on the business goal and the learner needs in our training courses will get us the desired business benefits.

The goal of Action Mapping is to successfully help you convert your formidable 'information dump' into a no-nonsense meaningful course, that focuses only on 'actions' that the learner needs to learn to perform his job better. The action mapping process, according to Cathy Moore, consists of the following steps:

1. Identify your business goal.
2. Identify what people need to do in order to reach that goal.
3. Design activities that help people practice each behavior.
4. Identify the minimum information people need to complete each activity.

I believe this approach takes us away from the linear approach we had to covering courses earlier, wherein we would necessarily cover a lot of theory in the beginning of a course, hoping the user 'may' need it sometime. I think that approach is now irrelevant as it also indicates a level of uncertainty and lack of awareness on the side of the course designer. The benefits of applying the concept of action mapping to your courses are:

1. Tightly focused materials.
2. Realistic, compelling activities.
3. No irrelevant information.
4. More likely to have a measurable business impact.

The things we need to avoid doing though are:
1. Attempt to increase the learner's knowledge in their domain to an extent that you cover every bit of information that comes your way, and end up dumping information on the learner. For example, don't try and cover every single feature of the product. Remember that it is product documentation's job to do that.
2. Create irrelevant quizzes in the name of engaging the learner and waste valuable learning time.
3. Write statements that increase knowledge rather than teach actions, meaning write sentences that are task-oriented. For example, The Access Control dialog box, gives you many options to control actions of your users, can be better written as Use the Access Control dialog box to assign appropriate privileges to your users.

The focus, so to say will be, the 'action' that your want the learner to learn in order to be able to perform better in their job.

My 2 cents on action mapping
I think we as instructional designers need to ramp up and define a niche for ourselves by proving that we 'can' understand the learner's needs and design courses to precisely address them. This will only be possible, owing to our ability to gain domain knowledge in the domain in which the training is being created. For example, if I am creating training for the telecommunications domain, I need to understand generic telecommunications concepts, as well as the way in which the product that I'm creating training for, will be used by the learner. So you, more than the learner, need to work very hard to gather this information and analyze it to the level of the 'actions' or 'tasks' that your learner will perform.

I also believe that those of us who believe a lot in the traditional ways of training, need to move towards a mindset change here, and accept that the 'traditional' trainings that we created in the past were not necessarily the best solutions and recognize how practical concepts like action mapping can help us deliver effective training.

There is also a need to create simple and usable user interfaces and interactions that will motivate the learner to learn more, rather than deter them from proceeding, owing to the complex nature of the interfaces.

As Cathy rightly highlights, the associated practice activity linking to an action, should be taken from a real-life scenario rather than a fictitious scenario that sounds unrealistic to the learner. It becomes imperative on the part of the instructional designer to research on and create 'realistic' scenarios that the learner can 'really' relate to.

In conclusion, I believe that as time moves on, the need to being practical becomes paramount and we need no more eye openers than we had in our past experiences.