Instructional Design: On the road to learning

Of Android, Mobile Games and Learning Experiences

2011-05-15T13:54:00.007+05:30

I never thought I'll write about learning games and mobile learning until I bought my Android. People have asked me, why Android phone? My answer has been that I love Android as it is breaking new ground for mobile computing and open technologies. Android is versatile as it is not limited only to mobile phones, but it can be installed on various devices. Android gives developers the opportunity to leverage their development skills, while also building an exciting and active community, just as ground breaking as Java. Just thought of adding this: "When technologies don't restrain you, they enable you to innovate." I truly believe open technologies are the future!

I couldn't have written this post without experiencing the real thing. I had set aside to buy my Android (Nexus S) after some expenses were out of the way. But my 5 year old Nokia gave in and I had no other choice but to buy my Nexus immediately. I am extremely happy.

Having the power of a smartphone , I am now always connected irrespective of my tight deadlines at work. Oracle Fusion is on its way to the first release and the Information Development team is busy, extremely busy. These are exciting times and the Nexus was just the icing on the cake!

I started off a couple of weeks back, very cautious initially about randomly installing apps fearing security issues and malware. When i inserted my sim card, the phone just configured everything like a breeze. Everything started working on a simple 2G connection. I didn't even have to call my service provider
To start off, Twitter and, Facebook were safest bet.

I was soon reading articles and blogs voraciously as it was so much faster that logging into my laptop, opening the browser, and using a mouse. This was smarter and everything I wanted was accessible using my fingertips. The feeling was amazing. I missed tweeting and following up with news so frequently before. A phone had changed the world for me. I was even replying to my manager's emails immediately during the harrowing time to renew my passport.

The world was at my fingertips and I felt empowered. I was managing my time better now despite my deadlines. Not that other phones don't have such features, but what makes the Nexus S special is the user experience and the speed at which I'm able to complete the same tasks. Being in Information Development I have a lot to take back to my job from these experiences.

I have also been skeptical about computer games and NEVER got hooked to one till now. I saw Jane Bozarth tweet on #lrnchat last week about Angry Birds teaching you Physics.
Today I can admit that I'm hooked to it for the following reasons:
- Incredible user experience.
- It's ability to teach you using experiential learning.
- Shows how there are multiple solutions to a problem.
- The game teaches you strategy.
- Ensures you remain motivated.
- Encourages and rewards you interestingly.
- Last but not the least, the birds are so very cute.
- Jane Bozarth also mentioned it instills love for nature. I think compassion too.

Moreover, this is my first blogpost from my Nexus S! And I've finished writing it in exactly 45 mins! Now that's a record for me. I'm now motivated to blog more! Get the message? :-)

The New Age Instructional Designer

2011-01-29T16:29:00.007+05:30

Instructional design provides a gamut of principles and models that enable you to train people effectively in various areas of expertise. The role of an instructional designer is essentially driven by a need to find appropriate solutions by applying instructional design strategies and models to transfer information to users who use a particular product or service to perform their jobs.

Changed Learning Methods
As time progressed and technologies evolved, the role of the instructional designer as we understood it several years back, underwent a paradigm shift. In spite of client demands to create conventional elearning courses, the fact is that the way people are learning today has changed phenomenally due to the increased access to social media tools and advanced mobile devices. Twitter, blogs, wikis, and discussions have become the new age learning methods. Learner's look for relevance and access information only when it is needed. The concept of reading everything that comes your way and conventional ideas about increasing knowledge generically have phased out. Learner's now search for what they want, skim through to establish relevance, and move on if the information is irrelevant. The attention span of today's learner is short and they want quick and easy access to information. Working smart is the code word and learner's will only use resources that enable them to do so.

In such times, we can no longer talk about the standard learning deliverables, like elearning and instructor-led training materials in isolation. It has now become important to understand the factors influencing the learning process. The solution lies in viewing the job of an instructional designer more from the perspective of convergence of discrete learning entities that were created earlier and new ones that have evolved. It is also important to be aware that the concept of learning styles of a learner were never proven or found beneficial when designing learning content. The extensive variation in learning styles of individuals and lack of proven theories in the area, have automatically eliminated the need to talk about learning styles any more.

The New Role of IDs

When I listed the skills sets of instructional designers, I tried to be a generic as possible, but today I would not like to classify them only as skills sets any more. The way conventional instructional designers used to think about designing learning content needs to change.

Here are some things we can do to change the way we have been planning the creation of learning content:

Look at an IDs role as a supplier of information to audiences who are consumers.
Understand that learners have matured and are capable of finding what is relevant to them, while deciding on the value of the information available.
Appreciate that learning will be influenced by several information resources due to the learner's access to social media tools.
Leverage available information resources and help organize them effectively for the learner.
Plan learning in a manner that assumes the use of social media resources like wikis, social groups, blogs, and tweet as part of the learning process.
Start looking at learning as an ongoing activity that does not just end with a training.
Identify the need for performance support on the job and create modular content that is accessible when ever a user requires.
Stop assuming users read course materials and user guides sequentially.
Break content into smaller independent learning units targeted at an audience role, ensuring you accommodate those learners who may access learning content using mobile devices.
Employ strategies to make the content searchable and increase the relevance of information to the task the user is performing.
Design content solutions that are specific to an audience and the tasks the role is expected to perform.
Design models that address the needs of constantly changing information.
Plan learning deliverables in various forms to make them accessible from intranets or centralized content management systems.
Present information succinctly rather than beat around the bush in the name of overviews and long winding introductions.

Applying the above, does not de-emphasize the underlying principles of instructional design:

Know your audience.
Thoroughly understand the tasks they perform in their jobs.
Employ appropriate learning strategies to improve learning.

To me instructional design has always been a guideline of the mental process of creating any kind of content that a learner will consume. It is therefore imperative that we stop thinking of elearning or instructor-led training as the only learning deliverables. Being aware of the fact does not undermine the value of these traditional learning materials, but rather helps you identify the gaps and think about how to reorganize the existing models to make learning effective.

Quoting from Harold's blog on social learning for a business:

Tacit knowledge is best developed through conversations and social relationships.
Training courses are artifacts of a time when information was scarce and connections were few; that time has passed.
Social learning networks enable better and faster knowledge feedback loops.

Benefit of Social Media in Corporates?

2010-11-20T01:29:00.000+05:30

It has been a while since I was first figuring out how social media works and how it could benefit my job and organization. It was easy to see what I was able to do with social media, but hard to imagine how an organization as a whole would reap the benefits.

When I first started blogging and thinking about social media influencing learning and improving performance on the job, it was slowly sinking in and I think today I have a lot more clarity. I have changed teams within the same organization and dealt with people with a very old school of thought versus people who though are not big fans of social media but are quite open to it when I talk about the benefits. In my previous team, no one really thought much about it except a few managers who added the activity in my goals to make sure I find ways to benefit the entire team. People with not open to try a new way of communication and wanted to hold on to traditional email for everything. A basic thing as finding your remote team counter-part online itself was an issue. On being asked they responded saying they don't 'like' to be online so the best way to contact them was email. That was not an effective solution for a team distributed globally. It made things very complicated. I tried giving people suggestions to blog and share their knowledge about a product area on the wiki and use the forums instead of email. I sent invites over our internal networking site and also tried to encourage people to use tweet but participation was poor, and it was hard to show any substantial benefits.

The thing missing then was the enthusiasm to look at a new way of communicating. I can empathize with that thought as I realize it was even hard for me to explain how everyone would benefit from participating. Once I moved into a different team I made it a point to share my interest in social media and my blog. My team was more open to the use of certain other tools like tweet and instant messaging. That was a good start. A team of over 100 people used tweet as a medium to receive updates on the status of a product environment, uptimes, downtime etc. It quick and hassle-free. Given that I had already earned the reputation of being an advocate of social media, I'd have people question me about the use of various tools. Things do get easier when people ask questions, because then you know that they want to learn. Even if some were mildly resistant to the idea, I managed to come up with a few examples of using certain social tools and benefit from them when compared to the current way people were doing them. I had to clarify the bigger goal these tools aim to achieve and the fact that they are not perfect but constantly evolving.

In a more recent instance of a similar conversation amongst my team, I was able to push out the benefits of using a white board in conferences for brain storming and aiding a group discussion. I was happy with the positive reactions. Later on today, I was contacted by someone from my previous team. He conveyed that they were planning to use social media to help technical writers do their job more easily. He asked me of what I thought about it to improve the quality of technical documents. He had reservations like so many from the old school of thought about things like, what if information on social networking sites is inaccurate? I surprised myself with my clear response to his queries. My response made the following points:

Our company has a bunch of social networking and business collaboration tools that one can use. Blogs are available both externally and internally.
Imagine a community of employees from various product teams collaborating with customers and partners, about the product on the company blog. A plethora of information is shared over time. Implementations experiences, customizations, problems faced, workarounds, solutions, best practices, tips and tricks....the list is never ending when there is a community.
So, if an individual has to blog 'inaccurate' information they will soon realize they have a greater responsibility to the community. When someone blogs they are in the glare of the public eye. Experts and novices will read the information and validate if they found it useful or not. If someone's information is not satisfactory, they automatically receive less traffic and someone in the community would let them know about their view of the content. So generally everyone would try to give their best rather than their worst.
Your blog or profile becomes your public image and people know and respect you for the thoughts you share and the value you add to the community.
Moreover, blogging what you know helps you organize knowledge you've gathered over time in a meaningful fashion and clarify several areas you may be in the process of figuring out. What is nice is that you're able to keep a record of what you thought and how your knowledge evolved over time.
For large corporations where knowledge is distributed in unknown pockets, social media can be the medium of discovering that wealth of knowledge and putting it to good use.

Today, the fact that I feel so much more confident handling questions from colleagues and friends, whether positive or cynical, is simply because I am an example of the evolution I'm talking about. I can slowly coax people into participating and getting a glimpse of what is going on. I can empathize with those who do not see the benefits because it is almost impossible to see it without being a partner in crime. Social Media needs your participation for you to see any benefit and only when you participate will there be a community, and when there is a community is there scope for collaboration, conversations and innovation!!

Social Chat Culture: Thoughts on joining #lrnchat

2010-09-30T22:31:00.004+05:30

The social chatting culture has been quite rampant and people seem to love an online discussion with 'tweeple' as they are known. Or is that term old already? Today, I chanced up on lrnchat on Twitter in a time that I could attend and quite enjoyed the conversations. The dexterous manner in which planned questions for a topic were put forth and people responding with quick thoughts itself was really enjoyable and overwhelming. I think some of the key things to note in an online conversation is the spontaneity of the answers and often every one has a valid point. The answer often comes without much thought or speculation and is very instantaneous and I believe it is this quality that makes it interesting.

We have similar social chats on Fridays in our organization and they're quite fun too. Such sessions give employees an outlet to express how things can be improved, what they think is important, and overall build a conversation that has a capacity to bring out what people have in mind in an informal manner. The outcomes can be interesting as people are uninhibited as they might be in formal meetings; they joke chat and contribute whatever comes to their mind, and you automatically have some excellent points made in the end. Overall, every one enjoys a brainstorming session on a topic with some guiding questions to carry the discussion forward to a possible outcome. In addition, they have an ability to help you network with like-minded people or people who share your interest areas.

Some tips for planning a social chat:

Choose a topic that appeals to a larger audience using voting or polls.
Choose an organizer who can plan how this topic can be discussed or guided.
Assign moderators to help the main organizer and act as guides during the session.
Schedule a time and date for the discussion to take place. An hour of discussion is the ideal amount of time. It can be less or more depending on the volume of participants expected, and capacity of conversation that the topic can initiate.
Have the organizer prepare a short excerpt of the goal of the discussion, why it is important, and what will the key points in question.
The organizer may share this information with the moderators and use some of their feedback.
Find ways to pass on this information to the larger audience by tweeting to groups, setting up an event, writing on your website or blog.

It may be a good idea for the organizer and moderator to be an expert in the topic but also be open to new ideas and feedback.

Tips to Organize the session:

Have the organizer write a welcome note and ask all participants to introduce themselves.
Initiate the conversation in any fashion deemed suitable. A question a picture or video to look etc.
Once the conversation is on, the organizer should keep an eye on the time and initiate the next question or point for discussion.
In the end, thank people for participation, ask them to share links, feedback, or suggest more topics.
Finally, publish a transcript of the discussion for the benefit of the others who wished to attend but could not.

I would recommend anyone to attend social chats simple to experience the value that they can bring if done right.

Future of Organizational Learning: Some questions

2010-05-29T20:35:00.032+05:30

Recently, someone from Bloomfire contacted me over LinkedIn and requested me to give answers to some questions. I have been late to respond but thought they were pertinent given the way things have changed in the training world. So let me answer them for myself anyway before I send them to Bloomfire.

From your perspective, what are some of the challenges in writing curricula that resonate with the learner?
The main challenge I see is Knowing your audience precisely. Knowing your audience helps you scope out the training accurately and achieve the right level of detail. It will be the key to any kind of task you want to do; build a product, create a game, or plan training content.

How might these challenges differ from the challenges of yesterday?
I believe the challenges of yesterday were more than the challenges of today. The intervention of Web 2.0 and the increasing tech-savvyness of the learner have made information immediately accessible to one and all. Today, most information is easily searchable, Internet connections are much faster, Web technologies have come a long way and social media has gained ground. We no longer have the challenges of providing learners access to information. What we need to focus on is planning our training curricula in a manner that incorporates hands-on training in a simulated environment, and promotes collaboration with peer and subject-matter experts. The key is in knowing how to leverage social media to make the learning curve easily achievable and in a shorter time.

What are some technology and research trends today that will have an impact on tomorrow?
The study of users in general has revealed that giving the user information based on their existing knowledge on a subject is critical for their success. The research has shown a need for greater user-focus. Tomorrows applications will be increasingly user-focused and minimalistic. Minimalistic because we will have a clear picture of the user's profile and be able to focus on what the user needs to know. So organizational learning will be designed to support performance, and training will be largely collaborative and exploratory in nature. Learners will be mature and be able to determine their own learning paths. Learners will be more independent and able to access information in a manner that will help them accomplish tasks. In other words, Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) will be a norm.

What might organizational learning look like 10 years from now?
Ten years is a long time and we are already stepping into the era of Web 3.0 where personalization and social intelligence will be key. Ten years from now social and collaborative learning will become commonplace and will be built into the system. Learning will be less controlled, more learner-driven and minimalistic. Formal training will be supported and followed with collaborative, experiential, and exploratory learning. Content will be open and designed to be accessible from all kinds of devices; it will be simple and very specific. For example, the use of a screen shot or graphic can replace the use of words. Information will need to be to accessed faster and during execution of the task. A learner's performance will be supported by pertinent, short, and instantly available information anytime and anywhere.

