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Challenging Times Call for New Realization

The Challenge to Human Minds During this COVID-19 crisis, the world as we knew it has undergone a sea change. A lot of things that we thought were not possible have now been made possible. Amidst the pandemic, the goal is to preserve businesses and the economy, to continue essential services, and increase social awareness and responsibility. All this comes at a cost of certain people's jobs, exposing them to health risks, and the mental challenges of dealing with isolation to protect both ourselves and other people. Some people want to believe this is equivalent to a war. The focus on productivity for academics and business takes a lower priority than caring about life as we knew it before the pandemic broke out. This is a sea change in the way we did things in the past. The urgency of the issue is exacerbated by the nature of how easily this virus spreads. This can do one of two things. Take the human race to the: Next level of consciousness and realization Depths of our w...
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Meaningful Data on Customer Success

I've always wondered how instructional designers appear to work in silos while building training and cranking out several hours of courses. With the advent of xAPI and data science, we could consider a possibility of linking training 'outcomes' to customer success. New Implementation Case Study Let's take the case of a new product release or a new implementation for a large company like Oracle or Salesforce. The partners and consultants undergo training to either use the product in their day-to-day tasks, or to implement it for a customer. A 5-day training is organized and successfully completed. Now the consultants are ready to head back and actually implement the application. After this point, I've never had visibility into 'data' about the outcomes of the training. I've never known whether they were actually able to use the specific knowledge to successfully use an application including their ability to troubleshoot issues and design one-off cus...

Building Learnable Products - Managing Knowledge Effectively

After a long hiatus, I've realize it's time to resurrect my blog, with my renewed experience from all the years I was away. Its been a fascinating journey with so many challenges personally, professionally, and just overall that I was overwhelmed at first about what to write about. During this time I transitioned multiple roles from an eLearning instructional designer to a curriculum developer for instructor-led training, to delivering a train-the-trainer to instructors and consultants at Oracle University, to graduating as a technical writer. I was fascinated by the vision of the convergence of applications, user interfaces, and training into a amalgamation in the modern era of mobile technologies and machine learning. It's beautiful to watch this evolution in a short period of just 6-7 years. Notably the evolution began well before it but became significantly visible in the last few years.  This gives me a segway to my topic, Learnable Products, which I have diligen...

Simplified Learning

I have always sought simplicity in every learning solution that I develop. As our products evolve to simplify more and more complicated day to day problems, the learning solutions must be simplified as well. My post about the Future of Organizational Learning was a thought in this direction but on a broader scale. Now I'm thinking of a granular level of learning that can be developed and packaged with the product. Large enterprise products solve complex domain specific problems. Learning about such products becomes equally complex. Hence our role as learning designers calls for us to be specialists. We must be able to design learning so it can be seamlessly intersperse d within the product. Imagine a newly installed enterprise solution with many of pages, regions, dashboards, etc. The user who is a domain specialist and probably familiar with related products in the domain must be able to log in and use the product without having to undergo a rigorous and exhaustive learning...

Don't Market Social Media

I have been through this battle of encouraging people to use social media for learning and knowledge sharing. I will admit my style is subtle and not aggressive. But that's also because it doesn't work by being aggressive. What does help is empathizing with the users and their various styles of social interaction. Just because someone is not on social media sites often doesn't mean they are not social or don't want to share information. This calls for us to stop thinking run-of-the-mill. Yes, over selling social media is becoming run-of-the-mill! We need to get back to the basics and think again. I can give examples from my team of people who are collaborative by nature and achieve the same results by meeting people face-to-face or over web and video conferences. They are some of the most brilliant people in their jobs and communicate effectively. They are always happy to share their knowledge for the benefit of our team. Such people will always excel in communicati...

Of Android, Mobile Games and Learning Experiences

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 ,...

The New Age Instructional Designer

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 co...