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Learning about learning

Assessment: What Are You Measuring, Anyway?

3/28/2016

1 Comment

 
As an elearning manager, I have reviewed a lot of elearning during my career. Much of it dumps content out there followed by multiple choice questions. If training is learning new skills, then why aren't we testing the skills they are supposed to learn in our programs?  What is the difference between what we do and what marketers do in content marketing? As Harold Stolovich would say, "Tellin' ain't trainin' and trainin' ain't performance." 

After considerable noodling, I've come up with four reasons why we assess learning so poorly.

Hypothesis 1

We don't know what we are supposed to measure

Picture
It's easy to write multiple choice questions. They are quick to craft and program. But they usually only test remembering, which is at the bottom of Bloom's Taxonomy. 

If we spend our time crafting outcomes and objectives, then supposedly build our training around them, why aren't we measuring to those goals?

Maybe we don't know we should.

Hypothesis 2

It's hard to measure things in elearning

Yes, it requires a little more thinking to find creative ways to measure skills using an online function. But that doesn't mean you can't. If I am teaching a course to students learning to use a piece of software, shouldn't they be able to use it at the end? I can't tell you how many times I have seen multiple choice, text based questions asking about buttons at the end of these courses. There is no context, and no pictures. What is that helping?

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Why do we Love Conferences & Hate Training?

2/10/2015

2 Comments

 
Picture
I've spent the last couple of days at Training 2015 sharpening the saw in my talent toolbox. As a trainer and instructional designer, I'm continually looking to improve my craft. I've learned a ton in the different sessions, much with direct applicability to my job, and look forward to trying out the new ideas.
I love conferences, and my friends might consider me a conference junkie. During this event, I've been struck by the fact that most of the workshops I've attended have been lectures with PowerPoint slides, one of the things that people lament about as being the dreadful part of training. I've been totally engaged by the content, and left making connections to my world. What is it about conferences that make them engaging that is such a contrast to much of our training that puts people to sleep?

At A Conference

  • User selection
    In most conferences, there are choices to be made during workshop slots. Program titles and descriptions are provided, and attendees select the sessions they would like to attend. There is interest and investment in attending.
  • Audience match to the topic
    In a conference, we have like-minded people in attendance. 

    Conferees generally have some grounding in the topic, even if it is new to them. The jargon is familiar, and the context of the topic is understood. 
    Slides are crafted to impress, since the presentation is often to a peer group. 
  • Expert's View of Specific, Condensed Content
    Workshops are presented on topics in the presenter's area of expertise. Many times, the presenter has submitted a proposal that was reviewed and vetted by a selection committee. Since the audience is often new to the topic, the high points are covered to provide a taste of that expertise and enough insight to be able to ensure the attendees leave feeling informed, and often equipped with something to implement. There is a laser focus on a slice of the presenter's knowledge and experience.
  • Right-sized Timeframe
    Workshops tend to run 60-90 minutes at a conference. This constraint creates the need for careful planning. When a person is asked to present at a conference, s/he is given a small window of time and needs to determine exactly what will fit into those few minutes. Workshops must fit into that schedule another program needs to occupy the space when it concludes.  

At a Training

  • Someone else determines attendance
    In most companies, training fulfills a requirement. Whether it is compliance or learning a new software, it is someone else's idea that the learner attend.
    Learners may not be vested or interested.
  • Varied Audience
    In theory, at a training event, the audience is level set. A particular type of employee is required to attend. If the trainer has done a thorough needs analysis, strengths and weaknesses of the population are understood and the curriculum matches the need.
    More often, training is one-size-fits-all with no variance for needs of differing populations.
  • Expansive Content Presented by a Facilitator
    Training is often bloated with unnecessary content. Nice-to-know is not separated out from need-to-know. Classes are presented by trainers who may not be experts, but rather new learners a few steps ahead of the trainees. If an expert is invited in, s/he may not be able to distill content to critical points. Additionally, content may not have relevance to the learner's job today. 
    Too much information creates cognitive overload, and learners become overwhelmed, unable to filter out key points.
  • Timeframe May Be Too Long
    Living in a faced paced society combined with the impact of television has shortened learner attention spans. Six or seven hours of training, especially when learners are not completely engaged, is exhausting. Unless the material is properly scaffolded, the learners will lose ground as time goes on. 
    Time is bloated to match the content.