Could you envision a 21st century training program for us? What might it look like?
A new employee is hired into an organization and needs training. The machine is automatically setup by the network. Once the employee logs in to the system, he is automatically shown a screen which will predict the first questions on his mind like, what am I here to do? What do I need to learn to do my job? How do I learn what I need to learn to do my job?

The employee is informed by the system that he needs to learn how to use the company's CRM product to capture and process customer requests. The system finds out based on the employee profile from HR and social intelligence date, that the employee is already familiar with similar CRM systems and does not need to under go the basic-level training. The system automatically directs the employee to the next level of the CRM product training.

The employee learns by working directly on the CRM environment. There are short Whats new? and product overview modules to get him quickly up to speed with the tasks the product is designed to complete. The modules instruct him to interact with the environment in real-time. The modules are not sequenced linear courses but reference-hybrids in any form like demos, examples, scenarios, and real-time exercises on the product. Reference information is easily available on the product interface. The training encourages looking at the help and other references like real-time use cases, FAQ information, common problems faced and the resolution.

The goal of such training is to get high-specialization individuals up to speed on the job in the shortest possible time. The training is planned based on learner profile information and studying the background knowledge levels of the learner.

Also, the system will have collaboration built-in as a norm and will suggest appropriate contacts in the CRM domain within the organization. The employee will be able to collaborate with technology similar to tweets, chat and web conferencing to learn from subject-matter experts. Social media tools will allow him to search for existing information on the subject, or start a new live conversation about his queries on the product. Using the tools, the new employee is now able to network within the organization and get acquainted with appropriate persons related to his job.

In short, I am hinting at the use of intelligent-training techniques by leveraging on social-intelligence data.

We've seen online communities proliferate, from online communities just for friends (Facebook.com) to communities just for tackling complex R&D challenges from Fortune 500 companies such as P&G (InnoCentive.com). What do you think of organizations supporting their own learning communities?
Supporting organization-wide learning communities is becoming essential so that employees within an organization are well networked. In medium to large-sized organizations, it often happens that knowledge is in unknown pockets with individuals or teams. A lot of the knowledge could be documented and made available, but it is almost impossible to capture tacit knowledge and the knowledge gained from real-time experience. The use of social media connects people based on areas of interest, and aids the discovery of resources with the required domain expertise within the same organization. This positively impacts efficiency on the job and improves employee productivity a great deal. In future, the normal way one does their job in an organization will be using collaboration and social networking techniques. Social media is causing the breakdown of hierarchy to build communities using wirearchy by enabling horizontal and peer-to-peer based communications.

Looking at things from a bigger picture, I'd like to leave you with this note: Are you Ready for the 21st Century?

Are You Ready for the 21st Century ? from Michel Cartier on Vimeo.

What books, blogs, and/or magazines would you recommend for our readers if they'd like to stay current in your line of work?
There are tonnes of great online resources and blogs. I recommend the best-of-breed approach so one can reach out to the maximum number of resources in one area. I suggest going into elearninglearning.com and performing a keyword search. The site filters your information to various levels as you may need. It is also a good idea to subscribe to the 'Best of' feed on this site to get a summary of the best blog posts for the month.

Evolving the Education System

2010-05-29T17:35:00.017+05:30

A few recent events have compelled me to think harder on a previous post of mine about a change proposed in the education system in India from 2011. This post was my first reaction to the decision while also highlighting the realities associated with education on our country. While it is easy to pass a rule, but bringing in a change in the mindset is going to be the hardest. I have been guilty of becoming an infrequent blogger, but from time to time there has been a reason to come back. This time it has been after a friend told me that my post had been used as a topic of group discussion in one of the premium management institutes. It was totally by chance that I found out, thanks to KP. That sort of woke me out of my slumber and made me want to come back, to learn more and write more.

Before each post I spend a lot of time reading and listening to other related resources. I have done so this time as well and will try to bring them all in here as well as I can. There are various problems that I was discussing in the post about No board exams, including my own disagreements with the way I was educated. Doesn't really mean that I don't acknowledge that what I am today is due to my education and the ICSE board is certainly one of the most respectable boards from my point of view. My comments are on much broader lines based on the kinds of problems I faced when I studied certain subjects, of what I would have rather done versus what I did, of the fact that I believe I realized my strengths much later in life after I had made choices, of how my confidence was higher only after I had figured out very many things. So I am not criticizing a single board but the entire system. How the system assumes that one kind of learning suits all and how you are drilled down with a bunch of subjects read out of a text book, learned by memory in which you understand some part of it and just remember the rest so you can score in the exam. After having completed my studies and in my present life, I find I hardly remember several things I learned in school. I find no application of many of the things. I only remember those topics which had seemed interesting but are just in my memory to tell people things like - I know laughing gas, its nitrous oxide!! Now who even cares about that?

So what has effectively happened, is a lot of the learning is irrelevant to my job and my daily life. I tried cramming several things initially and then it just became too much. I always wanted to stay out of the race and never could. Finally I chose to be an instructional designer after having a taste of it and reading related information on the net. I am glad about this one decision though as I came in to this field by complete chance when I had no idea where I was going after having done a BSc and MSc. Sounds silly doesn't it? Well my parents wanted me to do science and I did. I chose computers as a subject and somehow got in here and I am glad of not having to be an engineer writing a small piece of code who's greater application I have no clue of (no offense to coders there but that's what happens in jobs) or even the customer.

Bringing changes to the education system?

Process-based learning
So what are the kind of changes should we be comprehending to the education system? Maybe to get rid of the term 'system' in the whole thing and introduce 'process' instead.
I like quoting Harold from his post:

Some of the processes that readily come to mind are critical thinking; analyzing data; researching; communicating ideas; creating new things; etc.

These are the skills that should be taught to students Reasons backing process-based learning are mentioned in Charles Jennings blog. Quoting from there:

Dr Ebbinghaus’ experiment revealed we suffer an exponential ‘forgetting curve’ and that about 50% of context-free information is lost in the first hour after acquisition if there is no opportunity to reinforce it with practice.

The rate at which the Internet has caught up has made information available free and faster at all times. So we can reduce the load on our brain from 'remembering' facts which can be Googled at any point and time, and spend it in learning techniques for solving problems, interpreting information, improving communication, reusing data rather than trying to reinvent the wheel where possible, and making innovation and creativity the main goals of our existence. You may note that the previous line has dropped the word learning at the end and quoted on existence. I would like to take a step back and explain why I said this. Enhancing learning is our goal as instructional media professionals, but the bigger impact of 'learning' in our lives is what we do with what we learn. We can learn just for the passion of it but until it is put into good use it remains passive and is almost the same as having learned by rote. If we can use the learning to improve the existing 'system', it would make a huge difference.

Problem-solving
I consciously chose to mention problem-solving skills as I read how problem-solving skills are important to each one of us. When people are trained to be engineers they solve loads and loads of problems to crack entrance tests. I've noticed that engineers are hired as programmers, because their degrees certify better problem solving skills than people who have studied the very same subjects and curricula in pure-science streams. So we're talking about people who are trained to solve problems based on certain facts given. These are called structured problems and they usually have a correct answer. But the irony about problems is that there are several kinds of problems. The CSPS site talks about unstructured problems where facts are vague and you don't necessarily have a single correct answer, but multiple options based on which you need to take decisions. This is how our real life day-to-day problems are designed. It would be ideal if schools could assist students in the process of thinking through such problems and letting student discover the outcomes. It is also important to reinforce and be realistic here as several problems do not have immediate answers and how one can choose one path over the other knowing the pros and cons of each option.

Help Students Identify their Talents
After relating some of my own story, I find this point to be so very critical to education as a whole. Teachers should be trained to identify the strengths of students and curriculum designed to help students identify them. Without this you would always have only some all-rounders topping the class and the rest biting the dust. They would eventually get branded as 'average' students for no real fault of theirs. The problem more often is that they do not know where their strengths lie. If one can identify their strengths and focus their energies in those areas supported by a more flexible curriculum at school, it would make the life of several students much easier and they would shine much better in areas of their strengths. That way we would have many more happy students who would love going to school rather than the opposite.

Focus on doing more than rote-learning
Provide students ground to explore possibilities about the subject they are learning about. Give them space to explore and discover, to feel and analyze, to give what they read about a thought, to discuss and collaborate, to work as a team and try experimenting. This kind of learning will not only increase their interest level but help them complete the learning cycle for a topic. Thus curriculum should not prescribe text books from which to ask questions in an exam. Text books limit information to no end and I used to quite hate them. I used to like that the ICSE board occasionally gave questions that students would love to rate as out-of-syllabus, but there was no big deal with them because all you needed to know were basic common sense techniques and simple concepts you had already learned. So help students 'use' their learning and not expect to see a dumb-xerox of what they read in a text book, in the exams. Don't spoil them, but encourage them to be independent and proactive learners. Don't try to control what they learn but teach them how to learn and how to use what they learn.

After revisiting Harold's blog right now I see some recommendations made to the University of New Brunswick. Now these are interesting.

Education for under-privileged children: Helping them catch up
I also came upon this recording from Hole in the Wall Education which is an initiative by NIIT. Their take on educating poor children in India brings in a whole new perspective into the effectiveness of informal training, self-learning and short elearning modules to educate children of poor parents for free. Since the children face several challenges to complete their education, there is a high dropout rate and these children are unable to cope with the bulk of the syllabus in schools. So informal learning and the Internet can save the day for such children and help them learn and grasp basics easily. Here is where process-based learning and problem solving can be of great use. You can teach kids the processes and then help them apply it to various situations. Teach them the techniques and they will be able extrapolate them to other applicable areas. If these kids run after the existing curriculum, they will never be able to learn for the next generations.

ID Research Versus Application

2010-04-18T00:00:00.004+05:30

I really owe a huge apology to those who have so ardently followed my blog for being away since September. Not for the shortage of ideas or things to blog, but due to a lot of changes that I had to go through at work, and personally grapple with managing time. Yes, there are still many things happening and I have slowly got back to the blogging circle, started reading stuff people in the community are sharing, trying to observe changes that have come about during this gap, etc. I do like to spend significant time researching matter that I want to write about, by reading other blogs where people have written about related topics. To me blogging is like a research, a constant quest for solutions for tomorrow and a means to express ideas that run through my head every now and then.

Fortunately, the 'changes' I'm talking about have helped me see things in a new light, to understand my domain from a broader perspective and understand how it fits into the bigger picture of things.

Things on my mind for a while now...
I have always wondered about the two aspects of instructional design: the theoretical side and the application side. I see how each time application tends to fall behind on going research. By the time you build a system to add in the most current trend, there is already something new. I believe this is the way it works in other domains as well, but the question that keeps running in my mind, is how does one reduce this gap? The smaller the gap, the more connected research will be with application. For example, if someone researches and writes about the ADDIE theory and I have to implement it in my organization, it is most common that I will not able to implement it as it is defined in books. What will likely happen, is that the way I work through it in my work place, gets driven by actual events that occur, functioning of other departments associated with the completion of my task and so on. I personally feel that research should not just run parallel to application. There has to be a means to constantly go back and forth between the two, take into account dependencies when writing a theory, and finally define more realistic theories and processes. It is important not to look at each domain in isolation and imagine it implemented in a running organization with real-time challenges.

This has been on my mind for really long now and I will continue to think on it. Please add your valuable thoughts as I would be glad to hear from you all.

No board exams from 2011 in India?

2009-09-13T11:26:00.028+05:30

This bold move by the HRD minister of India to bring in radical change in the Indian education system, shift to a grading system, and eliminate ranking and the mark sheet, triggered a huge furore! In a country where citizens have grown up to 'always' be measured by marks, compared to others who always score well and yet are all rounders, been pushed by our parents to 'study' so much, that they reach a point where they didn't want to hear the word anymore. Somehow even today in India, young people are pushed into engineering and medicine, as they are the most highly respected streams. Such stereotypes make parents put enormous pressure on kids and the competition just gets stronger. Kids cram and prepare for competitive exams and sometime commit suicide when they fail, as they feel they've let down their parents. I'm sure so many Indians of this and the previous generation can relate to this experience unless they 'were' those ideal kids all parents liked to have; good at studies (the greatest stereotype)! Yesterday the HRD minister Mr. Kapil Sibal was called on to one of our news channels (NDTV) to recite a poem he wrote on his and the government's vision in this bold decision.

So many of us in this field of learning and education talk about various ways of engaging the learner, creating a great learning experience rather than dumping information on the learner. Some have even blogged about Killing the curriculum and have made some really bold statements. Harold Jarche makes some great points in his post First, we kill the curriculum and some great discussion came up in the comments on the post. Gilbert actually tried a whole new way of self-learning for several years! I thought that was interesting. I like some points Harold makes:

As books are to subjects and disciplines, the Web is to processes. David Weinberger says that Everything is Miscellaneous, and in our interconnected world it sure is. That means that ALL subjects in school or university are miscellaneous and it doesn’t really matter what you study. It matters how you study and what you can do with your knowledge.

How apt! If you learn and only learn and don't figure out how you can make a significant difference with all you've learned, it does seem futile. Often, Indians are also known for their vast general knowledge. Their ability to dream big and struggle to reach greater heights at all times, is probably ingrained in this 'traditional' system of education and upbringing. This definitely is a good thing, but maybe not all in the population of 1.2 billion can be expected to be run of the mill. In a country where basic education is a struggle to deliver to so many, bringing in such a radical change all of sudden can lead to a lot of chaos, unless it is gradually brought about and with a proper implementation plan that takes into account the deficit in the existing system to take on such a change smoothly. Any change is good, only when it is done keeping in mind everything that is needed to to be done, to reach the vision in mind.

Some interesting statistics on the subject of the use of social media in schools in the U.S. are detailed in this post by Geetha Krishnan. Coming back to the scene in India, here are a few thoughts on what I think maybe issues in the implementation of the new system of grading students:

The majority (including rural India) existing teachers are certainly not qualified to move into this new system. Existing teaching styles and practices would make the implementation come with a lot of resistance to change. News reports already show so much concern and speculation.
The existing infrastructure of the majority of schools do not support advanced and alternate means of learning like access to the internet and other learning resources.
'Making learning fun' calls for not only changing the final event of a board exam, but improving the overall learning experience in schools. In India more often than never, teachers cling to older methods of teaching and it will be very hard to get them out of this. It would stir several out of their comfort zone and this will not help bring value.
Given everything, bringing about a mindset change seems like a major issue to me. The size of the population and our binding to culture, tradition and most importantly 'stereotypes' could make this an implausible proposition at least in the near future.
Just like accepting and imbibing social media in general has come through so much resistance globally, changing the system of education and a new way to look at and design curriculum seems a really long way to go.

Given everything, I am positive that change will come, but in its own time, as it is the way of nature as such. But to have the conviction to bring in this change is a quality that is needed going forward. I wish our government good luck in this noble endeavor and hope to see positive outcomes.

