In case you missed it � 2012 according to Clive on Learning

Before I take a break for Christmas, I thought I'd provide you with this summary of all my posts on Clive on Learning in 2012. I've marked with asterisks a few posts that were particularly signifiant from my point of view.

December

Transforming learning and development

Insights: Evaluation and follow-up matters
Insight: Learner journeys need to become seamless
Pyramids and spheres
Insights: Assessment is changing
Insights: Line managers and coaches have a critical role
Insights: Experiential learning is an important part of the architecture

November

Insights: E-learning design is changing*
Insights: Organisations need multi-device learning solutions
Insights: Formal courses are not dead, just different
Insights: L&D is playing a key role in supporting informal learning*
Insights: Improving performance still matters the most

E-learning is dead, long live learning*
What sort of journalist am I?

October

Do instructional designers need to know about what they are designing?*
New directions in self-study e-learning: the return of scrolling
New directions in self-study e-learning: social interactions*

September

Over-teaching experts and under-teaching novices*
Learning videos - anyone can do them, but that doesn't make them easy

August

Why video trumps e-learning*
Selling your services by the hour
Bundle resources and you may not need courses*
What new designers really need to know*
Tools, talent, training and, above all, time*
Why I'm reading more mags than ever

July

Is e-learning something I can do?*
What specifically is e-learning good for?*
Life beyond the course
What is e-learning good for?

June

Is e-learning effective?*
goalgetter - assisting the transfer of learning
European survey shows growth in coaching and blended learning
Will e-learning put me out of a job?*
Why is e-learning so unpopular?*

May

What's the point in competency frameworks?
When compliance is not enough*
M-learning: What's the big deal?
Time to tame the HiPPO*
This house believes the only way is e-learning

April

Bert lives on in StrumSchool
The only way to build confidence is to practise and get feedback*
Collaboration is what we do nowadays: get over it
Why face-to-face should be for special occasions*
Visual design: learning from the professionals
The problem with pre-work*
To be an effective designer it helps to understand how people learn
Steve the top Wheeler and Dealer

March

Sharon Burton's 8 steps to amazing webinars
Craving resolution
Learning, learners and logistics*
A question of attitude*
My love-hate relationship with learning objectives*
Transforming learning and development - the video
Exploring social learning with Ben Betts

February

Don't be afraid to call yourself a trainer
Eating an elephant
Online learners need the means, the motive and the opportunity*
Running out of time
Market failure? Blame it on the dog food*

January

A welcome to Elearnity Vendor Perspectives
Digital Learning Content: A Designer's Guide
iBooks Author: Any relevance for learning in the workplace?
E-learning and L&D salary data for the UK
How much is an authoring tool worth?
2012: A time for highly connected learning specialists*

Transforming learning and development

Over on the Onlignment blog, I have, throughout 2012, been setting out a model for a transformation in workplace learning and development. I started the series by arguing the case for transformation.
I then established a vision for workplace learning and development that is:

• aligned
• economical
• scalable
• flexible
• engaging
• and powerful

I moved on to look at some of the changes that can be made to realise this vision, expressed as six shifts:

• from generic to tailored
• from synchronous to asynchronous
• from compliance to competence
• from top-down to bottom-up
• from courses to resources
• from face-to-face to online

In the posts that followed, I brought the series to a conclusion by focusing on the practical steps we can take to make transformation happen:

• Recognising the uniqueness of your particular organisation in terms of its requirements, the characteristics of its people and the constraints which govern its decision making.
• Establishing a learning architecture and infrastructure that recognises these unique characteristics.
• Putting in place processes for improved performance needs analysis and blended solution design.
• Building capability in areas such as the design of digital learning content, learning live and online, and connected online learning.

I have now brought all these posts together in a free e-book in PDF format. It's also available on Kindle and in paperback. I hope you find it useful.

Insights: Evaluation and follow-up matters

This post completes my commentary to the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The tenth and final 'insight' is that �Evaluation and follow-up matters'.

This insight mirrors the findings of Towards Maturity, which places 'demonstrating value' as a key element in their model for effective application of learning technologies. To quote from their latest benchmark report, demonstrating value means: 'Closing the value loop from strategic objective to achievement � and ensuring that stakeholders are kept fully informed along the way.'

Learning professionals have always known that they should be measuring the output of their interventions in terms of business performance, but in easier times (in other words before October 2008) there was very little external pressure on them to do so. As long as there were bums on seats, the happiest of happy sheets and no complaints, then who would want to rock the boat by suggesting that some of this stuff wasn't actually necessary or useful?

Encouragingly the insights report is telling us that: 'Budget appears to be available where you can prove value to the business. Successful learning departments are preparing a business case for projects and then evaluating the impact on performance. They are also ensuring learning is followed up with reminders and being transferred to the workplace.'

I have seen recent evidence of some very sophisticated ROI analysis of learning interventions, and this is to be lauded, but it's usually not necessary to provide evidence with scientific precision. Kirkpatrick himself made the point that, on a routine basis, all that was really needed was a convincing argument in terms of likely causality: 'The programme went down very well; certainly the assessments we did show that participates moved on a long way in terms of skills and confidence; the evidence from the field is that most of them are putting what they have learned into practice and that this is contributing to better performance in terms of �'.  Whether you subscribe to Kirkpatrick or not - and the management of your organisation couldn't really care less - the point is that your budget can only be justified on the basis that it adds value to the organisation. It is only reasonable that you should be able to demonstrate this.

The insight also makes a point about follow-up and this is every bit as important. A typical formal intervention - classroom or e-learning - provides valuable input but very rarely sees the job through. If learning interventions are to make a valuable contribution to business performance, they must be seen as an on-going process, not an event. That's why I am so supportive of blended solutions, because, when well designed, they can cross the boundaries from formal to non-formal to on-demand and experiential learning.

