Bert lives on in StrumSchool

When I was 11, my older brother returned from a long trip abroad with a Hofner electric guitar, which he had tried unsuccessfully to learn. He gave it to me, along with a copy of Bert Weedon's Play In A Day, the now legendary book which enabled tens of thousands of British people to learn the guitar. Just like scores of guitar superstars from the 1960s, I started with Bobbie Shaftoe Went to Sea.

I went on to teach guitar in my spare time for some five years or more. And when I discovered computers, just about my first programming project was to put together what I called the Apple Guitar Workshop on the Apple IIe.

Well, last week Bert Weedon died, aged 92. But his spirit lives on in sites such as StrumSchool. Oh how Bert (and me when I was teaching guitar) would have loved to have access to modern technology. StrumSchool is a site, set up by Benjamin Shapiro, that teaches beginners how to play basic guitar fundamentals for free, with a curriculum of instructional videos, downloadable documents and 'a dash of personal attention'. From what I can see it's funded by donations and ads. I watched a few of the videos and they're pitched perfectly for the beginner. Sorry, Bert, but this is much more fun than Play In A Day and doesn't even cost five shillings.

The only way to build confidence is to practise and get feedback

Over the past couple of years I've been making quite a play on the need to design formal learning interventions so that they focus on inspiring and confidence building and not on dumping knowledge. In my experience of talking to 100s of trainers, the typical workplace intervention consists of 75% theory and 25% practice. This has two effects:

1. Learners are overwhelmed with new knowledge that they cannot hope to retain.
2. Learners have nowhere near enough time to develop confidence in applying new knowledge and skills, meaning they often leave the course in a state of 'conscious incompetence'.

Well, there's one thing saying that training should be mainly about supported practice, it's another doing it. Although I've been trying to apply this principle for many years now, I've never felt that I've gone far enough - like many so-called 'experts' I can't stop finding things to say and practical work gets squeezed. This week I've had an opportunity to go the whole way, as I've been working for two days with a group of experienced trainers looking to build their skills in facilitating within a virtual classroom. Historically a course like this would have contained one main practical exercise, conducted only once a whole load of new concepts and principles had been introduced. It didn't work. Trainers know quite a lot about facilitation, but they're often extremely anxious about using these skills within the unfamiliar environment of a web conferencing package.

So, here's how it went this week:

• A quick introduction to and discussion of the principles of live online learning and a look at the basics of the tool, in this case WebEx. At this point I applied the principle: 'provide only as much knowledge as is needed to allow learners to practise and no more'.
• A first practical session conducted in groups of three. Each group designed a short session about a topic related to the use of virtual classrooms, then ran it and got feedback from the rest of the participants.
• I ran another virtual classroom session on using audio, video, graphics and text online.
• Again in groups of three, they designed and ran a second online session, this time restricted to the use of images and audio (to get them out of the 'designing with text' habit).
• I ran another session on using interactivity in virtual classrooms.
• Once again in their groups, they designed and ran a third session, about other important aspects of the use of virtual classrooms. The idea was that much of the content would be researched and presented by the students themselves. This worked perfectly.
• And finally, they individually designed and ran a fourth session, this time on a topic of their choice.

I reckon 80% at least of the course time involved them practising. As a result, all participants reported that they felt completely confident of their ability to go straight out and run a real session.

Most of the time I had very little to do. Much of the feedback was provided on a peer-to-peer basis. As a result I reckon this course could easily have been run on a very large scale basis, with many hundreds if not thousands of students (online, of course, not in one physical space).

I'm pleased to report that the model worked, at least for me and for this group. No-one said they felt short-changed by the fact they weren't exposed to mountains of theory. Everyone felt they were busy and engaged from start to finish. This will be my plan for any future skills-based course.