Another good point Harold makes in his post:

All fields of knowledge are expanding and artificial boundaries between disciplines are disintegrating. Our education system needs to drop the whole notion of subjects and content mastery and move to process-oriented learning. The subject matter should be something of interest to the learner or something a teacher, with passion, is motivated to teach. The subject does not matter, it’s just grist for the cognitive mill.

I believe this is true and it is only a matter of time before subject-purists start seeing the diminishing lines and start looking at the bigger 'subject' called knowledge. As we evolve as human beings we will slowly start seeing life and learning from the bigger picture and that's what will make the real difference!

Learning Strategies You Can Use

2009-09-09T23:10:00.026+05:30

One of my favorite topics of all times since I got into the profession. I'd love to share all I have on my mind relating to this topic and from all perspectives I've seen it apply. I remember once when I was working on a course, a certain part of it was more like paper work and some planning activity to be done before beginning the project and come up with a list of resources needed. The product enabled the user to use these resources and flesh out a complete process that interacted with real-time systems to deliver a service, say a shipping or billing service. But the planning activity was a critical and essential step.

The process of planning and building up the working model of the service using the product was what I had to teach the learner. After analysis, my solution was to transform this planning activity into a scenario and have the learner work through it in three parts with some questions on decisions, drag and drop and multiple select. It finally turned out to be quite interesting when the graphic designers took a jab at the layout and came up with some cool interactivities to depict what I had in mind.

So what are Learning Strategies?
Learning strategies, as the name suggests are direct or indirect strategies employed by instructional designers to help learners easily understand learning content. By using a strategy, the instructional designer eliminates the need for a learner to learn just by memorizing information provided in a course. The strategy justifies the benefit of the learning content and indicates how the learner can use and benefit from it.

At a high level learning/instructional strategies can be at a macro-level or micro-level. So what does macro and micro-level strategy mean?

A Macro-level strategy is designed at a course or curriculum level. It would be more in the lines of providing a learning solution that works for a certain audience when we consider the tasks they need to learn. The macro-level strategy governs the overall direction of the learning solution. I've written about one such strategy in a previous post on Pure Courseware vs Reference Hybrids. You should use this as an example only, and remember that you can come up with several such strategies based on certain criteria that you gather in your research and analysis phase.

Micro-level strategies are more low-level strategies that you use to teach the different information types (fact, concept, process, procedure and principle). Lets look at few examples here.

Strategy 1: The derivative approach
Usually good for teaching facts. Rather than just stating facts, its nice to start with an example of a task a learner needs to do and then conclude to the fact. In this way, you would have stated the benefit of having a certain feature in a product, and how it will be useful to the learner. You could teach concepts similarly. For example, the fact is that youtube is an excellent tool for sharing videos online. Assuming tools like youtube have just arrived, you could present this as: you have bought a really cool camcorder, went on a long ride with friends and recorded some nice videos. You now want to share these videos with other friends and family. To conclude, you introduce youtube as the tool that can make this experience possible.

Strategy 2: The questioning approach
Good to teach concepts and principles. You can start the section by introducing questions into the learners mind. This triggers the learner's thought process and makes the learner make the right connections and build up a concept. For example, the learner is learning Newton's 3rd Law: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. How about asking the learner, when you throw a ball it bounces back with nearly the same force. Why does this happen? Once you raise the question the next thing you do is briefly explain why that happens, or drop a few hints and ask a few more questions about a similar scenario, before bringing out the principle behind why this is happening.

Strategy 3: Learning from mistakes/experiential learning
This strategy can be used to teach multiple types of information. Allow the learner to run through a set of quizzes or play a game with certain rules. Here even a decision tree is an appropriate strategy. All through the exercise, make sure you give the learner sufficient facts to make decisions, along with hints and guidance at the right places. At the end, have them review their actions and analyze what they could have done differently in the quiz or the game. Make them realize what differences their choices made to the situation. By the end of it the learner will figure out the facts, build connections and understand the underlying concept or principle being taught.

Strategy 4: Demos and recordings
Works best for procedural topics. Create short recordings of procedures that the learner should know, containing audio and instructions in the form of callouts, with the procedure that needs to be learned. This should be preceded by some introduction to concepts and facts in previous screens. For example, create a new PowerPoint file and insert a new slide.

Strategy 5: Practices and hands on
Again useful for teaching procedures, but especially those which are really big and complex. This should usually be preceded by a demo, so the learner has already seen the procedure taking place. This strategy requires very detailed instructions to be given to the learner starting from where to begin a task and where to end it. The instructions should be simple and step by step, give the location of the area of expected action and have really short sentences, so that a learner can perform the procedure independently.

Strategy 6: The scenario approach
The scenario approach works very well with many complex products to teach the learner a task they need to perform on their job. The scenario works well with generating relevance as the learner can immediately relate to something that they do on a day to day basis. Based on time constraints and business requirements, one could choose one of the following ways to deal with a complex concept or procedure to be taught:

Use a scenario and create a series of quizzes with simple drag and drop, click the relevant area and multiple-choice interactivities, all focused at making the learner use his knowledge and take decisions. This causes the learner to think through a situation and make connections. This strategy is simpler and requires less time and expertise on tools.
Use a scenario and come up with a game to help the learner achieve the objectives. This approach probably takes more time and requires some technical programming skills. This is also an area I haven't explored myself.

Overall, one may argue that there are many ways to combine and use each strategy to teach different kinds of information. My answer to that is yes you are right! You could build a complete game and employ a different strategy to teach different skills, all in one big scenario. I would also like to emphasize that strategies should not be used for the sake of having one. It is extremely essential for an instructional designer to measure what is absolutely essential and what is excess flab. A strategy used to create a better learning experience and aid the learning process is valuable. This is where one needs to be practical and remain focused on the learning goals. Ask yourself these questions:

Will the strategy actually make it easier for the learner to grasp the concept?
Given the audience level, the learner is an advanced learner. So would it be better to list the basic concepts and focus on using strategies for the really complex ones?
Is this strategy becoming too redundant in the course? Then I should probably change strategies and try something new.
Is the example I used a strong enough case or should I change it?
Does this information need a complete scenario or a small example?
Is the procedure simple enough that one can just learn it by seeing a demo, or, is it so complex that it is better to design some hands-on after the demo?

elearninglearning Updates

2009-08-22T23:24:00.007+05:30

The elearninglearning site managed by Tony Karrer has come a long way in the last one year. It plays a significant role in bringing together some of the best elearning blogs on the Internet, thanks to Tony's efforts. My blog too came a long way after getting listed, as it was one of the most exciting and encouraging achievements for me. I'm really late to post this announcement, but the site now has a new look and some new options as well:

A new feed that is just the "Best of" which are basically the hot lists and other similar supporting items.
You can of course also subscribe to a "Full feed" of the site.
There is also an email subscription option at the top right of the page.
A blogpost describes how people can participate in the site.

Some interesting topics from Tony are:

I wish Tony good luck and I hope a lot more enthusiastic bloggers get listed on elearninglearning.

Business-driven Learning and LH Theory (Love-Hate Theory)

2009-08-22T15:12:00.029+05:30

IDCI Session Highlights
Today's IDCI session by Abhinava (Twitter ID: @Abhinava) was extremely thought provoking for me. The topic of discussion, LH Theory (Love-Hate Theory) triggered on a lot of thought on how to be sensitive to the learner and use 'love' to design courses. To know more about the session go to twitter and search with the hash tag #IDCI. The session highlighted the need to be sensitive to the learner needs more holistically. At the same time, the session compared two modes of creating learning; Love and Hate. The session also emphasized on when to use each mode of learning.

Here's the presentation that Abhinava put on Slideshare:

The LH Theory

View more presentations from abhinava.sn.

So when do you use the LH Theory?
You use Love when:

You want to create learning for a long term.
You want to create a long term relationship/bond.
When you have time to create good learning.
When there is a lot to gain.

You use Hate when:

You want to create learning for the short term and don't really care much about the outcome.
When you don't need to create any long term relationship/bond.
When you don't have time.

Why Business-driven Learning?
So, you use Hate theory when you only mean business and don't plan to invest a lot of time. You want a quick-fix solution that just serves the purpose. I found this discussion extremely relevant in today's times, as most often we seem to get pushed towards the Hate theory for purely business reasons. It is also important to be sure that you don't use Hate out of ignorance.

Sometimes, when you're in a situation where the business demand is high, using Hate does seem like the most practical thing to do. The need analysis moves from addressing the learner need towards addressing the business need! One could easily argue here that isn't the learner need the business need as well? My answer is yes at a high-level, but probably not exactly how we define it when we get to the specifics. I call this kind of learning 'Business-driven' or 'Business-centric'. The following are some justifications for creating 'business-driven' learning:

You really need a quick solution to address the business need and get training out there to learners. Meaning your TTM (Time-to-market) is the #1 priority.
Shelf life of the learning material is short (6 months to a year) and content changes/updates very often.
Your learning supports the business and is not the primary revenue generator.
Topic for learning is a mature one (like a product for niche areas) and people in the domain already know a lot of the basic concepts. Some are very advanced users. So, all you need to do is to tell them the new features and concepts and they will soon be using the knowledge hands-on.

The ideal ID world?
Given a chance, IDs would love to make the most effective and engaging courses. Some attributes that contribute to making such courses are:

Perform a thorough learner analysis.
Do a thorough needs assessment for your learners meaning drill down to the exact learning outcome that is expected.
Empathize with the learner and create simple, usable and easily navigable courses.
Don't make the course a content dump. Take time to make the course effective and engaging.
Use well-researched real-time scenarios to add relevance to your learning material.
Personalize feedback and strategies if the learner has high EQ (Emotional Intelligence)
Design simple but effective practices.
Use practices when absolutely necessary and not for very simple procedures.
Validate and choose the appropriate delivery medium based on content complexity. Very advanced courses with lots of hands-on are better delivered in classroom training. Do not try to achieve this goal using online learning.

Business-driven learning; the reality and the solution
When you create business-driven learning, you may tend to skim/rush through many of the above steps. But business-driven learning becomes a reality as end of day 'business' is what everything boils down to. This of course does not undermine the fact that you do need to deliver the best possible solution in this situation. Here are some things one can do:

Be extremely clear about the business objective.
Do a periodic detailed learning profiling and assessment of the prerequisite knowledge and skills of your learner. Knowing the prerequisites will enable you to reduce the flab on your course and focus on a smaller amount of content. Eventually, this reduces your TTM.
Research on and recommend a list of rapid elearning tools that work for the business solution.
Leverage on existing material and spend time refining and updating it to the most current information.
Focus on reducing knowledge gaps rather than covering the whole bulk of content.
Use social learning as much as possible and focus on creating short and effective micro-learning strategies.

Why should you share knowledge? A big question?

2009-08-16T14:06:00.011+05:30

Further to my post on Should you share information?, I'd like to express my thoughts once more, based on a recent discussion with some colleagues . At the recent training I attended, I met a whole bunch of pre-sales and consulting people who were also there to learn more about the product. It was amazing that in a class of 20, we had people from at least 10 different countries! What was more important was that all of them had the task to sell the same products and were not really connected until this training. Thus the training was also very critical for them to network. Being the social media evangelist, I obviously suggested that people use our social tools and share their knowledge online. At a later point when we were discussing offline and I was suggesting to our trainer that he should share his experience online, the obvious debate came up. One of the colleagues started telling him that if he did so, someone else would learn his job and he could be replaced. My opinion of course is:

When you share your knowledge, you actually grow to the next level. Being a trainer he was obviously already sharing knowledge but in a limited forum.
Your clarity on the subject is further enhanced and you end up researching it further.
You have people in the community write back and add value to the content.
It is also practically impossible to share all the tacit knowledge you gained over several years. If you even attempted, you would perpetually always be on a blog or wiki and not have time for your actual job. That knowledge always stays with you and is your 'value' to the organization over what you share with other people.
Effectively, the percentage of people who read your information and get positively impacted and make the most of it, is a really small number when compared to the whole lot who have read it. Very few might have got the exact value you are trying to share.
Also it is important to remember that the knowledge you gain when part of an organization is also the organization's asset and not only yours.

I also suggest seeing the video who owns information.

From here I leave the rest open to debate.... Really, what do the rest of you think?

What makes effective ILT?

2009-08-02T22:51:00.009+05:30

I am attending a deep dive training for the product I work on, and this is probably one of the first detailed internal trainings that I'm attending. I have a lot of observations and learning from the way the training has been designed. In effect, attending the training gave me a much deeper perspective into what goes on in the learners mind during a class. I recommend that all IDs attend trainings sometime, just to get a better insight into the learner's mind.

When creating training for complex and advanced products, learners benefit from having a greater number of hand-on exercises and demos. They help in improving a learner's confidence on the subject tremendously. Such cases call for classroom training. Here are some of my insights...

Examples and scenarios
I think the instructor needs to be loaded with relevant real-world examples to help learners grasp the concepts better. Examples help build the connections that learners are looking to make. As you delve deeper into a subject, learners benefit from scenarios that make sense to his job, rather than random analogy. The examples should also keep in mind other systems interacting with the product in question. Thankfully, our instructor is not short of examples when somebody asks a question or he explains a concept.

Hands-on exercises
I must say that in the specific case of the training I am attending, the product is really complex and we are working on exercises that are over 3 hours long. So how does an instructor address such a challenge when it cannot be avoided? I think such exercises should be chunked down to no more than 20 high-level steps, and the task and concept explained before beginning each part. Our instructor is doing a good job with that.

The other thing with exercises that I realized is, how important it is to have standards and be consistent in your way of referencing things, in order to enable students to see exactly what they need. Some suggestions:

The classroom setup needs to be detailed and communicated to the class prior to starting the session.
For each exercise, ensure that you mention the prerequisite requirements.
Give a short summary of the task and objective that will be achieved using that part of the exercises, just before it.
Have standards and be consistent in your way of referring to components that repeat.
Group instructions of one screen or component under a high-level instruction.
Write short sentences that start with where the object of action is located.
Emphasize the button/option where the action needs to be performed and the value that needs to be entered/selected.

Overall, I think the class also needs to be very interactive and solicit participation from learners. But you really need to plan your time well so you can cover everything needed, and also have the class contribute to the learning.

Social Learning Adoption Success: First Steps?

2009-06-28T11:54:00.016+05:30

I'm quite thrilled to let all of you know that my effort to push social workplace learning in my team has been recognized. Post my queries posted in my blog post Social Learning Adoption, I have been slowly evangelizing social media tools and social learning to management at every opportunity I've had. It has been a great recognition for me the last week, when the manager of our team from the US, acknowledged my efforts and my knowledge in the domain, and included the use of social-networking to benefit our global team in my goals for the next year. I know this is a tough job, given the challenges I listed in my post, but never-the-less its an encouragement that motivates me to work at it in an organized manner. I believe I owe my knowledge and confidence to the community who willing contribute and encourage me. Getting listed in the elearninglearning site was very encouraging too and I thank Tony for it.

