The Learning Strategist

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-...