As this is the last of my ten commentaries on the Insights Report, I'd like to thank Steve Rayson and the guys at Kineo for providing this useful stimulus to debate and congratulate them on the sale of their company this week to City & Guilds. Let's hope they are able to maintain that 'indie' culture and edgy approach within the context of a much larger and - historically at least - more conservative organisation.

Insight: Learner journeys need to become seamless

This post continues my commentary to the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The ninth of ten 'insights' is that �Learner journeys need to become seamless'. Although you should really read what the report has to say on this topic, the gist is that employees want easy access to information that is relevant to their job responsibilities. I'm not convinced this is anything to do with 'learner journeys', more a continuation of the experiences they have come to expect in their everyday interactions with Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and the like.

'Easy access' means you log in once and once only as you move from site to site. It also means availability in usable formats on all platforms (in other words mobile devices as well as PCs). This is how we're used to accessing web sites (at least the most-commonly used big sites) outside work. I don't see any reason for learning professionals to look for new technologies to achieve all this, because the problems have, by and large, already been solved.

Some learning needs to be dealt with separately, because it needs its own, secure space with the ability to track learner progress and assessment scores. But, of courser, we already have those platforms and they continue to play a role. But I don't see why it shouldn't be possible for everything else (the web articles, videos, software demos, PDFs, decision aids, wikis, forums and the like) to be handled through whatever intranet software an organisation has - SharePoint or something similar. This means learning professionals working closely with IT, internal comms, knowledge management and other departments to devise an integrated solution.

To be honest, when you're working outside the domain of formal courses, I wouldn't use terms like 'learning' at all, and certainly not 'learner journeys'. Employees don't see online support materials as tools for learning, just business as usual. In many cases their goal is not learning, in the strict sense that new connections will be made in the brain, just access to information for the here and now. If they do learn something for the long term then that's a fortunate secondary result.

The report also makes the point that employees want information that is relevant to them This happens routinely outside work through a number of means:

• search engines
• social media - our friends and followers recommend and share useful stuff with us
• news feeds
• sites aimed specifically at people like us
• content that is tagged with keywords

In other words, all the stuff you would expect to find on a Web 2.0-enabled content management tool. Chances are you already have one, even if you're only using the Web 1.0 features.

Pyramids and spheres

Yesterday there was much fun to be had at the eLearning Network 25th Birthday Party. The term e-learning may not be 25 years old but the concept certainly is and the volunteers at the eLN (formerly TACT - the Association for Computer-Based Training) have done a brilliant job of providing a forum for e-learning designers and professionals to share best practice.

My contribution at the event was to join with some of my fellow past eLN chairs to present highlights and lowlights of our term of office. Each of us nominated one item to be placed in the bin and forgotten about and one entry for the hall of fame.

From my tenure (2008-2011), I chose two contrasting developments, knowledge management and Web 2.0. No prizes for guessing which is the hero and which the villain.

I represented knowledge management by a pyramid:

Why a pyramid? Well, because knowledge management, as it was originally conceived, was another top-down, over-structured, IT-led endeavour, designed for robots not humans. It flopped terribly, not least because it didn't capture the knowledge that people really want and need, which is now generally acknowledged to be tacit, anecdotal and grounded in real-life stories and examples.

Contrast this with Web 2.0, represented by the sphere (and excuse the rather amateurish application of Xmas wrapping paper):

A sphere because Web 2.0 is not hierarchically structured. Essentially anyone can and does communicate with anyone else, regardless of who they are. Web 2.0 has changed the world. It's hard to imagine how we could have functioned without Wikipedia, YouTube or Facebook. Now everyone's a teacher as well as a learner. No-one knows everything and everyone knows something.

You'll be pleased to know that Web 2.0 was voted by the audience to the hall of fame. Knowledge management was beaten for the dustbin by our over-use of labels, as nominated passionately by Jonathan Kettleborough.

Top of the bill was Stephen Heppell who provided a characteristically relaxed, humorous and thought-provoking review of historical and future trends in learning technologies. Laura Overton brought us up-to-date with the Towards Maturity 2012 benchmark, which provides a number of interesting new insights. I particularly like their list of 'Seven missed l&D opportunities'. There was also the final of the 2012 Pecha Kucha competition, with some fabulous entries. The winner was my theatrical Onlignment colleague Phil Green, who will now be insufferable.

Insights: Assessment is changing

This post continues my commentary to the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The eighth of ten 'insights' is that �Assessment is changing', in the sense that assessment of knowledge is not enough - it is performance that matters.

By and large, employers are not really interested in their employees having knowledge; they want them to be able to fulfil their job responsibilities, and to do that they must be competent. Competence will depend to some degree on the knowledge that employees have, but it will also be underpinned by attitudes, skills and the confidence to put these into practice.

Automated, computer-based assessment does a pretty good job of testing for knowledge and certain cognitive skills, but it is going to tell you nothing about a person's attitude, interpersonal skills or motor skills (unless you've got some pretty impressive simulator doing the job). So, in the majority of cases, the multiple-choice quiz placed at the end of an e-learning module is going to tell you very little that matters (and even when the objectives are for simple knowledge transfer, this is far too early to provide any meaningful evidence).

E-assessment is tempting because it is automated and cheap, but to believe that this is a useful measure of competence is a delusion (some may say a conspiracy of mutual delusion - if you don't tell anyone, then I won't). The best way to measure competence is through observation of actual job behaviour, something which most managers do routinely. So, to assess competence, however derived (through formal, informal or experiential learning), you need simply to ask managers whether their direct reports are exhibiting the desired competence. If you're looking to make this process as efficient as possible, create an online questionnaire and have your LMS (or some other platform) send out a link to this a month or so after the learning intervention has been completed. Simple.