I'd like to use this post to also answer a question one of my co-bloggers Sahana raised on her blog, do people need training on how to learn? Her post suggests that when she urged one of her colleagues to use twitter, he came back to her asking her to create training on how to use it. I think and agree that the process of using social learning tools like twitter does have a learning curve for everyone. How fast one can pickup the tools and use them to their benefit depends on their 'tech savvyness' and their familiarity with Web 2.0 tools as such. But what I also want to emphasize, is that it doesn't make sense to talk of formal training on the use of such tools for the following reasons:

These tools are quite intuitive, and if one wants to use them, they should just go out and read relevant resources and get started.
You cannot show the 'value' these tools bring unless you go out, use them and participate actively. You cannot expect to sit back and just have information 'come' to you from others. So it requires 'active' users to 'proactively' go out and look for information and figure out how to use these tools to your benefit. So 'pull' learning always works with these tools, as these tools are designed to promote 'pull' learning.
Once a user figures out the tools, they need to be persistent and be able to identify their own learning patterns, interest areas, what works for them and what doesn't. So it does require mature self-directed learners. The tools promote what Web 3.0 is trying to achieve with personalization of information and limiting it to what users find useful to them. So it does call for self-directed learners.

In spite of these facts, what I'm saying here is that it doesn't mean that all learners need to be self-directed and well-versed in the tools from day one, but they do need to be self-motivated and persistent. What we, who are savvy with the use of such tools can do, is to provide people tips and tricks that we figured out, guidelines on getting started and most importantly urge them to go out and look for information, participate and contribute their experiences. Then they will just figure out for themselves! The only way they are ever going to see value, is by being part of this virtual community and figuring out what they're interested in. A good analogy is a seeker of information, going to a book store with no specific book in mind, exploring the available options and finding a subject of their interest. After this the user may buys the book. He will then read it after which he may like it or not like it. If he does like it, he recommends it to others or he may go out and write a book review highlighting whats good and whats not. That's how social learning works as well, except that the whole process takes place in a virtual community and you won't be spending money on that book!

Trying to get to the background of the mental pattern a user goes through while using social media for learning is well explained by the Cynefin Framework. There's also this video I found useful:

So it is important for us who recommend social media to others, to understand the patterns that a new user will usually go through and help them work through those. The best way is to recommend reading the online resources available. A more theoretical insight into understanding the learning pattern is the double-loop learning concept.

To solve the problem in question, I would recommend reading specific online resources to the user:

I will also recommend telling them about successful collaboration initiatives like Trek Earth and reading stories or case studies of social learning implementation. Looks like I have a plan already!

Qualities of an Instructional Designer?

2009-06-21T19:48:00.000+05:30

I started thinking about putting together some qualities of an instructional designer (ID) versus the skills of an instructional designer, when I attended the April 2009 Learntrends webinar by Jay Cross. The tool used for online conferencing had a chat feature and I got speaking to many of the participants and moderators. Cammy Bean and I happened to discuss what qualities an instructional designer should posses. Clark Quinn intervened with some of his suggestions too, and this got me thinking. The few qualities that came out of the discussion:

Innovation
Creativity
Business sense (goal)
Passion
Sensitive to learner
Minimalist

To start with, an instructional designer has to be open-minded, self-directed and self-motivated with one goal of making the learning experience for learners complete. An ID has to understand the business need that drives the requirement for any learning. Having good communication skills, an ability to gather and analyze information and organize it into a structured format are critical skills for IDs. An ID also needs to be really sensitive to learners and their needs. Understanding how people learn should be an ongoing study, and his/her focus on addressing business needs by leveraging evolving technology and standards. An ID also needs to be a minimalist (apply minimalist theory). Over and above a whole list of must-have's, IDs need to have the discretion to selectively apply what is relevant and will enhance learning, rather than bombard a learner with information.

Some guidelines for all IDs are:

Perform a thorough audience-analysis and remain focused on the learner profile and his needs.
Design meaningful and measurable goals.
Design task-based courses after performing a thorough task-analysis.
Use relevant examples and analogies to aid learning.
Device methods in which the learner can interact and discover facts, concepts or procedures themselves to keep them interested.
Design minimalist, or loosely-coupled, self-contained modules that focus on learner goals and drive to the point quickly.
Keep it simple and use animations, demos, practices selectively and only where absolutely necessary.

Whatever you do, you do need to think 'business' at all times and be able to provide quick, relevant and no nonsense information to learners without getting them distracted. All of this calls for you the ID to do your homework well before you get down designing your course.

Big Question: Time Spent

2009-06-07T21:10:00.014+05:30

An excellent question for one and all, and what better opportunity to motivate me to get back to the blogging scene that I have been away from for quite long now, and so for reasons precisely related to Time Spent. Tony thanks for this excellent question!

To start with I'd like to tell folks that I am quite versatile and love doing a lot of things. I live believing that after all I have only one life to do everything that I want to do, so I do not stop myself if i have an urge to do something quite new and compelling, that I would enjoy.

So what do I spend my time with?
Well I work on weekdays, so my commute to work and back itself takes a away a lot of my time. At work, I manage to tweet and get on FaceBook and chat with my friends and colleagues in breaks between working. These are important to me and I have linked my twitter and FaceBook accounts so the tweets are shared on FaceBook as well. But I have several friends on FaceBook (school time friends, other friends and colleagues) with whom I share a more personal relation, so I quite often set more personal messages on FaceBook only, and enjoy it when my friends come back with comments that often add humor to the situation. Social media does become an integral part of my life as a lot of my friends aren't in the same location as me and it isn't possible for me to meet them otherwise. I was recently, suddenly flooded with loads of work and had several issues to resolve that were making my current project very complex. I was really stressed and bogged down and was feeling guilty for a while that I didn't have time or the bandwidth to blog. My mind was always preoccupied and I couldn't write blogs or read a lot of other blogs and news in such a situation. But, my feeds stay in my reader so I can read them at a later point and time. That way twitter is really effective to keep me up to date and point me to the most valuable posts and latest happenings. It almost comes like a breath of fresh air in such times. So twitter is just great for me!

What am I doing less of today?
Social media has actually got me connected back to zillions of people whom I had lost touch with many years ago. I don't think I'm doing less of anything but actually doing a lot more things now. Today, I'm more exposed to information and more aware as a result of social media. I love reading blogs and learning from all you wonderful folks in the community. All this gives me a broader perspective while doing my job and I owe a lot to the confidence I've gained in the field of instructional design and elearning to social media. So, effectively I am doing a lot more things that I ever thought I would be doing before. I've also fallen in love with photography and have a group of colleagues who go for photoshoots on weekends once in a while. I'm learning from them and from the collaborative photography site Trek Earth where I post my photos. I have connections and networks here as well and that adds to my satisfaction.

I am simultaneously fascinated by several things and also want to do my bit to the environment and participate in tree plantation, play a volunteer role in activities organized by our employee club, learn aerobics to stay fit, yoga someday, eat well, shop...etc. I also love to travel and am absolutely in love with nature. Saving up money so I can visit wildlife sanctuaries in India or anywhere that I can make it to. I love spending time with friends and family too and drop everything when I get a chance to do that. I am also an ardent sleeper and sleep late at night and wake up late in the day on weekends. In effect I love to sleep ... :) So, my life is a mix of all these things and I am not very consistent or disciplined about doing just one thing. So lots of things often result in my occasional lapse in blogging or regularly following on or commenting on people's posts. But I do love to and push myself to multi-task. I tell myself that I should be able to do everything and not complain that I don't have enough time. I take things as they come and don't fret about them before.

Sometimes all this gets really overwhelming, so I manage to cut off too when I feel like I'm reaching my threshold, and I enjoy those solitary moments as well. Wake up and sit with a cup of tea, read the newspaper or just a book. I also dream of going off to some far off place with only nature around me, sans technology and gain back my peace of mind. Thinking of such things replenishes my brain cells that get dulled with the daily grind of commute to work and getting back. So, effectively to answer the last question is, I actually have a better life due to social media and not the reverse. My motto is to live life to the fullest learn all I want, do all I want, live the way I want! So social media can actually be used to your advantage .... think about it!

Road to Learning now featured on elearninglearning

2009-05-17T18:03:00.011+05:30

This is the first step towards the success of my blogging effort and I'm really excited about it. I thank all of you in the community for your support and I hope to keep writing good stuff that you all can make use of. elearninglearning is a very useful website (and topic hub) that features good blogs related to elearning. It has been a really satisfying journey till here since I started off seriously from January 2009. My posts so far are:

I have been learning a lot in this journey and feel a greater sense of achievement when I write my posts and have your support. Thank you all!

Social Learning?

2009-05-12T17:20:00.022+05:30

Social learning is known by many names - social learning, collaborative learning or informal learning. For many years we considered formal training to be the only way to make people learn. Formal training required people to be present all at one location. As technologies evolved, people could remotely hear and speak to a teacher in a classroom from any location. But these options were still quite expensive. Then elearning came by and we had people making loads of self-paced courses. Somehow even this seemed insufficient after some time and people started exploring blended-learning strategies. There was a need to provide more support and information to people on-the-job. As people kept looking for new ways of teaching and learning they realized that that learning happens in other ways too. You learn when you speak to like-minded people and people sharing similar interests and professions.

During this time social networking tools came by and people found new ways of connecting with each other. Meeting and connecting with people was made so easy! Then Wikipedia emerged, discussion groups and forums were largely being used to share information and resolve on-the-job problems. Google became the largest learning resource due to its super-fast search capabilities. It was observed that when people were desperately searching for solutions and more information on subjects, they proactively searched the Internet and found all relevant resources and learned more about their subject of interest and also resolved problems with the knowledge gained.

Social networking tools gave people opportunities to connect with people sharing similar interests and professions. Groups of people sharing common interests or a profession irrespective of their geographical location are termed as communities. Now, it was possible to discuss and share knowledge and learn a lot more from the other person's experiences. This process of proactively searching for information and shaping it into a form that makes sense for a situation is termed as informal learning or personal knowledge management (PKM).

So, the best ways today of learning beyond what you receive from formal training is to reach out to others and learn from their experiences to solve real-world day-to-day problems. Experienced professionals today don't need spoon-feeding but quick solutions to problems. They are self-directed learners and are motivated to define their own learning paths and manage their learning resources using social bookmarking tools and advanced search engines.

We can leverage on social networking tools to drive social learning in our organizations. Using social learning will help people grow in their domain knowledge, problem-solving abilities and make the process of communication much faster. People will be able to create best practices, learn from sharing experiences and not waste time trying to reinvent the wheel. Eventually, it will help improve their productivity at work. The goals social learning tries to achieve are:

Connect people who share a common interest and provide a platform to share ideas and experiences.
Serve as a knowledge base for searching solutions to problems that people have already faced.
Sharing knowledge about specific domains among a large groups who are distributed in geographically different locations.
Give learners the flexibility to learn in their own means, define their own learning path and choose resources that will help them learn more.
Keep learners constantly motivated as they share and exchange information and get recognized for their knowledge and contribution to the community.

It is also important to know that it takes a while to adopt and change your working style and use social learning as part of your regular job. Also, understanding the mental process of learning in case of social learning is an interesting study and the article on when we should collaborate on the Anecdote site is really an interesting read. Following this you may have more questions on implementing collaborative learning in organizations and measuring the benefits of social learning.

More about Audience Analysis?

2009-05-10T16:38:00.044+05:30

I've found a lot of useful blogs on what constitutes audience analysis and the whys and hows of audience analysis. So, I choose not to repeat these points as they have been well explained. What I will do instead is look at it from a bigger perspective and drill down to how it relates to the rest of the process of developing a course.

At a high level, audience analysis needs to be done for any product or service that you create or provide. Let's say you make a product. In order for the product to be successful, you would have to:

Ensure that the product is simple and easy to use, like limits the user to have to fill just one page with customer information and submit, and the system takes care of the rest.
Simplifies and accurately addresses a problem that a user has, like helps a user to effectively take and manage orders.

The question is, how would you do any of the above? The answer; by knowing the user who is your audience!

Reinforcing why audience analysis?
Any requirement for either training, documentation or even the creation of a product is driven by audiences. If audiences demand something, only then do you plan to initiate the creation of a product or plan to provide a service. That is why these days we make customer-centric processes, user-centric user interfaces and learner-centric courses. It is simple logic actually; if one cannot use your product, it wont sell; if you don't provide requisite training and documentation, people won't be able to use the product properly, and hence won't buy it; if your product is functionality heavy and has fantastic features, but the interface is too complex, again people won't buy it! Like it or not, users drive needs; so you need to know your audience and perform audience analysis.

Knowing your audience?
Knowing your audience means you should know who the prospective users of your product or service are and what tasks they typically perform. I am developing a social networking tool for people in general, or, I'm designing a social networking tool to help connect professionals within my organization. In each case, the choice of the features I provide would be customized to each kind of audience. In the former case, I may provide a lot of personal information sharing options like, photos, blogs, game applications, etc. In the latter case, I may not provide photo sharing, but idea and knowledge sharing within the organization, professional groups, providing recommendations/appreciation for work done, etc. Though the overall concept of connecting with people would be the same, there would be specific customizations that would address personal or professional requirements in each case. To summarize you need to know:

Who is the audience?
What tasks they perform as part of their job?

What skills do they need to posses? Prior Knowledge?
If an individual has to use your product, what are the basic skills they need to posses? In our example, they may need to be familiar with browsing and using internet applications on a given platform like Windows, Mac, etc.

What skills the audience needs to posses?
Their prior knowledge of using similar tools?

Audience demographics?
It is important to know the age group and background of the audience; is your audience an adult, a teenager or a child? Knowing the target age group that your audience falls into, is an important piece of information that drives many requirements like, your user interface, the contents of your product/tool, or even the level complexity.

Working conditions?
Working conditions that the audience is subject to like if he works in shifts or the hardware and software the audience typically uses. If your audience is a system administrator, he would typically work in shifts and have access to the servers in the organization, etc. This information helps you know what your assumptions could be; like a system administrator would know the basics of installing and configuring servers, and also be familiar with concepts related to servers like clustering, etc.

Target devices used?
The devices from which your product, service, course or documentation be accessed like computers, handhelds, etc. This helps you plan your delivery mode and technology to use to develop your product or service.

Audience Level?
Additionally, it helps to know if your audience is a beginner or an expert in using similar products or services.

Developing your course?
Coming back to developing a course, it is only after you collect and analyze the information that you can come to your list of tasks. For example, you now know the following things about your learner:

Here's a sample template you can use.

So, you can now make a list of the tasks that you need to teach:
- Installing and configuring the ABC product.
- Authenticating and authorizing users using ABC product.
- Managing user credentials.
- Controlling access to devices and hardware.

There's your task list and now and you can now begin your task analysis. That's another topic I will cover. Till then please let me know your comments on this post.

Social learning adoption?

2009-05-08T19:27:00.013+05:30

Wikis in plain English, another very good resource I found thanks to Frank Bradley. The video explains the use of a wiki in a very simple day to day real-life scenario.

