The Learning Strategist

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ,...

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...

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 co...

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 peop...

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 informatio...

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 pr...

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...

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 ...

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 qu...

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: Alltop vs Browse My Stuff Social Filtering Topic Hubs Using Social Signals to Find Top eLearning Resources I wish Tony good luck and I hope a lot more enthusiastic blogg...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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-...