Insights: Line managers and coaches have a critical role

This post continues my commentary to the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The seventh of ten 'insights' is that �Line managers and coaches have a critical role'.

It is, of course, hardly a new insight that managers and coaches play an important part in workplace learning, because it has ever been thus. Having said that, it is encouraging that this report picks up an increasing emphasis in this area.

Psychologically, very few people work for a local authority, a bank, a charity or a retail chain. They work for their direct line manager. If they leave their employer, it is more often than not that they are 'divorcing their manager' - regardless of what they say at the exit interview. If your manager believes it is important for you to beef up on some new development, or to refine your skills in a particular area, then you are motivated to do so. If your manager shows little or no interest in the training you are doing, then probably so will you.

Other reports have come to similar conclusions. Outsourcing specialists KnowledgePool conducted a study with input from more than 10,000 learners and their managers over a three year period. The data was collected from an online survey issued three months after the completion of training, and focuses on the degree to which the transfer of learning has taken place and the effect this has had on performance. The results are summarised in a downloadable white paper, They Think It's All Over. Here is one of the main findings:

"Line manager support to help learners use what they had learnt was a major factor in tackling the lack of performance improvement. The study found that where learners did receive line manager support, 94 per cent went on to apply what they had learnt, and performance improvement invariably followed."

When assessing what made the biggest impact on transfer of learning, Broad and Newstrom looked at three different parties � the learner�s manager, the trainer/facilitator and the learner themselves � at three stages in the process � before the intervention, during and after. They found that the greatest impact was made by the learner�s manager in setting expectations before the intervention; next most important was the trainer�s role before the intervention in getting to know the needs of the learners they would be training; third most important was the manager�s role after the intervention.

	Before	During	After
Learner�s manager	1	8	3
The trainer / facilitator	2	4	9
The learner themselves	7	5	6

Both KnowledgePool and Broad and Newstrom acknowledge the critical role that the manager plays in determining the outcome from a training programme. But while the former has focused on the impact that the manager makes after the intervention, Broad and Newstrom show that what happens before can have even greater impact.

Middle managers do not have an easy life, facing conflicting pressures from above and below. They may not make the big decisions but they are the ones who have to put them into practice. And as organisations get leaner and flatter, they have ever-increasing spans of control and less time to spend with each of their direct reports.  

But middle managers are still the gate-keepers to learning and development. If learning professionals do not properly engage with them, they will find their efforts under-supported if not outright sabotaged. And you don't engage with people through a policy of enforcement, by telling them what to do. As ever, people don't resist change, they resist being changed. The only way to make any learning strategy work is by on-going consultation with middle mangers. They must own the strategy. If they do, they might just get behind it. If they don't, you might as well not bother.

Insights: Experiential learning is an important part of the architecture

This post continues my commentary to the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The sixth of ten 'insights' is that �Experiential learning is an important part of the architecture'.

As learning and development professionals we are most alert to those opportunities which will help employees to �learn to� carry out some task or fulfil some responsibility. We want to get ahead of the game, to equip employees with the knowledge and skills they need to meet the requirements of current and future job roles. Even when we put in place facilities and resources to support on-demand learning, we still have a forward looking focus, trying to get ahead of the game, even if only at the last minute.

Yet for many people, the greatest insights come not through �learning to� but by �learning from� our day-to-day work activities. Experiential learning is literally learning from our experience. It occurs consciously or unconsciously as we reflect upon our own successes and failures at work as well as those of our acquaintances. It introduces an extremely valuable feedback loop into our everyday work.

Without experiential learning, all we are left with is the 'doing'. We repeat the same actions over and over again, never improving and constantly at risk to every new threat that appears in our environment. Experiential learning is 'doing' plus an essential additional ingredient - reflection. Without reflection, we can have many years of experience and learn less than someone who is a relative newcomer but who has acquired the ability to learn.

Experiential learning occurs whether we want it to or not, but there are good reasons why, as learning professionals, we should be supporting and encouraging it:

• Because everyday work experience is rich with opportunities for learning.
• Because we don't always take the best advantage of these opportunities.
• Because, if something goes well, we want to repeat it.
• Because, if something goes wrong, we want to avoid it happening again.

We are hard-wired for experiential learning, as John Medina explains in Brain Rules: �When we came down from the trees to the savannah, we did not say to ourselves, 'Good lord, give me a book and a lecture so I can spend ten years learning how to survive in this place.' Our survival did not depend upon exposing ourselves to organised, pre-planned packets of information. Our survival depended upon chaotic, reactive information-gathering experiences. That's why one of our best attributes is the ability to learn through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas.�

And what�s more, as John notes, this ability does not fade with age: �The adult brain throughout life retains the ability to change its structure and function in response to experiences.�

Employees are well aware of how important experiential learning can be. The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) asked 2076 employees in the UK to identify the activities that had been useful in helping them to do their job better. Top of the list, identified by 82% of respondents, was 'doing your job on a regular basis'.

There are many ways in which an organisation can encourage experiential learning on a top-down basis:

• benchmarking
• project reviews
• action learning
• job enrichment
• job rotation
• performance appraisals
• a policy of continuous improvement
• optimising the working environment

Whether or not learning professionals have an active role in these processes depends on their brief, but as true learning architects, they need to have a handle on all the ways that learning occurs in the workplace.

Insights: E-learning design is changing

This post continues my commentary to the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The fifth of ten 'insights' is that �E-learning design is changing'.