I'm currently working on how we can use the wiki in my team to leverage on and share product knowledge. We have a sizable team that is distributed across various locations, and I think it would be valuable if my team members could use the wiki and the forum to share knowledge across this globally distributed team. At the current stage, there are just a couple of designated people who update process and standards information on the wiki, and the knowledge there is limited only to these topics. The challenges I see though are:

- Having people change their working style and go looking for information on the wiki or post queries into the forum. Currently, people are not used to visiting these sites as part of their day's work.
- Deciding what kind of knowledge will benefit others, besides what we document and create for our customers, so as not to duplicate information.
- Having people to be proactive enough to participate and share what they know. Currently, people seem to believe that only some folks should go out and update the wiki and they will just refer to it when needed.
- Keeping information current at all times as when the product release date nears, people would be swamped with work and only be focused on finishing up their document/courses and closing all bugs.

Generating Participation?
Some points I gathered from Control and Community: A Case Study of Enterprise Wiki Usage are:

Build a critical mass of contributors. Since the contributors are employed by the enterprise, it is possible to make the Wiki part of people’s responsibilities. At CorVu we found this to be imperative. Unlike a public Wiki (where there are many people who contribute huge amounts of time as a hobby), in a work context (where everyone is probably too busy already), this isn’t going to happen. So write it into job descriptions. Get managers to send emails to their staff saying that one hour a week should be spent writing up their knowledge on the Wiki. Arrange a seminar on how to use the system. Use the company newsletter to promote the value of the project.
Build a critical mass of topics. To be used, the site must be useful. To generate traffic to the site, make the most frequently required information available on the Wiki first, and make the Wiki the only source for that information. In CorVu’s case, for example, one significant page stored the latest product release information. When any software version was moved from internal QA to Beta, or from Beta to General Release, this page was updated. Once people learn that the Wiki contains a lot of useful information they will look there for answers to start with rather than wasting someone else’s time by phoning or emailing questions.
Send links rather than information. Set an expectation that when anyone is asked for some detailed information, the response should be a link to a Wiki page. If the information has not yet been Wiki-ized, don’t type a lengthy answer in an email; instead, spend an extra minute typing it into a Wiki page.
Provide recognition and rewards. As with most Wikis, the best way to encourage participation in the long term is to ensure that the efforts of the contributors are valued. This is easier in team and enterprise Wikis than in public Wikis because the contributors are known. Wiki pages can indicate explicitly who the primary authors were. There can also be rewards within the enterprise beyond the boundaries of the Wiki. For instance, some employees may have components of their annual review linked to their involvement in Wikis.

Please suggest what would be the ideal steps to have people adopt these social learning tools as part an parcel of their daily job.

Call for eLearning Demonstrations

2009-05-02T12:29:00.002+05:30

Tony Karrer is organizing a session on elearning on May 21st between 9 AM to noon pacific time. He is looking for people to present examples of practical solutions to common problems to leading edge solutions. Some example areas that he quotes:

Self-Paced Courses
Performance Support Tools
Mobile Learning
Collaborative Learning
Social / Network Learning
3D Learning
Games
Toolkits
Interesting Tools

If you are interested, please send me an email (akarrer@techempower.com) with:

A brief description
A couple of example screen shots

He is expecting to have more examples than we can show and discuss in the 3 hours and will try to choose a variety of different examples that represent effective patterns.

Long-awaited: Instructional Designers Community of India

2009-04-27T21:31:00.007+05:30

Finally, we have a community in India exclusively for Instructional Designers. A great initiative by Ram, Rupa and some other Instructional Designers, to bring together this community and collectively function as an organized body. The ID Community had their first successful meetup at Bangalore last month. You can join their community in LinkedIn to learn about their activities. They have also published a list of FAQs for people who want to be part of the community.

I think this is a much needed initative in India and I hope many of you join them and make this initiative a success. I wish them the best of luck!

Should you share information?

2009-04-21T16:10:00.007+05:30

Information isn't owned by an individual but by a community. Jane Bozarth is right in her post on Who Owns Information?

Here's a fantastic video to prove it:

I love the concluding lines that say 'In the past you were what you owned', 'Today you are what you share'.

What do you all think?

How to make collaborative learning work in organizations?

2009-04-16T01:20:00.015+05:30

Collaborative learning, (I prefer collaborative as it seems more like an organization thing than social) basically informal learning, is the way to go today, and yet we seem to have so many questions coming up:

How can we get it to work to really bring value to the organization and the customers?
How can you ensure it is used the right way?
How do you ensure authenticity of information that is critical to the organizations goals?

All very valid questions to ask while we are still bordering on the implementation of the collaborative learning project, and trying to measure what value it would bring after implementation. It is possible to convince management that collaborative learning would work for the good of the organization, just like brainstorming and knowledge sharing sessions did in the traditional models. The advantage here is the time saved on those meetings, and converted into information accessible through the medium of Web 2.0 resources. These resources have proven outside the organization in triggering conversations and bringing in a lot of collaboration to fully define facets of a single idea. Let's take the example of collaborative/social learning so to say. We know the benefits by now:

Helps establish virtual relationships and trigger good discussions that result in brainstorming on certain thoughts and ideas. Thus, helps in arriving at conclusions based on the thoughts expressed during the discussions.
Helps one get a wider perspective on certain topics and allows them to read up all available resources before concluding on a topic.
Generates a sense of satisfaction to have adequately researched on a topic, discussed it with people in the community, heard peoples experiences, and finally reached a consensus.

I think all of the above are necessary activities we anyway need to do, in order to work effectively in an organization and bring value as individuals. So then whats missing and why are we apprehensive about implementing collaborative learning and measuring the outcomes? How is it different from the traditional ways of achieving the same goals?

In my opinion, one of the main factors here is that all this happens virtually, in an uncontrolled environment, where anyone in the community can be the source of the information. How do I validate the information before using it for a task? Please help me out here.

The solution??
My goal is to suggest a solution about how you may ensure authenticity of the information. I think the idea here has to be locally dealt with by the management and implementation team of a collaborative learning solution. Their effort has to be in the direction of:

At what level is the implementation of such a model feasible? It should ideally be at a business unit level where employees work on a set of related products or services.
Devising a model that will work for the organization given the culture that exists. For example, we will use our existing blog, wiki and forums and integrate search into it. We will add more Web 2.0 tools as we go along.
Define some high-level directives as to what they would like to see being discussed and in what forms. For example, encourage employees to share information in certain high level categories like, possible product implementation models, product architecture related topics, improving product performance, product usability, best practices, tips and tricks, troubleshooting, customer scenarios, other ideas, etc.
Benefit or recognition they can provide to an individual who shares their knowledge or idea that eventually brings business benefit. For example, management should come up with some reward mechanism or tie the task of sharing knowledge as part of the individuals performance.

If we do not take pains to evaluate how best we can implement such a model in our organization, we would be repeating the past when we thought that elearning was the best way to go, and later realized that it was ineffective mainly due to inadequate research and planning of the course design. We missed aspects of learner motivation and relevance, and created learning that was just an information dump. Let's not repeat this with collaborative learning if we want it to succeed and achieve greater heights.

I'd love to hear what you all have to say about implementing collaborative learning at your workplaces.

Suggestions to measure social learning

2009-04-16T01:05:00.006+05:30

Tony Karrer raises a valid point in his post Social Learning Measurement : eLearning Technology. Just the point I was thinking of after wanting to have a social model implemented in my own organization. It seems very interesting and attractive to have means to access information informally on-the-job and have it exactly when you need it. But I see the following challenges in the implementation of social learning at workplaces:

- How do I ensure the information is organized well enough for an individual to access it when needed? The search feature has to span across all available information resources related to the subject to give me what I need.
- How to ensure the authenticity of the information? We are in an organization dealing with real customers. Hence we can't take the risk to goof up based on something written in a social learning network. At a high-level I can imagine a reviewer/moderator model being implemented where all of the information entered is validated by experts. But this hard to implement given the amount of time commitment needed from the product experts when compared with thier priorities upfront. This model also needs to make space for new ideas that crop up and not just depend on legacy and proven information.
- How do I ensure I am getting the latest and most current information?

Thinking about measurement, which is the most critical factor in deciding if this model is getting us real tangible results, I can suggest a few ideas at a high level:

1. Have polls on topics to gather information about whether the information has been useful or not.
2. Every post should have a rating associated with it. The search should list posts that have received good ratings at the top level.
3. Do regular sanity checks as information in organizations change as fast as the shelf life of a particular release of a product and are outdated quite quickly.
4. Finally, the most important is to measure the learning outcome in terms of how it helped make the product better, or received appreciation from a customer, or helped tackle a complex business problem. This would be the true reality check and can be enabled by maintaining metrics or statistics that can be collected from the online systems and consolidated into reports that can be queried from various perspectives. Much like how we measure effectiveness of formal training.

But let's admit it, measurement is the key to prove that social learning forms have helped employees bring value to an organization.

Beyond Kirkpatrick?

2009-04-08T13:35:00.008+05:30

After reading Beyond Kirkpatrick by Tom Werner, and Jane Bozarth's post on Alternatives to Kirkpatrick, I was satisfied to hear that there has been effort to better the evaluation process. This is the kind of information I was looking for when I posted Kirkpatrick's Four Level Evaluation Model, knowing that people would have tried, tested and evaluated the model by this time.

I did receive feedback supporting Kirkpatrick's model from John Pasinosky, Richeek and Geeta Bose. All of them supported the model and said it had worked well for them. John Pasinosky said:
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I have tried to incorporate the 4 levels in my instructional design practice. It is very valuable if you don't have any other plans in place. ( - In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king!). The good part about it is less that you can make a better product than that it gives you a framework to know what went wrong when it does go wrong - or someone is unhappy with the results.
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Geeta Bose, agreed that the Kirkpatrick model had been useful. While saying that she added:
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While this is a great foundation, like all other methodologies, this too should evolve to fit the changing needs of the training industry. This model (in the classical sense) does not help measure the ROI from training. This model also emphasizes on "post training evaluation" while evaluation should be an ongoing process.

At Kern, we have evolved an evaluation methodology that has worked well for us and our clients.
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Richeek agreed too adding:
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It is definitely practical. It all depends on how you market it. If managers & other decision-makers see the value, they'll definitely agree. I have gone into meetings where managers have come in late and start a meeting saying they have to leave it early and then have them say at the scheduled end, "Can we extend this meeting? Would you have the time?"
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Another presentation I found by Bersin and Associates (designed way back in 2006) gives a good insight into the problems in Kirkpatrick's model of evaluation, that I found practical. I don't mean to down sell Kirkpatrick's model but all I'm saying is that we need to move on and come up with more current ideas. Quoting from Jane's post:
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In the interest of fairness I would like to add that that Kirkpatrick himself has pointed out some of the problems with the taxonomy, and suggested that in seeking to apply it the training field has perhaps put the cart before the horse. He advises working backwards through his four levels more as a design, rather than an evaluation, strategy; that is: What business results are you after? What on-the-job behavior/performance change will this require? How can we be confident that learners, sent back to the work site, are equipped to perform as desired? And finally: how can we deliver the instruction in a way that is appealing and engaging?
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I believe this would be true as change is the only constant in every field.

My 2 cents
It's good to know that certain strategies and models have proven in the past, but our requirements today are changing greatly and we need to move on, redefine strategies and redesign models to address the changing needs of learners. I believe it is imperative to re look at our existing training strategies, and evaluate courses to bring in this change.

My questions to all of you would be:
1. Do you think there is a need to change the way we design training?
2. Do you think we need to have more dynamic ways to address the problems faced by our learner?
3. How do you think evaluation should ideally be done to help improve and impact learning greatly?

Big Question: OMG I'm Stuck!!

2009-04-01T20:09:00.009+05:30

This months Big Question is about Stuck?Getting Unstuck? Stuck, is exactly how I feel, and the reason I started blogging and connecting with people. My blog becomes a forum to get my ideas out. So there's the problem and the solution right there! But come on now, don't we all feel stuck at different points in our work or even personal life? Well, being stuck is very much a reality as anything else, and I've felt this way many times before. Each place I worked posed different kinds of challenges, but to get to the point, here we're talking about being stuck in your organization with a lot of great ideas about how to improve things around you and the service you deliver to the customer.

There are several reasons why one gets 'stuck' so to say:

Your organization is just very happy doing what they always have been doing as it earns them money anyway.
Your team members, who drive a lot of the initiatives because they've been around longer than you, just don't know what's changed in the market outside. They're fine to keep doing what they always did in the last 8 to 10 years cos the management is happy!
Sometimes employees see or hear whats changing but completely fail to see the value in it.
Sometimes employees just feel more secure doing 'proven stuff' than exploring new possibilities.
Some employees respect the management so much, that they will wait until the end of time for the management to initiate something new. "Why get your hands dirty in trying something the management hasn't even figured out? This is easier."
Some people listen very intently to the people who give new ideas and tell them, "Yeah, that sounds really cool, and right too. But you know what, this is the way they do it here. I've been around here really long and I know, nothing will change!"
Sometimes your team leads and managers may tell you after hearing your bright ideas—"All that's fine, but what happened to that issue we had the other day? You better figure out or we'll miss the deadline!" or simply—"Haven't you enough to do?"

The Result?
Imagine the plight of the poor bloke who just had this brainwave after reading loads of blogs, wikis and cool discussions on the Internet. Depressing really! But that's the reality, and it will probably remain this way in almost all organizations, but with varied levels of intensity. I'm sure, at least two of the above points will be true for any employee unless he's the boss and takes the decisions.

The employee, who was once really excited with his brilliant idea and imagined what value it could have brought to the organization, is demotivated, and begins to think that he or she is not going to get anywhere in the present organization. The employee starts questioning himself—what happens to my future and career? What happens to my dream? Will I stop learning if I continue to remain in this environment? Should I leave this place and try somewhere else, somewhere where people have more sense to see the value in my ideas? Or should I just surrender to the circumstances and become a drone like the rest?

The Point?
So, the implementation of all ideas on last month's Big Question, about Workplace Learning in 10 years, are immensely dependent on the organization's willingness to invest and bring in change, not forgetting that change only comes in gradually and never upfront in such cases. It takes time to provide the infrastructure to support all the changes, and most importantly the people who will help bring about the change. It requires support and acceptance from everyone involved to adapt to a new way of doing their job.

So what can you do in such a situation?
Rebel and let everyone know that what you are suggesting is the next generation thing, and that they're too stupid to see it? Disclaimer here: I think you should try that only if you want to loose the one or two people who took time to listen to you and advise you! You may loose even the smallest chance of ever getting your ideas across in the organization as people will start thinking you are an arrogant, alien-headed, snob! Now that's really not the ideal situation to be in, so here are a few things you can do.

