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.