For at least ten years I have been trying to broaden the use of the term 'e-learning' to include any use of technology to assist the process of learning, whether that's synchronous or asynchronous, interactive or linear, collaborative or self-study. The term has always been used this broadly in education, but in the corporate sector it continues to mean one thing only: interactive self-study tutorials, in the style of good old CBT (computer-based training). I have now just about given up on this. I'm beginning to accept this narrow definition and use the term 'learning technologies' for the broader perspective.

This diversion into semantics matters when you try to interpret this fifth insight. It matters because the term e-learning is so ambiguous and there are, in fact, two very different developments taking place:

E-learning itself is changing

This change is evolutionary and based on an improved understanding of what works and what doesn't when it comes to formal e-learning tutorials. The better and more successful materials are much shorter (or at least much more modular, making it possible to learn in small chunks), visually more rich, more focused on key concepts and principles rather than mountains of detail, and much more interactive.

I don't think gamification or virtual worlds have had that much of an impact, interesting as they are - perhaps when the economy improves, we'll see more risks taken in these areas. What we are seeing is better storytelling and, above all, a much-improved use of learning scenarios. These are all very positive developments as far as I'm concerned.

Often what people really want is not e-learning at all

By contrast, this change is revolutionary and driven by the very different experience that we have when we access information online on a day-to-day basis. If you want to know about, say, photography - one of my current interests - the first thing you do is go to Google and YouTube. Your search doesn't lead you to slide shows full of bullet points and multiple-choice questions, but to blogs, Wikipedia articles, screencasts and lots and lots of videos.

You know the detailed information will always be available online so you don't bother trying to learn any of that. You want the big picture, the important ideas, lots of tips and tricks, and demonstrations of the key skills. If you have questions, you go to the forums. If you want to benchmark your progress against that of your peers, you join groups, share your work and provide helpful critiques to others. We are completely accustomed to learning in this fashion and very satisfied with how well it works. We cannot see why things should be so different at work.

So e-learning design is changing because, more often than not, it's not traditional e-learning that people want. They're looking for resources not courses. They want these resources in all sorts of forms - plain text will often do, graphics are nice, but they particularly like video. They are not expecting these resources to be fully-functioning learning objects, that take a learning objective through to its conclusion. Rather they want to pick and choose from a range of materials that can each make a contribution to whatever evolving goals they may have.

We're looking for a new breed of digital learning content designers. Yes, they will be able to analyse a need and understand an audience but, most importantly, they will be great communicators in a wide variety of media. Some will specialise in the e-learning tutorials with which we're all familiar, but many more will never get to write a multiple-choice question.

Insights: Organisations need multi-device learning solutions

This post continues my commentary to the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The fourth of the ten 'insights' in the report is that �Organisations need multi-device learning solutions'.

It used to be that mobile learning was thought of as something quite separate from e-learning - a parallel path for learning technologies. The experience that millions of people have had over the past few years of working with high resolution mobile devices (my third generation iPad has the same resolution as my 27" iMac!) is that you can do most of the same things when you're on the move using a touch screen device as you can on your desktop PC. True, you only tend to get one window on screen at a time, but as far as learning is concerned that's a big advantage. Whatever you call them - desktops, laptops, tablets, smart phones, even games consoles - they're all computers and increasingly they work in very similar ways.

Buyers of e-learning services don't care about the technical difficulties involved in building content that works across all these platforms. And, quite frankly, why should they? It is quite reasonable that they ask that any content that's developed should work on any device currently available or likely to arrive in the next few years. Not that many employers are yet using mobile devices that much for learning. But they will, if only because the early adopters - of tablets in particular - in most organisations, are senior executives. It is absolutely de rigeur that they carry an iPad when on the move, and there's always a chance they'll want to take a look at the latest corporate e-learning programme, if only to check how they look in the introductory video. If they find out that it won't work they'll demand solutions.

So how do e-learning developers respond to this demand? One way is to use an authoring tool that will output to HTML5, which in theory at least will work on most devices (although not if your organisation is still using IE6). This may mean you end up with different versions for different devices, which is not quite meeting the objective.

Another solution is to create content that intelligently adapts to the device on which it is being viewed, something that Kineo itself is pioneering. Responsive HTML is now quite common for major websites, which format content according to the screen size, but certainly not usual for e-learning. One of the interesting side effects of this is the need to move away from the slide show model and to embrace scrolling pages (see my post on the return of scrolling and why this should not be a cause for concern).

Having recently advised that e-learning is (nearly) dead, I'd have to admit that m-learning is going the same way. Our customers don't acknowledge a difference, so why should we?

Insights: Formal courses are not dead, just different

This post continues my commentary to the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The third of the ten 'insights' in the report is that �formal courses are not dead, just different'.

Formal courses have taken a bit of a beating in recent years, as the pendulum has swung towards more informal approaches. There has been a realisation, I believe, that courses have failed to deliver in terms of real performance change and that there's much more to learning at work than sitting in a classroom. Way back in 1970, Peter Honey pleaded for us to 'stop the courses, I want to get off.' He argued that organising courses was the easy option, but that to create effective learning interventions which were meaningful in terms of the job called for much more effort, imagination and innovation. Forty years later, we're getting the message.

As ever, the pendulum tends to swing too far. There are some powerful arguments for keeping formal courses somewhere on the agenda:

• Employees who are new on the job and have lots to learn, are more than happy for their induction and basic training to be formally structured and supported. They don't know what they don't know and cannot be expected to just get out there and network.
• There's truth in the notion that 'qualifications only matter if you don't have them'. When you're young, in particular, and building a career, your qualifications mean a lot, because you can't point to a great deal of job experience. That perspective may change as you get older and wonder how much your formal qualifications have helped you in actually doing your job, but at the time they're very welcome. In fact some people never tire of collecting badges and certificates, particularly those who didn't achieve so much through their formal education.
• Pretty well all employers need to know for sure that certain learning has taken place (or at least training, which is not the same thing of course). Obviously this includes the compliance agenda, but could well extend to other key aspects of working life, where knowledge and skills are critical to the organisation's success. The best way to satisfy that need is through some sort of formal course, whether that's face-to-face, online or a blend.