So What?

What does all this mean for us? How can we create right-sized learning that learners are invested in? 
  1. First, we need to consider the needs of the learner. We need to understand their current job and how this training fits into it. 
  2. Second, we need to strip out any fluff and keep the main thing the main thing. What's the critical nugget(s) that your learners need to leave with? We need to make sure to identify that and reinforce it throughout the program.
  3. Thirdly, we need to think about designing to a timeframe, rather than build until it is finished and determining the time at the end. If you know you have a half day to accomplish something that might have taken three without a constraint, you'll work hard to ensure that the key points are the keys.


Impossible, you say? I'm not so sure. We do it with conferences all the time.
2 Comments

Knowledge Repositories, Randomness and Learning

2/2/2015

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Last night I attended Trinity Rep's rendition of Will Eno's play Middletown. The play has the rumblings of becoming my favorite play of all times because of the themes and thoughts it evoked for me. The play is set in an average town and is about average people, their loneliness, back stories and interconnectionedness. There's quite a few juxtapositions in it which leaves us with a lot of things to ponder. Contrast that with Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern are Dead, which was produced in the tiny Wilbury Theatre which considers fate and free will, the absurdities and complexities of life, choices, and tells the back story of Shakespeare's Hamlet. What, pray tell, you might ask, does this have to do with learning?

Randomness

In both plays, there are a lot of random scenes with no apparent interrelationships. It isn't until near the end that things start to tie together.

We cannot allow training that we create, whether it is elearning, collaborative sessions, or classroom work to be like this. Learning must be intentionally planned out for the learner to learn. That's why we need an instructional designer to work with the sequence lest our learners leave at halftime, missing the entire point of the play.
PictureLibraries: Who sets the agenda when you go there?

Are Your Learners Leaving at Intermission?

I wrote earlier about the elearning that caused me to bail on getting my PMP certification because of the vocabulary spouting talking head. (Yup, I left at intermission on that one.) Last week, I was asked to take a technical training course to be able to access a software application at the office. The training consisted of 10 modules, with directions telling me I had to complete two mandatory sections and an elective. There were two mandatory items and eight optional ones. There were also two labeled advanced and eight labeled beginner. I suppose you can guess which of the ten the mandatory ones were. My goal is to be able to set up a shared resource site  You'd think this would be easy, right?

There is no seeming order to the modules. Each covers a different topic, with well designed how-to instructions and practice exercises. The production values were great. However, as a learner, I feel like I have no idea WHY I need to learn these things because I have no idea WHAT I'm going to do with the software so far. I have an idea of what I WANT it do do, and I suspect going to this repository to ask HOW to do these things would be a much more efficient way to access the knowledge repository of all of these skills.  There is no Table of Contents of the modules. If you search the repository for the software name, you get 87 modules with titles and descriptions, but nothing that seems to overview the software or its purpose. 

So now I know how to mark a post Employee of the Month. Yay? 

Granted, there are nine other modules I need to work through, so perhaps I'll find something to meet my goals. I've found myself being baffled by the first module because I didn't have any context. I imagine that be it will the same with other modules, unless I can find something that sequences this. 

The best way I can explain this is to imagine yourself being dropped into the help section of a piece of software, picking random items and pretending this is the way to learn how to use it. 

There's a Difference Between Learning Something New And Finding an Answer

The point of all of this is that we need to understand the learner need when we are creating training. If someone has experience and needs specific answers, send them to the repository. If they have no foundation, sending them to a knowledge repository without a curriculum plan or sequence of activities is like sending someone to the librarian to learn calculus. A librarian knows how to find specific information, and is a resource to be used thusly.  When you need to learn something from the beginning, you need a teacher, or a curriculum set up by one who teaches. A teacher plans the activity and breaks things into bite sized, sequenced lessons. A librarian finds resources to find answers.

Big difference. Remember what role you play when you provide learning to your learners.
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    Jean Marrapodi

    Teacher by training, learner by design.

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