Collaboration is what we do nowadays: get over it

Stephen Downes pointed out an article in The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning by Neus Capdeferro and Margarida Romero entitled Are online learners frustrated with collaborative learning experiences? This caught my attention because I'm a great believer in and keen user of this approach. My experience has been extremely positive and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Anyway, the authors claim:

Despite the pedagogical advantages of collaborative learning, online learners can perceive collaborative learning activities as frustrating experiences.

The study was carried out with 40 students on a Masters course in E-Learning at the University of Catolunya. In spite of the title of the report the degree of frustration was not that great:

Overall, respondents occasionally felt frustrated.

This is obviously a concern although it did not spoil the course as a whole:

Scores for frustration with regard to the perception of participating in an appropriate and satisfying training program showed that the majority of respondents felt little effect. None of the participants responded that they felt very effected.

So, not a deal-breaker then, but what were the causes of frustration for some? Well, the major items were:

• imbalance in the level of commitment, responsibility, and effort
• unshared goals and difficulties in organization
• difficulties in communication/dialogue in terms of frequency
• problems with negotiation skills
• imbalance in quality of individual contributions
• excess of time spent and workload
• conflict and problems in reaching consensus

Sound familiar? Yes, because this is what happens in one way or another every time we interact with other human beings to get a job done. I'm not sure if humans have an instinct to collaborate, but our ability to work together has certainly contributed greatly to our success as a species. Unfortunately we have contradictory tendencies - selfishness, laziness, competitiveness for starters - which tend to get in the way of collaboration, but by and large we get by.

Being able to collaborate is an essential life skill, particularly in the era of Wikipedia and open source projects. Those who don't do their bit will find themselves low down the list when collaborators are chosen and at a disadvantage in such a networked world.

So, I'm not remotely put off the die of collaborative learning activities. I say collaboration is what we do nowadays, so get over it.

Why face-to-face should be for special occasions

Like most people, I listen to quite a bit of music, but only very occasionally do I go to a live gig or concert; I watch a considerable amount of drama (most of it mysteries and thrillers I�m afraid), but this is on TV, only very rarely at the theatre; and I watch my fair share of sport, mostly on TV but (here�s where I break the pattern), also quite regularly at the Amex stadium in Brighton. The live events I have attended in my life are, in many cases, peak moments of high emotional engagement that I will never forget. The rest is just passing the time enjoyably.

So how does this relate to learning events? Well, traditionally, of course, learning was always face-to-face, because that was the only means possible (as was the case with music, drama and sport - if there wasn�t anything on locally, you did it for yourself). Over time we developed ways of packaging up learning content in books and on tapes and CDs, which freed us up from having to be there on the day when the lesson given. Now, of course, we are more likely to access this material online or download it play on a mobile device. In the past 15 years we�ve also been able to communicate and collaborate with tutors, experts and fellow learners online, in real-time if we want, so why would we ever want to get together to learn face-to-face?

There are, of course, some aspects of face-to-face events which are not really practical to achieve online: activities that involve touching, smelling or tasting; interacting with physical objects, such as tools and equipment; detecting fine nuances of body language; activities that require more real estate than a computer screen. Let�s put these to one side for a minute, because most learning events are not of this nature. So, how do you decide whether to attend a more routine presentation, lesson, workshop, coaching session, or whatever it is, face-to-face as opposed to online?

We can go back to the comparison with our consumption of entertainment. I see there being a number of categories:

1. People (or teams of people) that are so special to you, that at some stage in your life you just have to see them live. There are musicians, sportspeople, thinkers or actors that I would pay almost anything to see live and you are probably the same.
2. Events that you go to primarily for the social contact it provides and because it gets you out of the house.
3. Events which are interesting enough that you�d definitely make time to watch on TV.
4. A third category that you would fit in if you had the time, probably just skimming through or paying partial attention to.
5. Others that you have no interest in at all.