Which brings us to the other part of this insight, which is that formal courses are changing in nature. Blended solutions, whether or not we call them this, are without doubt the strategy of choice among larger employers around the world. Blended solutions do much more than provide variety or choice. When well designed, they apply the right strategies at the right point in each intervention and use the media that can most flexibly and efficiently deliver these strategies. Most importantly, they can cross the boundary from formal to informal, making sure that learning is embedded in real-work experience.

In other words, formal courses are becoming less formal; less of an event and more of an on-going process. Designing interventions this way requires a serious change in thinking and we're not there yet. However, many L&D managers have already embarked on a process of transformation and are prepared to do whatever it takes to get there.

Insights: L&D is playing a key role in supporting informal learning

This post continues my commentary to the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The second of the ten 'insights' in the report is that �L&D is playing a key role in supporting informal learning'.

Informal learning is a broad term, covering everything from on-job instruction and coaching, through to the use of performance support materials, collaborative and experiential learning; anything, in fact, that doesn't come bundled up as a full-blown course. In the Learning Insights Report, they use the term in quite a restricted way, to refer to the use of digital content on an on-demand basis - resources rather than courses. They see evidence of increased involvement of L&D in providing or curating content that is 'good enough' to do the job, although rather less progress with user-generated content. If this really is a trend, then it's a very important one.

For some in L&D, the only learning resources they get involved with are the printed handouts they provide alongside their classroom courses. While these may be useful to some, they are in the wrong form completely to meet contemporary needs. They are a relic of another age. Practically everyone on the planet with access to a PC or a mobile device is used to the idea that you can get any information you want, anytime you want, in practically any format you want, just by typing key words into a search field. It might be a technical miracle that this is possible, but for the general public it's simply expected.

The message does seem at last to have got through to L&D (and to e-learning developers). While there is still a need for formally-packaged courses, these are for special occasions, when we or our employers require some formal record of achievement (or at least of participation). In the meantime, there's a job to be done, and that's far better achieved through access to videos, PDFs, forums, blogs and simple web articles. These are much easier to produce than highly-structured e-learning and just as easy to consume. Nothing lasts more than five minutes and the emphasis is strictly on practical application.

In the Learning Insights Report, they refer to this as a 'disaggregation' of learning resources. Why bury useful material, such as videos and decision aids, somewhere in a hard-wired monolith of an e-learning course, when they can be accessed in an instant as separate resources? By producing digital content in this granular fashion, you dramatically extend it's usefulness. A great example of this is the ubiquitous YouTube video, which can be embedded just about anywhere from a blog post to an email, perhaps even played in a classroom! In some ways this is a realisation of the concept of 'learning objects', which failed to make any impact ten years ago, but which could soon be taken for granted.

I'm working on several projects with clients at the moment which take the form of collections of resources in a wide variety of formats. Often this material already exists, and where it doesn't, the gap can be filled with rapid content. This is a far more flexible, scalable and manageable process than we've seen before, but it doesn't take away the requirement for professional outside help. Even making content that is 'good enough' requires strong communication skills and lots of concentrated time for analysis and creative thought. Many L&D departments are stretched to the limits and simply don't have the capacity.

Which brings us to the idea of user-generated content, which should, in theory fill all the gaps that cannot be resourced on a top-down basis. Clearly this is one aspect of contemporary online living that has yet to transfer on any serious scale to the world of work. Perhaps we are expecting too much. The 90:9:1 rule suggests that only one in a hundred will start up a blog, create a new thread on a forum or put a video on YouTube. We're not going to see people do things like this at work unless they are seriously incentivised. On the other hand, nine in every hundred will keep the conversation going and contribute in some way with a comment or refinement. That is more realistically where we should expect to see user-generated content emerging in the workplace - as thousands of short contributions to hundreds of conversations. With powerful search facilities on a corporate intranet, these can provide the answers to the everyday questions of the remaining 90%.

Insights: Improving performance still matters the most

Over the next few weeks I'm going to provide my own commentary to the excellent Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine. The report is largely the work of Steve Rayson. In his own inimitable whirlwind fashion, he interviewed 30 or so major UK employers this summer to get a handle on the key trends in workplace learning. He did a good job and the report adds an interesting alternative perspective to the research carried out by others in the UK such as Towards Maturity.

The first 'insight' from the report is that 'improving performance still matters the most'. In particular, Steve makes the point that, if you can prove that a learning intervention will positively impact on performance, the necessary funds will be made available.

For me, the interesting word in this first insight is 'still'. I'm not at all convinced that performance has driven decisions on learning interventions in the past. I'd say quite a few other issues could come into play:

1. Complying with policies and regulations
2. Providing training and development as an employee benefit
3. Delivering learning as an end in itself

Let's take these in turn.

1. Compliance may drive learning interventions but it doesn't have to

Now every organisation does, to some extent, have to comply with regulations of one sort or another, whether that relates to employment policies, health and safety, the prevention of money laundering, the marketing of pharmaceutical products, and so on. The implications of breaking these regulations � and being found out � can be devastating for an organisation, not only financially, but in terms of public reputation. In extreme cases, executives and others lower down in an organisation could face criminal charges. Not surprising, then, that organisations � sometimes on the insistence of their insurers � take great pains to ensure that infringements are kept to a minimum. An obvious step in achieving this is to ensure that everyone involved obtains adequate training.