Step 1:
First, evaluate if your idea is that of immediate action or a long term one. Based on this, set your expectations of the time it may take to get it implemented. Ask questions like "Based on the business need, will they find use of the idea? Will they need it now or later?" If your answer to these questions is yes, then go ahead and plan to give your ideas to the management.

Step2:
Whatever you do, it is most important to:

Say the right thing at the right time
Tell the right person about it

Now you may ask, when is the right time? Who is the right person? My answer is, strike when the iron is hot, meaning speak about it in a relevant situation or discussion. Plan your idea well and back it up with what benefit it brings to an individual or the organization. It is hard to decide each case above, but you have to figure this out by studying the organization and their priorities over time, or discussing them with someone who has been around longer.

My Experience
When I had an idea, I first started asking around if there is any idea management forum in the organization. When I didn't get the information, I threw the question to one of the top managers after he gave a session on the organizations goals and how he plans to achieve them. He thought for a while and realized there wasn't any such place. He then asked me what my idea was? On explaining the idea, he seemed to like it, and asked me to send him an email with the details. He responded back after researching it himself and appreciated me for bringing it up. He now wanted to start a forum thread to collate ideas from employees. I thought that was a good start.

The other part of giving ideas is the expectation we have once we have given them. But, you need to remember here that it takes high priority to implement any idea. That's how businesses work I guess!

So to conclude, I can say that you may feel 'stuck' in spite of having given your idea, but its important that you at least got it across. The fact that not much changed immediately should not deter you from thinking and innovating. Try and innovate in your regular activities to make it more interesting. Try suggesting something new, but each time remember to back it up with sufficient evidence so people understand the context and the benefit that will come out of it. Try and blog the ideas that are not directly related to your company's benefit, and share it with the community. Let's accept it, its not a fair world we all live in. It is therefore important to make the best of every situation.

Collaborative Learning with Trek Earth

2009-03-30T19:40:00.021+05:30

Learning more about the world through photography, has been the motto of these websites—
Trek Earth, Trek Nature and Trek Lens, that I ardently use to learn about my hobby—Photography! I think this has been a noble initiative that has been helping amateurs like me around the world learn the art and science of photography. I believe this site works, as I have seen people who initially had very regular photos and have now shown such improvement that I was amazed!

The reason I choose to speak about these sites is not to advertise them, but to highlight how the whole learning process here is a collaborative one, relevant to what we all speak about in informal learning. The users of this website range from professionals to mere beginners like me, from people with the most high-end DSLRs to basic Point and Shoot versions. Whatever you use, does not deter you from posting your photos here and having people critique your work.

These sites have some common features like:

Regional Groupings of Photographs, that allow you to browse photos within Continents, Countries, Regions, States and Cities.
Critique System, that allows you to give and receive constructive feedback and comments on photos.
Workshops, that allow members to post edited versions of your image providing a useful visual example on how to improve a specific photo.
Alerts, to receive email alerts whenever new photos are posted according to various criteria.
Multilingual Capability, that allows you to view a page in any language (currently Chinese ~Traditional & Simplified~, Dutch, English, French, Japanese, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish).

The way the site works is you may:

Post your photos, go and view other photos and critique them, thus increasing chances of people navigating to your photo and leaving you valuable comments.
Critique other peoples photos and do workshops to help others learn even if you don't put up your own photos.

On this site, you get credits for:

Giving useful critiques that help others in the community improve their work.
Giving useful workshops that others can learn from.
Writing useful notes that give more information on your photo, the location and history, how you took that photo, what settings you had on your camera etc.

All the above parameters are based on ratings given by members of the community. Based on your rating you can be a silver or gold star—critiquer, note writer, or a workshop editor. Besides this each member who likes your photo can give you up to a maximum of 2 points.

The way you work when you are new to the site is to upload your photo, then review other photos that you find interesting. You need to be persistent, and over time people start visiting your profile more often and leaving you critiques or comments, doing workshops, marking your notes useful, etc. You reply to them and thank them for appreciating your work or giving useful feedback, and eventually end up connecting with a few members of the community whom you follow regularly, much like how we have a blogging fraternity in our community.

Few things I would like improved about this website though is the user interface, which hasn't changed much since the sites inception, and to have some cool and latest Web 2.0 features like Flickr.

I highly recommend this site for people who are willing to learn more about photography. But when I do, I often have people look at the photos there and say "Wow, these are too good. Are my photos worth putting up here?" My only answer to them has always been, that this is not a place for professionals to flaunt their talents, but for photography lovers at all levels to share their knowledge and learn from.

I'd like to hear from all of you if there are similar sites for learning photography or even any other subject.

Long Live ILT? What's the point here?

2009-03-30T16:41:00.006+05:30

I'm surprised to see such a strong post supporting Instructor-Led Learning only, in times when Web 2.0 reigns and the learning trend is slowly changing. Tony Karrer makes very good arguments in his post Long Live ? and I suggest reading his views.

I don't agree when Saul says that people in the community claim that ILT is dead. I am quite in touch with most of the posts on the community and that is definitely not what people are trying to say. From what I understand, we are in a transition stage where in people are exploring other possibilities of learning, and the means provided by informal learning was a welcome change for several reasons:
- Accessibility to classroom training when you need help on the job
- The cost of attending an ILT is high
- Online courses were not sufficient to cover all that a learner needed

So, I think, the whole initiative is coming about as an attempt to make information accessible to the larger group, and enable them to learn on their own, by writing their perspective and sharing information from their experience. How often have we always wanted to know how another organization did the same job that we do, and what their priorities are? I always was curious.

All of this only gets an individual to understand the bigger picture, and whats happening outside their own world. You are simulating an environment of group discussions amongst your community, by blogging your opinion/ideas and hearing what others think. You are allowing the learner to think and understand aspects on their own, stimulating the thought process and allowing them to create and build their own solutions after reading a bunch of related articles blogs etc. I think informal learning is about:
- Broadening your horizon.
- Learning actively rather than passively.
- Being open to listening to others in the community and hearing their point of view.
- Making your point after having sufficiently researched the topic you have in mind, keeping in mind that there are more perspectives and views that matter, not just your own.
- Being open to appreciation and criticism without being biased.
- Stimulating yourself to think rather than being spoon fed with everything on a golden plate.
- Willingness to accept that there is lot more knowledge to be learned and researched, than what we already know, that the world is big and we can never know every single thing in our lifetime. In short 'Knowledge is an ocean'.
- Doing what is best for a situation and working continuously towards improvement, knowing there is no limit to how much better you can do your job.
- Knowing there can be more solutions to a problem, than what is given in books.
- Exploring new possibilities, and reaching higher levels of cognition on cliched topics.
- Accepting that what we have been doing in the past was a good solution then but not anymore!

Coming back to the post we're talking about, I'd like to reiterate and agree with Tony that, no where does one say that informal learning replaces the ILT process. ILT is here to stay and so is elearning. But informal learning is the way to get on-the-job assistance, solve problems by questioning and debating, rather than accepting what a single individual source can tell you. It has more to do with the fact that there isn't any limit to how much you can learn.

But then again, it was nice to have someone challenge what we all believe in, and have us rethink and validate our initiative on informal learning once more. Isn't that was informal learning is all about?

Best Practices and Design Patterns

2009-03-25T21:41:00.019+05:30

How amusing that the very topics I had planned for my blog became a topic of discussion before I could even write up my post. I was planning to list some best practices in my field of work since quite sometime now, as I'm a believer in the concept due to the goal it intends to achieve—better and efficient performance. Looking at the posts and comments on Jane Bozarth and Tony Karrer's blogs it appears that the term is either 'overused' or misunderstood. I never had any doubts about what it meant until I read these posts. I read Jane Bozarth's post on The Myth of "Best Practices" the day she posted it and empathized with her point of view that people expect to get best practices for almost anything they want to learn. She's right from her perspective in saying that before asking such questions, one needs to understand that...
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A "best practice" is best only in the precise, specific context in which it exists.
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Today, Tony's post on Sharing Best Practices—Patterns originated from the same source, but I thought succeeded in dissecting the context and origin of term best practice and arrived at design patterns very beautifully. This is the way I would like to understand the concept of best practices too and totally agree with Tony. Thus, though I had absolutely no plans of writing a post on best practices, here I am writing one! After reading all the discussions, I now have formed an opinion that I want to share. Not intending to digress though, I think it is worth mentioning that today I read another post by Tony on New Blogs and how new bloggers have trouble thinking of topics to write. It seems that reading other bloggers posts intently can also give you wonderful ideas on what to write on your blog.

Getting back to the topic under discussion, best practices and patterns, I suggest fully reading Jane and Tony's posts and the comments, before reading mine. In this post, I plan to illustrate the points raised in the discussions with real-life scenarios, which is my favorite way of making people delve deeper into a topic. Once you have context, you begin to see the value of things which otherwise seem meaningless or irrelevant. I urge each of you to think about the scenarios that you find relevant with this post and share your thoughts.

Scenario 1:
As instructional designer, I use a course outline and a storyboard template in order to eliminate the redundant task of thinking what all I need to cover in a course outline, and what all I need to write in a storyboard. Now this is a best practice we follow to help us work efficiently and focus on the main goal we're trying to achieve here—Build a Course!
It is worth noting here, as to how the template was created; by observing a pattern of information that all courses largely require!

The same example applies when I build a custom course template with a menu, previous, and next buttons. Even Rapid elearning tools are built on the concept of observed patterns in elearning courses. Using the custom or rapid elearning tool can be interpreted as a best practice in order to avoid unnecessary errors and stay focused on the goal—Building a Course!

Scenario 2:
I've just decided to update my Nokia handsets firmware as I discovered there is an update to it. I browse to their website where they have beautifully documented the procedure on how to update my Nokia phone's firmware. If you look at the pre-installation task list (Points to note), you will note that they are essentially best practices. You will also find FAQ that give you questions of exactly what may happen during your phone upgrade and under what circumstances you should or should not panic. The FAQ are designed based on observed patterns and help make the update process predictable for a first timer.

The same can apply when you use any tool for the first time. Think about this; what if Nokia just gave you the software to download but never gave you the pre-installation steps and FAQ? What could happen? Your opinions are welcome...

Scenario 3:
I did save the best one for the last and hope this one illustrates the dicussion well. Let's say your organization has a retail product (consisting of ordering, billing and inventory) that they sold to a premium retail store. The product implementation is complex and cannot be installed and configured by just running a single setup.exe file. In order to get your product installed in the customer's enterprise, the customer needs to do many tasks:
- Plan the entire installation—how many machines needed, what applications to install on each machine, and how to evenly distribute the load so that the system performs optimally.
- Setup and configure several machines/servers for the database and application servers.
- Install and configure the database and application servers respectively on each machine.
- Install and configure each product.
- Connect and integrate the products so they can communicate, meaning:
- Ordering takes the order after checking with inventory.
- Then confirms the order and sends the information to billing.

You need to imagine a process running in the midst of all these applications and giving directions on what to do and when. By now you should understand that these are common but complex setups for an enterprise and involve a lot of risk.

This, I believe, is a strong case requiring one to have best practices and available design patterns to implement a complete product solution. If the planning or the implementation of this kind of a system goes wrong, it could lead to disastrous results like:
- degraded system performance;
- system malfunction leading to loss of valuable business information;
- unexpected system behavior.

The result: A major loss in the business.

The way to avoid such events from occurring, would be to follow certain best practices, as the problems listed above are actually common failure patterns observed in such systems. The way to prevent this problem would be to:
- Create backup servers to backup data regularly.
- Use advanced features like clustering to distribute the load on different servers (if your order volumes are high)
- Go with recommended patterns for designing and integrating such systems.

Finally, I'd like to conclude this discussion by reiterating some points:
- Best practices can be arrived at only from experience and real time implementation of a process or product, and are always specific to the domain of expertise. Thus, I agree with the comment that called them 'expert practices'.
- Using proven patterns as a base saves us from running into problems that others have already run into, and also prevent us from reinventing the wheel and wasting effort. It pays to work smart by leveraging on and building upon existing information or proven patterns to fit our need; just like I just did with Tony's post. I just used the theoretical knowledge he gave on his post and illustrated them with real-life examples. :)

So irrespective of the name we'd like to give them, we do need 'things' of the nature of best practices and patterns to help us do our job better.

I would like to hear from all of you as to what you think here...

Action Mapping in Action

2009-03-19T18:08:00.024+05:30

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.

Big Question: Workplace Learning in 10 Years?

2009-03-15T15:08:00.077+05:30

This month's Big Question question is Workplace Learning in 10 years?

A very pertinent question to ask in such times, as we hear of more and more failure rates in formal and push learning. Most of our generation have learned this way, and some like me have always found such learning boring from the very beginning. My parents, would force me to learn the way the other 'good' kids learned, and I would resist and prefer to stay in my own dreamworld, that I found more fascinating than my study books. Fortunately for me, every year before the final exam my mom would hound me into preparing for the exams and I would come out scoring reasonably well. Now I can owe my 'decent' job to all the 'push' I got from my parents. But given a chance, I would not like to go back to studying the way I did in school, though I owe my 'formal' degrees to the 'formal' learning I received. But I did have some pretty good teachers. My Geography teacher had a unique style compared to the other teachers in my school. She would ask us to close our text books, and teach us sitting on the desk like she was telling us a story. She would bring us pictures of the Aurora Borialis, and various phenomena, pictures of the different kind of jungles, videos of the equatorial forests, etc. and make her lessons much more interesting. I still remember a lot of Geography owing to her style. I even remember the Agents of Denudation project in my 10th grade, on which I worked very hard to get information from various sources. The whole process was simply made more interesting for me as I had to find and discover the information myself, and this process helped me retain the information in the long term.

This is pretty much the reality for me. When I started work, I joined an elearning company. This is where I was exposed to elearning, and also where I learned about instructional design, but this was purely on the job and with no formal training. Again, the process of discovery got me more interested in the subject. Overtime, I learned more and more about instructional design from the Internet, on my job, connecting with my peers and learning from their experiences, forums, etc. So even though I have a degree in Science and have studied programming in college, I learned instructional designing out of sheer interest and am here writing my views on the big question of the month. Since we do not have formal degrees and PhD courses in the field of instructional designing in India yet, I'm sure all of my peers in India would have learned pretty much the same way. All this is enough proof of how 'informal' and 'pull' learning work well and you have a 'motivated' learner out there who learns better because of his interest. Such a trend is already prevalent in these times, and is obviously driving towards a form of learning that is slowly but certainly, moving away from traditional learning consisting of learning blocks of course, module, lesson structures.