This list can be applied similarly to learning:

1. Events that you would take the trouble to travel to because they may well turn out to be milestones in your life. An example would be a great speaker at a conference or a world-renowned teacher.
2. Events for which the primary benefit is making and renewing contacts. Many conferences and classroom courses fit in this category.
3. Others events for which a webinar or virtual classroom session would be quite adequate.
4. Material that you would rather consume as and when it suits you, and very selectively, including blog posts, books and YouTube videos.
5. All those events and learning resources to which you pay no attention to at all.

Only items 1 and 2 require being face-to-face. Go beyond that and you waste resources on a massive scale.

Visual design: learning from the professionals

Clearly, you do not need to be a naturally gifted artist to perform effectively as a designer of learning experiences. Graphic design and instructional design are quite separate, but they are related. The way content is designed visually is going to make a big impact on how easy that content is to use, how clearly it communicates, how easily it engages, and how credible it comes across to the learner.

While it takes many years of immersion and practice to develop a real sensitivity to the nuances of visual communication and to have a really wide range of possibilities on which to draw, many of the essentials of graphic design (and possibly instructional design as well) can be communicated as simple rules and basic principles. These won't earn you a living as a graphic designer, but they will make your work stand out head and shoulders above your peers in the world of digital learning content.

Perhaps the best way of illustrating the importance of visual communication to learning design is to list the names of those designers whose blogs everyone wants to read: Tom Kuhlman, Cathy Moore, Connie Malamed, Julie Dirksen. Each of these can not only communicate in words; they can also put together high quality examples without calling on a professional artist.

Why am I going on about this? It's because I've just finished reading a great new book on visual design. It's called White Space is not Your Enemy and it's by Kim Golombisky and Rebecca Hagen (Focal Press 2010). As you would expect, this is a lavishly illustrated book, so it won't read well on a Kindle (but might do on the new, hi-res iPad). Written for the beginner, the book covers all aspects of graphic design, from print to web. While it doesn't directly deal with e-learning (although there is a chapter on multimedia), this should not put you off, because you will have no trouble in transferring the ideas.

So, looking to improve your art skills or just searching for inspiration? This book will do the job.

The problem with pre-work

Time and again, trainers tell me that they have trouble getting trainees to complete their 'pre-work'. For some this failure has become such an obstacle that it threatens the whole basis of blended learning, which will typically mix asynchronous activities (which these trainers would categorise as 'pre-work' and 'post-work') alongside the synchronous (whether bricks-and-mortar classroom or its virtual equivalent). It seems that, if there's a time and date attached to an activity, then trainees will turn up and get involved, but if any sort of personal time management is required, then you can forget it.

So is the concept of pre-work doomed? Well, yes and no.

Yes, because the biggest problem is calling it 'pre-work' in the first place. The 'pre' prefix implies an activity that takes place before the real thing; it's some form of preparation. The implication is that the only substantive element of any intervention is the synchronous element. Proper training takes place in the classroom. Other activities are optional extras.

So the first change that has to be made is to stop calling the synchronous element the course and the activities that take place before and after 'pre' and 'post'. They are all elements in a blended solution. And who says that a blend has to consist of the same old classroom sandwich (the meat - the tasty classroom bit - surrounded on both sides by the bread - the boring stuff)? It is not necessary for a blend to include any synchronous elements. It's also quite possible to start and finish a blend with live events and fill the sandwich with self-paced activities. Don't start with the idea that asynchronous activities are boring or you'll end up with a self-fulfilling prophesy.

And 'no', the concept of pre-work is not doomed as long as you regard this as necessary and useful self-paced activity and not a pre-cursor to the main event.

Want to make sure this self-paced activity gets done, then here are some tips. Note that I'm assuming we are talking a formal intervention here and one that really matters to an organisation. Self-directed learning is another thing entirely.