There are two ways of looking at this sort of training: (1) you can regard it as a simple box-ticking exercise in which employers and employees go through the motions of delivering and receiving training, in order to satisfy regulators and insurers that the job is being done; or (2), you aim to bring about a shift in behaviour such that infringements are very unlikely to occur, because employees believe in the policy and have the necessary knowledge and skill to put it into practice.

Option (1) is based on the assumptions that infringements are unlikely, the regulations are a nuisance and that compliance is a necessary evil. Option (2) is founded on the principles that infringements can and do happen, that the regulations are rightly in place to prevent harm to third parties, and that policies are not enough � delivering on those policies requires competence. Quite a difference. It is possible to comply with regulations but to do this with a performance focus. Let's hope that this is increasingly the case. For a fuller discussion, see my post: From compliance to competence

2. Training and development can be provided as an employee benefit but it can go further than this

There is nothing irrational about providing training and development as a benefit. First of all, it helps in attracting new employees, which can be critical when skilled labour is in short supply. It also helps an employer to retain the employees they already have. No longer can you demand or expect loyalty from your employees: the events of the last five years have made it quite clear that employers do not themselves show much loyalty to their staff when the going gets tough, so it's not surprising that people now look first and foremost to their own interests. As a result, an employer has to work to retain their best employees and an on-going programme of learning and development will undoubtedly help.

But there's no reason whatsoever why this should preclude a performance focus. As Daniel Pink describes in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, three factors stand out: the desire to direct our own lives; the urge to get better and better at something that matters; and the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. In other words, it really helps if the development you receive is meaningful and relevant. It should help you to do a better job, to improve your performance and deliver a better service to your stakeholders.

3. Learning can be seen as an end in itself, but it can also be the means to an end

I think that some workplace learning professionals get confused into thinking that they are running a school or college, where learning is the outcome. With this way of thinking, learning objectives become the over-riding focus of attention and rather superficial tools such as knowledge tests become important measures of success. But workplaces are not primarily places of learning. True, they function more effectively and are more enjoyable places in which to work if they value and encourage learning, but that's because learning is an important contributor to changes in behaviour. And changes in behaviour are a necessary (though rarely sufficient) contributor to performance.

So, the most effective learning interventions are going to be aligned to the goals of the organisation. They are devised only after answers have been obtained to some important questions:

• What behaviours are critical to the future success of this organisation?
• To what degree are employees already exhibiting the behaviours that are critical for success?
• What influence can learning interventions have on these behaviours?

So, as will now be perfectly clear, I'm all for an increased focus on performance, not just so learning professionals get to stay in a job, but because their own work becomes more meaningful and relevant. And you can't say that has always been the case.

E-learning is dead, long live learning

I produced this short video to accompany the Learning Insights 2012 Report produced by Kineo for e.learning age magazine and due to be launched today. I'll be posting about it over the next few weeks.

What sort of journalist am I?

Having just reached a major milestone birthday (I'll leave you to figure out whether that's 30 or 40), I feel justified in reflecting on the role that blogging is likely to play in the years to come. I've just made major investments in three new all-consuming hobbies - photography, video and piano playing - and I need time to make sure I get a good return on all three. At the same time, there's plenty of demand for my services as a learning technologist (which is what I've recently decided to call myself) so surely something has to give.

Well, for now at least, it will not be blogging. I've been posting for six years now to Clive on Learning, which represents something like 750 entries and 350,000 words. That's not to mention another 100 or so posts on the Onlignment blog. Surely there can't be much more to say?

I've become more and more certain that blogging is just a new form of journalism. It breaks away from more traditional print and TV journalism in that you are not answerable to any editor or publisher - there are, effectively, no barriers to entry. But having said that, there are plenty of barriers to prevent you from carrying on once you've got started. For a start, you need a stream of material for new posts. That will only happen if you're exposed to lots of thoughts and ideas (including those which challenge your own thinking) and that means a lot of reading, listening, watching and conversing. You also need to make the most of your own experiences, reflecting on the successes and the failures and looking for the patterns that will inform new ideas of your own.

Lots of people get this far, but you also need the means, the motive and the opportunity to convert this raw material into words (and, increasingly, pictures). Even then, if you fail to find an audience, you will have to be pretty determined to keep going indefinitely. So, plenty of bloggers eventually decide to call it a day. Those that are left are the ones who most enjoy being a journalist. 

A problem I am wrestling with is how often to post. For the first five years I posted twice a week, now only once. But some of my colleagues - with the blogs I most like to read - have no regular pattern. Donald Clark goes quiet for months then has the inspiration for a new series and belts them out at one a day, like a part works. Others, such as Nick Shackleton-Jones, post only when they have something significant to say. Nick's essays have the character of major feature articles.

Then again, some, like Stephen Downes, post every day without fail. They act as curators for all those with fewer sources to draw upon and less time at their disposal. While some act as a news aggregator, recycling press releases without adding value, Stephen provides his own unique take, and inevitably makes friends and enemies along the way.

So what sort of journalist do I want to be going forward? I'd say the best parallel would be a weekly columnist who takes the odd week (or perhaps even month) off. The discipline of a regular routine suits me. WIthout this, I'm sure the posts would become less and less frequent as the task of posting slipped further down the priority list.

All sorted then.

Thanks for reading this bit of introspection. With any luck I'll be back next week as usual. Unless it's one of my weeks off.

Transforming learning and development

In a series of posts on the Onlignment blog that has run throughout 2012, I have endeavoured to explain how transformation can take place in workplace learning and development.

I started the series by setting out the need for transformation.