The Road Ahead...
My predictions for the road ahead would be in the lines of what we all are talking about in the form of Ask and thou shall receive, seek and thou shall find. That's precisely what futuristic learning is going to be like irrespective of the time frame. In my view, the discriminating features of workplace learning for the times to come would be:

Learner-centric—All forms of learning will keep in mind the needs of the learner as the greatest priority.
Relevant—The focus will be to provide to the point and no-nonsense information. Long texty content will be passe.
Unlearn-relearn—It will be vital to unlearn several things of what worked in the past, and relearn them to understand their significance as of today. Thus, learners will have to be open-minded.
Reference hybrids—Lots of task-oriented reference material will be created and available to learners in the form of demos, quick-reference materials, advanced tool tips, task-focused documentation, wikis, blogs, etc. These materials will be the reusable entities available for creating presentation/training material on the fly.
Knowledge bases—Due to the extensive amount of learning materials that will be created the knowledge bases will grow in size. This will call for efficient knowledge management systems to organize and index the information, and also provide very efficient search capabilities. For example, I can imagine search spanning across wikis, forums, blogs all at once and giving the learner, the seeker of the information, exactly what he wants, irrespective of the source.
Idea management tools—The top management of organizations will reach out to employees via Idea Management tools, throw open questions about business problems that they need solutions to, and give employees at all levels an opportunity to share ideas that will help do business better, create new standards, coin best practices, design innovative solutions for using the products better and coming up with better ideas for creating innovative products. As a result employees will feel motivated and appreciated for their contribution and eventually be valuable to the organization.
Social/Professional networking—Learning will be greatly augmented depending on an individuals ability to reach out and network with people of the same community, trigger interesting discussions, and come to a consensus at the end.
Collaborative learning—The willingness to share what you have learned with the community, and being open to getting their suggestions, feedback and ideas will be critical. Wikis, forums, blogs will be the different medium, and they will be well integrated to drive collaborative learning. This will promote learning across hierarchies and learning will not be limited only to certain roles.
Brainstorming—Brainstorming on topics with peers and colleagues will supplement learning and aid the mental process of learning. Eventually, learners will achieve higher levels of cognition in their field of expertise and be able to graduate to levels of professional consultants .
Gadget independent—Learning will move towards achieving gadget/medium independence and formats will come about that will be compatible in all kinds of systems. Windows versus Mac users will not have the same compatibility issues.
Simple, usable and intuitive interfaces—All the new gadgets and networking tools will be designed for greater usability, simplicity and be intuitive to use. For example, we never had to learn how to use Google or Orkut. Just because the interfaces are intuitive people just 'learned' to use them and love them.
Scenario-based—Learning will be more focused on real life scenarios replicating the tasks that the learner will perform in their jobs. Simulations, decision-tree learning modules, learning games, etc. will be some examples of such learning.
Multi-faceted—It will become imperative to learn about the job you do from different perspectives. If you're a coder you will not only need learn the internal functionality of the product but also get a perspective of the customers point of view and the problems a customer faces while using the product. The requirement for knowledge will be more holistic and the learner will be in a position to add value to their job.
Learning outcomes—Organizations will get 'real' by encouraging their training initiatives based on the observed learning outcomes. They will measure the performance of learners and evaluate the training initiatives. There will certainly be a reality check to ensure that their money is getting invested in the right directions.

Having said all the above, one needs to realize that this will be a global trend but at all times there will be variations based on specifics:

You may not be able to share top secret, confidential, proprietary information this way.
We have to see how 'open' the times become with 'open' source, cloud computing etc.
Your organization may have their own quirks about doing things the way the world is doing them.
You may still have the typical digital immigrant species driving your organization, and it maybe difficult to bring about change all of a sudden as after all your audience does matter.

Knowing how these factors will influence learning trends maybe another discussion altogether.

Kirkpatrick Four Level Evaluation Model?

2009-03-14T16:23:00.011+05:30

Donald Kirkpatrick coined this model in 1975 and it could most probably be outdated. He talks about the four levels of evaluation of a course:

Level1: Reaction-Observe and record learner reaction to a training.
Level2: Learning-The extent to which learners change attitudes, increase knowledge, and/or increase skills.
Level3: Behavior-The extent to which change in behavior occurs on the job.
Level4: Results-The final outcomes that occur as a result of training.

I find this interesting though not surprising as the levels seem to be quite obvious.

The model says you need to use 2-3 tools to evaluate each level and you need to define the measurement at the beginning of every project. The figure gives a matrix of the measurement required at each level.

Another thing he says is if you don't get past level 2, you aren't using Kirkpatrick. Also he claims that using this model will cause a minimum wastage in your training investment.

I would like to try this out when I have a chance, and I'm not willing to comment about it till I know, but this seems to be very generic and I'm not very sure about how practical it is in a corporate scenario.

Some additional links. This table is also quite useful. Please leave your comments if you have tried using this in your setup, or if you have an opinion on this.

Pure courseware vs Reference Hybrids

2009-03-11T09:24:00.003+05:30

Background
I recently read this post by Tony Karrer discussing the development of what we traditionally call pure courseware versus the creation of Reference Hybrids Shift in eLearning from Pure Courseware towards Reference Hybrids. Though posted in 2006, this post seems very relevant even today and I feel like I have a lot to say about the probable solution to the discussion that this course brought out.

Citing past experience
In one of my previous organization, our management was looking at buying a rapid elearning tool that would make the creation of courses faster and easier. Now thats the impression the general audience has about rapid elearning tools, and is also the obvious reason why they think that buying the tool will solve all their training problems. Exactly what the vendors would love you to believe when they sell their tool. But, I think it's time we start being more realistic and start looking at what it is that we really want, and not conclude on using rapid elearning tools without understanding the essence of what they are equipped to deliver. Another post by Tony - What is Rapid elearning? really brings out the reality and I suggest reading this to get a better understanding of rapid elearning.

So there after me and my team, who believed that a custom made course design could be used to deliver the same business goals managed to convince our management over time, that we could deliver what the tool promised and much better, as we already had the basic framework for a custom course template (in HTML, JavaScript and Flash) in place by then. Now that was a successful transaction there as our instructional designers were happy that they would continue have the opportunity to design interesting strategies that would enable achievement of the training objectives and also engage the learner. I do not mean to say the available rapid elearning tools cannot create engaging courses but there are issues when you do get down to a lot of specifics. Janet Clarey's post clarifies this point better .

What's the point I'm making here?
Now let's get to the point without digressing from the main topics that were discussed in Tony's posts. The bottomline is that we need to look at training from a more holistic point of view than just arguing about what is phased out and what isn't. The point is, that we started making traditional courseware at one time and it worked pretty well. But when we evaluated the courses, overtime we found that there were several gaps in spite of all the instructional design strategies that went into creating the courses. Then we started asking questions like why is this not working, what did we miss out on, is this kind of courseware not working? And then boom, it strikes us that we need to change the way we do training. Maybe the 'traditional' way is not working because learners just want on-the-job, just-in-time and on-demand training. We should be able to give learners what they want, when they want it, and in whichever format they want it. Then came the age where we started believing that mobile learning was the next big thing. But please let me know how effective mobile learning has been? I am really curious as to me, it seemed completely unrealistic to believe that people could learn how to do their job from a tiny screen on a handheld device! Maybe this is because I am a digital immigrant species and not a digital native. Please fill me in here.

What's the solution?
Now, let's get specific and categorize all the random thoughts that I listed above. We're talking about 'traditional' courseware versus reference hybrids like just-in-time and just enough learning. My answer to this though is to remove the 'versus' part and start looking at an entire training solution.

First let's set our goal. We have an audience that needs training on a particular topic. You need to study your audience profiles to be able to come to a consensus about what modes you need to deliver the training.

Example Scenario 1: If you are designing training for teens to learn about using a specific 'cool' gizmo, you would be missing the basic point if you think of making formal training online/computer based training for this. This kind of a situation demands what you call just enough and just in time.

Solution:
So we can provide the following information:

Give a quick primer on the gadget and its capabilities.
List the features that enable this.
Cover the procedures to use the features.

Then link up this information to the feature of the gadget only when the learner demands it. The reason for this being, that most probably this person is a gadget freak and will figure it out if the product is intuitive enough.

Now what if the product is complex to use? Well then you need to put more effort and probably make the information more easily available at the right time, but certainly the 'coolness' of the gadget and how well it sells to these dudes primarily depends on how easy it is to use.

Example Scenario 2: You need to make training to enable learners to be able to use a particular software application on their job. Your audience is technical and don't need to learn the basics of using such applications. They need to know what does your application do to make their job easy.

Solution:
Here goes...
Plan a training curriculum which would be a combination of:

Formal classroom or full fledged online training supported by relevant interactivities
Hands on exercises using scenarios that would be relevant to their role
Formal documentation including context sensitive help

Now this is serious training and your customer will buy and continue to use your product provided you provide a complete solution package. This is a scenario where I don't think only reference hybrids would work. They can only be a part of the whole solution but not sufficient to provide enough training to a customer using your product in their enterprise where even the customer's business depends on the performance and usability of your product.

Let's get real, this is a reality and thus I choose to differ in saying that we cannot choose one over the other and say there is a shift in the strategy. I would like to hear what everyone has to say here...

Skill sets of an Instructional Designer

2009-03-08T18:45:00.007+05:30

Here a quick list that I came up with:

ID Theory and Concept: Understand and apply ID concepts, theories and models based on relevance.
ADDIE Process: Understand and implement the ADDIE process.
Business Requirement and Problem: Understand the business requirement that led to the demand for the training, and the business problem that the training is intended to be solved.
Suggest appropriate Training Solutions: Suggest appropriate training solutions based on the requirements and audience needs.
Audience Analysis: Understand the target audience profiles and analyze how to design the courses to appeal to such an audience and enable them to perform their job better.
Task Analysis: Structure and chunk course contents and present it in a format desirable to the target audience.
Write Measurable Learning Objectives: Write high-level (terminal) learning objectives and drill them down to the low-level (enabling or task level) task specific objectives. The focus while writing objectives should be to write something that can be measured.
Learner Cognition: Understand the learning patterns that go on in a learner’s mind and design courses appropriately.
Relevant Information: Look at a variety of available resources of information and identify what is relevant to the course objectives.
Interface with SME: Interface with SMEs and build good working relationships in order to get the requisite information to build courses.
Gather Information from different perspectives: Take information pertaining to the course from multiple perspectives (Dev/QA, Product Management, Instructor, Support/Consulting) and take decisions on what is relevant to the course audience.
Curriculum plans: Design curriculum plans indicating the list of courses that will address the business need, define the goals for the courses, and determine the appropriate delivery format that will enhance the effectiveness of the training.
Content Plans: Design the content plan for a single course, based on the results of the task analysis process. This includes writing the course terminal and enabling objectives, the topics comprising the course, and also indicating the content or key points that need to go into a topic. For online courses the strategy of dealing with the content maybe suggested. For ILT suggest how the instructor may use the content.
Storyboarding the course: Translate the information gathered and present it in the format of a course based ensuring that the course objectives are met.
Build use cases and scenarios: Work with SMEs to build good scenarios that the learner can relate to so that they find the examples and exercises relevant to their job.
Design Hands on Exercises: Design hands on exercises that are easy to follow and focused at the objective, and enable the learner to be able to perform the tasks on their own after the training.
Design Instructional Strategies: Design instructional strategies as appropriate to the course objectives and to keep the learner engaged and interacting with the course.
Training Evaluation: Evaluate training feedback and make appropriate improvements to the next versions of the course.

Also found another post on Instructional Design Skills. Please add any more that you can think of.

Language for technical courses

2009-02-28T22:56:00.014+05:30

The language for technical courses should be fairly simple, straightforward and formal, as the content is most often action or task oriented. A few general guidelines to write for such content are:

Don't use irrelevant jargon to decorate your conversation. Doing such things will not help engage the learner, but distract his focus from the objective. Instead use short but relevant scenarios and examples that help the learner relate to their job. Relevance is a great attention grabber. For example: As an administrator, you are required to assign permissions to various users based on their job roles. Look up the master list of users, and assign the users to their roles using the User Administration tab.
Always start the instruction step of a procedure giving the location of the object on which an action needs to be performed. For example: In the Volume Control dialog box, select the Advanced button.
Always give the result of the action at the end of the step soon after the instruction. For example the result of Step 2 would be, The Advanced Controls for Volume Control dialog box opens.
Use third person when it comes to technical documentation, but you could selectively use the second person. When it comes to online courses, try and keep a conversational undertone with a conscious effort to keep the seriousness of the topic. This would change if you are creating a story based learning course built around a real time scenario.
Follow your style guide, but keep in mind that when you write for online learning you need to bring emphasis to certain words using styles. Certain times style guides do not address the needs of online learning courses. For example: In the Volume Control dialog box, select the Advanced button.
Avoid using pronouns often in sentences when you are trying to indicate an action. For example: The sentence, Look up the master list of users, and assign them to their roles using the User Administration tab, is confusing over, Look up the master list of users, and assign the users to their roles using the User Administration tab.
Use contractions where they help make your sentences more concise, as unnecessarily long sentences can also be distracting.
Avoid using the gerund form of verbs unless absolutely necessary. For example: Use Run the setup file over Running the setup file.

Always keep these guidelines in mind without forgetting that you don't want to sound like a robot and you need to do everything that will help your audience learn complex technical topics better .

Analyzing technical information simplified

2009-02-22T21:52:00.021+05:30

You can start planning the design of your course once you have the requisite information. You can decide what is 'sufficient' based on some of the following points:

1. You have information about your audience profiles.
2. You have the business problem that needs to be solved.
3. You have the product available for research.

Once you have answers to the above, you can start making your course/curriculum plan. Though you might have heard these terms before, I will attempt to define them from a perspective that is more generic.

Curriculum: A curriculum is a set of courses that are logically put together in order to provide a complete training solution for a single product. For example, you may have a single curriculum for an entire product, like a curriculum for learning how to use Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Course: A high-level tangible task that a learner needs to accomplish in order to use a single or multiple features a product. Again this would depend on the complexity of the feature/s. So we can divide our curriculum to contain both basic and advanced courses.

For example, our Adobe Photoshop CS4 curriculum may contain the following courses:

1. Adobe Photoshop Basics
2. Using Adobe Photoshop to Edit Bitmap Graphics
3. Adobe Photoshop Advanced Concepts
4. Creating Special Effects Using Adobe Photoshop
5. Automating Tasks Using Adobe Photoshop

What have we done so far?

- Identified the curriculum and what it aims at achieving
- Based on the goal of the curriculum, we came up with a list of courses which are essentially task based

Now let’s get on with the rest of the task. Our goal is to create a curriculum and define the courses that would enable certain audience profiles to perform their activities effectively using the tool Adobe Photoshop. Here are the next steps.

Identify your audience
In order to design your curriculum, you need to know the roles your audience play. For example, let’s consider the following different users of Adobe Photoshop:

1. Visual/Graphic Designer
2. Photographer
3. Usability engineer/GUI specialist

Design your objectives
The next step is to define your course objectives. You can start with defining your terminal objective which you will further break down to the level of enabling objectives. The terminal objective is the high level objective that your course aims at achieving. When you analyze your terminal objective your break it down to the constituent tasks that enable the achievement of these objectives. These are your enabling objectives.