• As I've said already, don't call it pre-work or post-work.
• Make clear that this is necessary learning activity and why this is the case.
• Make sure that there is some formal output to this activity that you can clearly see, perhaps a document uploaded or an online task recorded in a database.
• If necessary, issue reminders. Be clear that the work is not optional.
• Do not, under any circumstances, use classroom time to cover material or revisit activities that should have been undertaken beforehand. If you do this, no-one will ever spend time on the self-paced activities again.
• If necessary, deny access to the synchronous elements until the asynchronous are completed.

Getting this right is part of the transformation from classroom-centric interventions to ones that really make a difference. If you believe in this transformation, you've got no choice but to re-think your policies to pre-work.

To be an effective designer it helps to understand how people learn

In the course of my work, I get to meet hundreds of l&d professionals every year, not just the managers, but those who work day in day out designing, developing and delivering courses for their organisations or their clients. Almost without exception I find that they're enthusiastic, intelligent and great fun to work with. Unfortunately (and you knew there'd be a 'but'), very few of them are remotely up-to-date with what we know about adult learning. I'm not claiming this is a global phenomenon, but I've certainly experienced this consistently across Europe.

Does this matter? I certainly believe so. Without this knowledge, a great deal of unintentional malpractice continues:

• unrealistic expectations about what can be learned through a single experience
• overloading learners with unnecessary information
• providing insufficient opportunities for new skills to be practised
• assessing knowledge when it's performance that matters
• treating novices and experts as if they were the same
• underestimating the importance of experiential and collaborative learning
• making poor use of text, images, audio, video and animation 

I'm not stupid enough to believe that we suddenly know all the answers about adult learning. Yes, we have had some breakthroughs through cognitive neuroscience and perhaps also through new perspectives on learning such as connectivism, but thinking will inevitably shift again as we discover more. All you can do is keep an open mind and work with what seems to be the best proven practices of the day.

There's book a I've been meaning to write which I hoped would address the problem. I tentatively called it 'What every l&d professional needs to know about learning' (not so catchy I know). But I've been beaten to the gun by Julie Dirksen.


Design for how people learn is available as a paperback but I read it on the Kindle (which was fine, except some of the diagrams didn't reproduce so well). Julie is a consultant and instructional designer with more than 15 years' experience of creating highly-interactive e-learning. She also has a very readable Usable Learning blog. Although Julie appears to have specialised in e-learning, there is nothing about this book which limits it to the design of self-study materials. Practically everything in this book applies equally well to classroom and blended interventions.

Like Cathy Moore and Connie Malamed, Julie knows how to write for the l&d audience. She's engaging, witty, clear, concise and grounded in the realities of workplace learning. My measure of how useful I find a book is the number of clippings I make on the Kindle. In this case it was 83. Not that this was new stuff for me particularly, but I wanted to capture the refreshing way that Julie was expressing the ideas.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who feels its time to get up-to-date on adult learning and doesn't want to wallow in theory.

P.S. I'm still going to write that book, only now I've got to up my game.

Steve the top Wheeler and Dealer

This morning I spent an enjoyable 30 minutes with Stephen Clee of iVIDiQ, looking at enhancements to his intelligent cloud-based presentation system (see my previous post on Presentations in the Cloud). I really like this system and the way it combines video with the presentation slides, and the way it allows you to easily random-access particular points in a presentation by referring to a slide or by searching for tags drawn from the slides themselves or added by hand.

All the presentations from the Learning Technologies 2012 conference in London this January are up on the iVIDiQ system, which is a fabulous resource. As you'll see if you go to the home page where all the presentations are listed, you can see how many views each video has received. As I understand from Steve that the promotion of these presentations has been undertaken primarily by speakers themselves using their own social networks, this gives a great indication as to who has the most vibrant network. Topping the charts was not any of the keynote speakers (Jaron Lanier, Ray Kurzwell or even Edward de Bono - who's the only one not yet to have approved his video) but good old Tim Buckteeth himself, Steve Wheeler, who at the time of writing has had 3952 views of his Digital Learning Futures.

Well done Steve. Perhaps this plug will get you to 4000.