I then set out a vision for workplace learning and development that is:

• aligned
• economical
• scalable
• flexible
• engaging
• and powerful

I moved on to look at some of the changes that can be made to realise this vision, expressed as six shifts:

• from generic to tailored
• from synchronous to asynchronous
• from compliance to competence
• from top-down to bottom-up
• from courses to resources
• from face-to-face to online

I brought the series to a conclusion by focusing on the practical steps that we can take to make transformation happen:

• Recognising the uniqueness of your particular organisation in terms of its requirements, the characteristics of its people and the constraints which govern its decision making.
• Establishing a learning architecture and infrastructure that recognises these unique characteristics.
• Putting in place processes for improved performance needs analysis and blended solution design.
• Building capability in areas such as the design of digital learning content, learning live and online, and connected online learning.

If this is all too much for you, I summarised the main ideas in this video.

Enjoy!

Do instructional designers need to know about what they are designing?

I remember many years ago being told of the important difference between process and content. It was applied in that context to managers, the inference being that management is a process that can be applied to any domain. In other words, if you�re a good manager, then you can do a good job wherever you�re asked to apply your skills, whether that�s a school, a hospital, a retail chain or an engineering company. I was always sceptical, but I got the idea.

In the thirty years since I left full-time employment, I have worked with dozens, perhaps even hundreds of organisations in every sector imaginable. In the course of the various projects I have undertaken, I have developed expertise in some of the narrowest slices of working life imaginable; so obscure, in fact, that only rarely has this knowledge assisted me in answering questions on University Challenge. Even though I typically started these projects as a novice in terms of the particular knowledge domain, most were a success and the clients seemed happy.

Having said that, from time to time I have had the luxury of developing learning materials relating to my own specialities in workplace learning. These are the projects I have most enjoyed and which, in my opinion, delivered the best results. So, what works best: designing with your own content expertise, or concentrating on the process, without necessarily having content expertise?

Arguments for designing with content expertise: 

• It saves a lot of time and effort: extracting information from subject experts is hard work and requires skill and persistence.
• You have greater credibility with the client: in the awards judging I participated in recently, I encountered several organisations that concentrate on a single vertical industry (such as oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, healthcare or finance) or a single horizontal slice (such as marketing or sales). These organisations employed designers who were subject experts. They appeared to be doing a really good job.
• You have heuristic knowledge: you know how things work; you have the anecdotes and the stories that bring learning materials to life.
• You are more interested in what you�re doing: because you are teaching what you know and care about.

And here are the arguments against:

• Your knowledge may not be current: if you�re not still working in the field, you can easily become out of touch with the latest developments.
• You may suffer from the curse of knowledge: as a subject expert, you can fall into the trap of believing everything that you know is important and interesting to your learners.
• You may be blinkered when it comes to teaching methods: there�s a risk that you�ll stick to same old formula, regardless of what�s now possible.
• You may be better at content than process: this is the problem with just about all technical training - you are asked to become a trainer because you know about the subject matter, but you never quite developed the same expertise in adult learning.

It looks like, whichever way you go, there are potential problems that need to be addressed. As for me, I�m undecided.

New directions in self-study e-learning: the return of scrolling

Earlier this week I wrote about the first of the new directions in self-study e-learning that I had noticed -  the use of social interactions. Today I explore another - the use of scrolling pages to replace the slide to slide mechanism that dominates so much e-learning.

Sometime back in the mists of time, when Jakob Nielsen was establishing his web usability standards, it became received wisdom that web users dislike scrolling - far better to present information in small chunks that appear 'above the fold' (a newspaper term meaning at the top of the page) rather than have users go to all the trouble of scrolling further down a single page. So, a single piece of work - a document if you like - became fragmented into pieces.

Jakob Nielsen did a thorough job of research, so I assume he was right in saying that users preferred not to scroll, but that was a long time ago, when many people were unskilled at using a mouse, and long before mice got scroll wheels and web pages could be scrolled with a swipe of the thumb. I don't think anyone thinks twice now about scrolling. If anything, there are likely to prefer staying on a single page rather than waiting for new ones to download. And if you want to print what's in front of you, far better to have it all in one place.

There was another reason why the slide metaphor was adopted for so much e-learning and that was Flash. Although Flash windows can be made to scroll, they were never conceived that way. Flash was originally designed to display animations, and these clearly need to be displayed in a fixed size window. In fact, fixed sizes were and still are commonplace in media generally, whether you're talking print, TV, photography or slides. But all that has changed after 20 years of web surfing. Although we still don't like web pages to have variable widths, and generally that doesn't happen, we're quite comfortable with the idea that web pages have variable lengths. You keep scrolling until you reach the bottom.

So, what's bringing about a change in thinking about the use of scrolled pages for e-learning? The simple answer is mobile devices and the need to make e-learning work on these as well as it does on PCs. Flash doesn't work on mobiles, so we're having to revert to native web technology, i.e. hypertext markup language, albeit in its flashy new fifth edition. Nobody wants to create multiple versions of their e-learning to suit the idiosyncrasies of different devices. The ideal is web pages that intelligently adapt to the devices on which they are being viewed, which is increasingly how the web sites we use everyday already work. If you try and maintain a fixed size window you have almost no flexibility to achieve this goal - you simply have to allow scrolling.

In conversations with Steve Rayson at Kineo, which is developing its own intelligent page formatting technology which they call 'responsive e-learning', it works a treat and users have absolutely no problem with scrolling when necessary. Obviously you have to leave behind the slide show metaphor and consider each page a self-contained document (in learning terms a lesson perhaps) but, hey, weren't we all getting just a little bit fed up with clicking next to continue? One of Kineo's clients has tested scrolling e-learning and reports that users are much more likely to scroll down a page than they are to click to another one. I wouldn't be surprised if others found the same.