Thus task analysis is a top down model that enables you to drill down from a course level to the level of identifying the lessons or modules or even the topics, that will constitute your course. It is a drill-down cycle, where you can continue this process till you have the most simplified unit, which could be a single task that the learner can learn to execute in one go.

So let’s take a single course out of our list above and analyze the objectives.

Course Name: Adobe Photoshop Basics
Terminal Objective: To familiarize the student with the basic concepts and tools available in Adobe Photoshop.
Enabling Objectives:
By the end of this course, the student should be:
1. Familiar with the basic concepts of Adobe Photoshop
2. Familiar with the menus and tools provided by Adobe Photoshop
3. Able to use the user interface of Adobe Photoshop effectively

Now the following enabling objectives each could be converted to a lesson:

1. Basic Concepts of Adobe Photoshop
2. Tools and Menus of Adobe Photoshop
3. Using the Adobe Photoshop User Interface

You can use this method and continue to drill down based on the need. Now we’re almost done.

Delivering your course
Following this, you can plan your course delivery method. Decide what will suit your audience better. Whether they would prefer to have online courses or instructor-led or blended. Typically it makes sense to deliver simpler and more conceptual courses online, but keep the advanced task oriented ones for an instructor-led course. This does not mean that you cannot make effective complex online courses, as you can come up with various strategies to make the courses engaging as well as effective. Scenarios and use cases are most effective for technical product training.

Here are some sample curriculum and course design templates.

Dr. Tony Karrer's blog post on Course and Courseware Fading - The Future of learning gives a more futuristic point of view to this model of traditional courseware.

Challenges and solutions to technical software product training: Gathering Information

2009-01-21T21:51:00.039+05:30

I worked with a company that created aviation training and my transition to software technical training was met with several challenges. For one thing initially I did NOT understand the products by just reading up ILT and documentation. We started with conversion courses that put me into the comfort zone. Converting ILT to WBT was the perfect thing for someone like me with no prior experience in the use of such technical and complicated software products.

The products were based on SOA and had concepts, (as deep as the Java language) to be understood in order to be used; finally there was the implementation part, the so-called production environment, where the customer implements the product in his organization, which the ID cannot see or imagine!

The next course we got into got us chewing up every bit of our left over nails and wondering where we could run and hide. This was a newly acquired company that had a great product but no available documentation or training! And that was just the beginning of another whole journey of a course development cycle, as our SME was in another country from a 3rd party company. The company that was acquired had outsourced all of the work to this company and most of their expert team within the company were laid off or had left! This is where I began to realize how product knowledge becomes critical to your success in a product company irrespective of the role you play. The company looks to make everyone product literate so that it helps do our tasks with greater insight.

The SME Reality
In time, I realized that being part of a software products company was one of the most challenging things for an ID. Contrary to common belief that since I was part of the same company that creates the products, I should have greater access to SMEs, the reality was exactly the opposite. The product teams are so deeply involved in their project schedules that they would never commit to providing us with a single person as a SME! Moreover, the product was so big and complex that it would take more than one individual performing a specific role to be able to give you all the information about features and facets to the product. Whew!

Dealing with the situation
Over time I learned to deal with a situation like this and following here you will find only solutions, so I can conclude this post on a positive note! Let's start with what are all the things we need to do in order to be able to plan and execute such complex courses successfully. In this post, I will only focus on the gathering of information and their sources. I plan to write more posts on how to analyze and segment this information to be able to produce effective courses for such products.

Accessing information types
The first thing you need to do is to identify and get access to all the available types of information within such a setup. Here is a high-level list of such information.

Documented Information- You need to have written information in the form of blogs, wikis, documentation, feature design documents, course/ILT material to start learning stuff.
Product Trainings - Look out for and get enrolled to any relevant product trainings that get scheduled. Do check on whether it is a high-level functional training, giving the benefits of the product and its features, which will be useful to your job, or a deep dive session, which will be mostly irrelevant to you.
Hands-on Product experience - You need to install the product or get access to an environment and be able to implement and use the features of the product from a task point of view, over just playing around with the features casually. Learn the product with a specific goal in mind like create a process to take a purchase order using the product, and get it running. This will not be easy and you will need to get guidance from someone here.
Implementation information - You need to have scenarios/use cases of how the product is used in the customer's setup or the so-called production environment. You have to be able to visualize the setup at a production environment and how the customer will use the product.
Value added information - You need to have information about the real-time problems faced by the customers while implementing the products (remember all software products are never bug free and their real-time performance can only be assessed in production)

That looks like a short list with just few high-level points, but believe me getting all this to get your course out is undoubtedly a herculean task, given that you also need to do your usual ID work, of audience analysis, task analysis (which I will cover in later posts) over and above all this. That's one of the reasons I decided to start blogging as it helps me to get thinking on a way to work these things out.

Identifying your sources of information
Given the challenges to getting these different information types, you need to identify the sources of such information. Well who else but multiple persons playing different roles on the product within the organization can provide such information? Let's identify the roles:

The Software Engineer/Developer
A great source of technical information to understand the product features and how to work with them. Ask them all you want to know about the product architecture, how components work with each other, where to find certain options/features etc. They also understand conceptual information a great deal, so leverage on it!

Words of caution
- They usually always know 'how' to do things but not necessarily 'why' you do things 'that' way and not any other way.
- Sometimes due to the way the team is organized and time constraints, certain developers would only know some of the features/aspects and not all. So you need to find the right persons for your course.
- They also may have no/limited knowledge on how the product is used in the real-time or in production.
- They have little or no knowledge about how important a product/feature is to the audience and a particular role.

The Quality Assurance engineer
A great resource to ask about how the product installs, what environment it uses, what are the bugs/problems with the product currently. Ask them questions about concepts, test cases, what works what doesn't and why. They are also a good source of conceptual information and would be familiar with the product architecture and how it integrates with different components.

Word of caution - Similar limitations to the development/engineering teams.

Both Dev and QA folks are usually high on technical product knowledge and the workings of the internals of the product, rather than the implementation and functional perspective.

Product Managers
They are great resources for customer information, customer profiles, product positioning, correct terms to use in your courses and documentation, and how to present the product to the audience. Remember that product companies often use training and documentation as a means to subtly market the product and make it look more attractive.

These are the people you should be asking the ‘why’ questions. For example: Why do we need this feature? How else can this task be accomplished or is this the only way?

They can also point you to the right resources, collaterals, product demos to customers, etc. They have a good understanding of the functional working of the products and their integration with other products.

You can ask them about how a customer uses the product, what features they use more often, use cases/scenarios, common problems etc. so that you can prioritize your content and improve relevance of the material.

Word of caution- Do not expect them to know the internals and the workings of the product features to the same level of Dev/QA folks. The Dev/QA guys are the techies and only they can get you such information.

Consultants and Professional Services
These folks are usually the implementation guys who go to the customer and help them install and implement the product. They also have a subtle marketing role associated to their portfolio. Their role is a post marketing strategy that serves as a benefit to the customer for implementing the product successfully, but also comes at a price.

Though consultants and Professional Services vary in terms of the level of their expertise on the product, Professional Services being quite superior, these people are the right ones to give you implementation related information, best practices, do's and don't, tips and tricks etc. They usually know and understand all facets of the product related to the implementation. They may also be able to give you a greater insight into the workings of the product with other products/third-part software/plug-ins etc. These are also the right people to ask the ‘why’ question to.

Word of caution- They may not know the product internals but understand the functional and implementation perspectives very well. Another downside is that you almost never get access to these guys, as they would always be onsite! You may try connecting to them through email.

Product Support
These guys take the calls for the customers who have paid for support on the product and help them resolve issues post implementation. This can be compared to a maintenance support role, where the customer using your product may have problems issues, questions, complaints, etc. The kind of information these guys would be able to give would be product bugs, common problems faced, troubleshooting information.

Word of caution- Same as consulting/professional services.

Note that Consulting/Professional Services and Support roles may not be distinct in all organizations as their structure may vary. You may need to identify folks by the roles they play and decide which category they fall into in my list above.

Experienced Technical Writers/Trainers/Instructors
These people are good resources because they learn the product as a result of their job and experience. They also often have hands on knowledge of working on the products. They are good people to consult on prioritizing the information you have, segmenting it, organizing and structuring it. There you go you have more help!

Word of caution- Do not treat these peoples knowledge on the product as final. Use the previous resources for that.

Wrapping up
I just realize how huge this post has become, given that i don't get enough time to blog more often, I tried to package a lot into one blog post here.

So to conclude on the above,

- Gathering information in software product setups usually comes from multiple sources and never from a single SME.
- People give you information based on their exposure to the product and their experiences. You need to filter out the right information by studying your audience and the tasks they will do using the product.
- The above information types and sources may vary depending on company organization and their way of functioning. Several times, due to policies etc you may or may not have access to certain kinds of information.

It is also important to ask the right people the right questions based on their roles, else it would seem like harassing them to give information on a domain that is not part of their key job role. So respect that and choose the right way to do this. Finally, make an effort to work your way through by making the right contacts, building a rapport with the right people and getting what you need. A good and professional personal rapport can add a whole new dimension to getting information! Remember good and effective communication can get you places…

Role of IDs vs SMEs???

2008-04-20T22:17:00.015+05:30

Let's come to the basic question as to what do we do as instructional designers?

Understand learner profiles
Create curriculums, course outlines, storyboards
Review developed content for accuracy etc etc

Over and above all this, what we should be doing as 'good' instructional designers, is to be able to suggest appropriate learning solutions based on learner need and business demands. For any of these activities a vital component is 'SME support'.

In my experience as an instructional designer I have had experiences with SMEs from different domains.

My first experience was to create learning content for the aviation industry. My company bagged contracts from several aviation majors like Airbus, Finnair, Snecma, Saudi Arabian etc. Here we worked on courses for audiences like cabin crew, pilots, flight dispatchers, maintenance personnel. In this industry our SMEs would be persons with aviation & training backgrounds. Working for this industry was fairly simple in one way that the syllabi or curriculums for each type of audience is globally standard with the existence of the FAA and JAA (Flight Aviation Authority and Joint Aviation Authority).

A typical process we followed to:

Derive the course/curriculum outlines from customer requirements and standard recommended syllabi.
Create lesson plans for each lesson defined in the course consisting of the course objectives, lesson objectives, key teaching points
Develop storyboards based on the the lesson plans.

All through the process we would work with SMEs at all stages to suggest guide and review the technical part and structure of the lessons / courses. Since this was a service based company SMEs would be paid for the time they spent on the courses and besides this we also had a full time SME always available. Work was fun and interesting as you work on topics like, flight planning, meteorology, ETOPS, aircraft systems, etc.

My second experience was with working for a products company where the client and SMEs would be in-house. This is a place where i first experienced working on highly technical products and the experience was truly worthwhile. The experience with SMEs was significantly different from my previous experience. Here we had to respect SME time as SMEs were part of the same organization and had their own targets to achieve.

Here we came across several kinds of SME profiles consisting of product managers, engineering team members/managers, professional consultants, QA, documentation persons and instructors. Each kind of SME can provide specific inputs related to their job which can in turn add more value to the courses and curriculum.

Here the task was to :

- Analyze audience needs
- Perform task analysis
- Create curriculums and come up with learning tracks
- Come up with business scenarios and use cases
- Design course outlines and develop storyboards

Once again all this is done by soliciting inputs from SMEs. Hence the role of a SME very clearly critical for the technical accuracy of course content, while an instructional designers role is conducive to the instructional quality, structure and flow of the training.

The only other perspective I see is that if IDs are expected to learn and become product experts and trainers, then they have to choose between being a training solution provider for different training domains, and graduating to be subject matter experts themselves! This is a tough choice sometimes....

eLearning in India

2008-03-14T15:37:00.010+05:30

Overview
eLearning is fast growing in India. elearning is mostly delivered in two modes — Web Based Training (WBT) and Instructor Lead Training (ILT). Computer Based Trainings (CBTs) are used these days only when standalone learning is in demand, like training on your new mobile handset or a latest gadget that you have purchased. Wherever there is a need for training a large audience, it is more economical to have Web Based Training (WBT) over Instructor Led Training (ILT). There are advantages of one over the other and using one method doesn't eliminate the other one. Overall effective elearning solutions can save organizations a lot of money and increase their return on investment, besides the convenience and accessibility offered to the learners.

Roles in the elearning industry
eLearning demands a variety of roles like Instructional Designers, content editors, document reviewers, Subject Matter Experts (SME), Authoring personnel or content integrators, Graphic Designers, 3D modelers, animators, LMS (Learning Management System) administrators and programmers, etc.

Who needs elearning?
At a high level companies/industries who require elearning professionals can be categorized into two types — product and service companies. Product companies use elearning as a medium to create product training for their customers and internal staff that use and / or work on or develop the products. Service companies take the work outsourced to them from clients who prefer outsourcing over internal development. These service companies are equipped with the resources, skills sets, and infrastructure that are required to execute these projects.

Domains which elearning benefits

elearning serves as a viable solution for several different domains. The aviation industry was one of the first to identify a need for having online learning and thus many of the based standards and processes were laid down by the aviation industry. In general depending on the training demand in a particular domain companies require different types of elearning solutions. An airline company or manufacturer may require training in the field of aviation, whereas a technical products company may require training in the domain of ERP, Messaging, ESB, networking, databases etc.

To provide the requisite technical knowledge for a domain, Domain or Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are to work with an Instructional Designer to create the course structure, content outline and detailed design. Applying knowledge on Instructional Design Theories, Models, and strategies the Instructional Designer structure's and fleshes out a course which is finally and integrated by graphic designers and content integrators. Finally the course is deployed on an LMS and hosted from there.

The evolving industry

In my opinion, several companies in the industry aren't matured in to the levels in demand. By matured I mean having established processes and well documented and tested standards and guidelines for delivering effective training solutions. Abroad, this field is at a much higher and more professional level. One of the major reasons for this is that there aren't many graduate/postgraduate courses in this field in India while there are such opportunities abroad. There may be few very good companies, but the list of companies in this field in India is very huge. eLearning is India is gradually evolving due to the initiative taken by professionals to walk the extra mile by learning from other sources and developing processes and standards based on the business needs and the market demands. This has led to the evolution of more streamlined and process based approaches which have delivered high quality professional learning solutions.

Another facet of this is the out sourcing of course development from structured process driven companies who had already defined standard models due to their vast experience in the domain of creating elearning courses. An example of this is Microsoft learning who has been a leader in delivering training and certification for more than a decade. When Microsoft out sources their courses to a vendor they train and groom vendors to follow their standards and models, and in the long term this enables vendors to understand and create processes of their own. Besides this some leading elearning companies in India like NIIT and TIS have played a major role in training and grooming individuals aspiring to make a career in the elearning domain.

Whats next?
And thus the elearning industry in India continues to grow and mature. We need to keep watching out for how the trends change over time and what the next generation of elearning courses could be like!