There is a barrier to going this way. Currently most e-learning authoring tools maintain the slide show metaphor and enforce fixed window sizes. In the meantime you're going to need some specialist development expertise. Ah, the bleeding edge.

New directions in self-study e-learning: social interactions

Over the past week I�ve been heavily involved in helping to judge this year�s E-Learning Awards. I used to have a role in administrating them, but I never got to see any of the entries. Last year and this I�ve been on the panels for several of the categories and it�s been a real eye-opener.

First and foremost, the experience has lifted my spirits. I get so much flack from trainers about boring e-learning that nobody wants to do, that sometimes I despair that we�ll ever get it right. While there clearly is a lot of rubbish, poorly designed and implemented, the awards show me that there�s also some absolutely fantastic stuff that learners love and which is making a fundamental impact on organisations. I�d go so far as to say we�ve finally come of age.

There are many reasons why the current crop of e-learning projects is proving more successful, not least the following:

• An acknowledgement that resources matter as much as courses.
• A much more modular approach, with content presented in small chunks.
• A shift in emphasis from knowledge exposition to skill-building using challenging scenarios.
• Better art direction and much more use of video.
• Deployment through much friendlier and more usable platforms than your traditional LMS.

I�m also beginning to see some changes to the way that your good old e-learning tutorial is presented. One of those is the inclusion of interactions that break out of the constraints of isolated self-study. The evidence I saw was in work by the innovative developer Nelson Croom, but I�ve seen similar things before.

The idea is that you present a question to the learner and then, once they have provided an answer, allow them to compare their response to those of other learners. This could work with a simple MCQ:

• 'Which of the following actions would you take in this situation?'
• The learner selects a response and perhaps gets some expert feedback.
• �Here�s what others decided. 80% went for option A ��

It would also be possible for learners to leave comments to explain their selections, and these could form the basis for a more in-depth comparison of perspectives.

What Nelson Croom showed, which I hadn�t seen before, was the application of this technique to open input questions, where the learner is required to enter a textual response (a sort of short essay).

• �What do you think was the cause of this situation?�
• The learner types in their response
• The responses of other learners to the same question are then presented

My understanding from Nelson Croom is that response rates to short essay questions in which student answers are compared and contrasted is much greater than when the learner�s response sits alone (and is not submitted to a tutor for grading). This is hardly surprising, because it takes an iron will to type in lots of text when you are the only one who will see it. I also understand that learners have responded very well to this form of interaction. You could achieve a similar effect by sending learners to a forum, but that�s a bit clunky and certainly wouldn�t work if you had a large number of questions.

There is a practical implication to these new forms of �social interaction� in that, if you want to use them, you�ll have to develop them yourselves, because no off-the-shelf authoring tool will do it for you. You need to set up a database and use this to store user responses question by question, so they can be drawn down later for future students to view. This isn�t complicated web programming, but it�s not trivial either. Hopefully, one of the tools vendors will see the potential and provide this service for you.

Over-teaching experts and under-teaching novices

No two learners are the same. There are seven billion people in the world each with their own unique life experiences, which have in turn shaped their aspirations, their personality, their attitudes, their preferences and their capabilities. It goes without saying that one of the greatest mistakes we can make as designers of learning experiences is to treat them all as if they were the same. The most common manifestation of this, in my experience, is to provide the same solution for those with a great deal of prior knowledge as for those who are relative beginners. The outcome of this is typically that we over-teach the experts and under-teach the novices.

Experts have the benefit of elaborate mental schemas, which have developed over time and enable them to see the important patterns and make sense of all the cause and effect relationships that relate to their areas of speciality. We all have aspects of our life that we understand really well, whether or not we could explain our understanding to someone else. We may be an expert in molecular biology, photography, accounting, office politics, bringing up children or the tactics of football. Because we have these elaborate schemas, we can pretty well cope with any new information relating to our specialisms. We are very hard to overwhelm or overload, because we can easily relate new information to what we already know, to sort out the credible from the spurious, the important from the trivial. The expert can cope with a long lecture, a densely-written text book, a forum with thousands of postings, or a whole heap of links returned in response to a search query.

The novice, on the other hand, does not have the luxury of a well-formed understanding of their new area of interest. They have to pay attention to all new information, because they have no idea whether it is important or not. They struggle with new concepts and principles because the patterns have yet to reveal themselves. They need lots of examples, stories, metaphors and similes to help them relate new information to their other life experiences. The novice craves a well-structured and supported learning experience, which allows plenty of time for them to process new information and to make sense of this in the context of practical application. They need reassurance and encouragement to help them through the difficulties they will inevitably encounter.

These are the extremes. Of course there are many gradations of expertise and only a minority of learners are complete novices or acknowledged experts. But it is easy to see how, if we are not careful, we end up providing an 'average' learning experience which satisfies no-one.

We can over-teach the relative experts:

• We patronise them with over-simplified metaphors, examples and case studies.
• We frustrate them by holding back important information which we then proceed to reveal on a careful step-by-step basis.  
• We insult them by forcing them to undergo unnecessary assessments.
• We waste their time by forcing them to participate in collaborative activities with those who know much less than them.

And we can under-teach the relative novices:

• We bombard them with information which they cannot hope to process, providing nowhere near enough time for consolidation.
• We provide insufficient examples and case studies to help them relate new information to their past experience.
• We are not always there when they get stuck or have questions.
• We do not go far enough in providing practical activities which will help the learner to turn interesting ideas into usable skills.

It may seem that I am suggesting you double your workload by providing two versions of each learning experience, but it doesn't work like that. The relative experts need resources not courses and, of the two, resources are much easier to assemble. Many times you can just point the expert at the information and let them get on with it. And by doing this, you've reduced the population that requires a more  formal learning experience considerably. You can start to give the novices the attention they deserve.