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To break down the distance, first battle at close range

22 Apr

“We have this training, and now we want to put it online.” It is the kind of straightforward request that can make an Instructional Designer or e-learning professional cringe. I hate that reaction, but the more I talk with colleagues, the more universal the reaction seems to be.

ImageLet me be clear: It has nothing to do with the opportunity the work provides. Taking effective training and adapting it to online a-synchronous delivery is what we do – and we (hopefully) enjoy it.

So why the cringe? It comes from the fight we know is coming. Perhaps fight is too strong a word, but it is a real effort to make trainers, curriculum designers and learners understand that what works in-person in a classroom won’t work for e-learning. The materials have to be broken down, re-imagined and rebuilt in another way to resonate and persevere for learners.

In posts to come I will go through the reasons why e-learning requires sometimes radical rearrangement to work, even for (especially for?!) the most proven live training event. Kelly Savage has a  reasonable primer on some of the issues on her blog post. My purpose here is to share a common yet often unspoken reality: Converting good live training to e-learning requires two instructional tasks. The first is training the current stakeholders and trainers, the second is the “actual” work of delivering effective e-learning.

I welcome ideas and success stories that have made the first task go smoothly.

Leveraging expertise… and vanity

3 Apr

In reading about online learning communities, Communities of Practice, and the trend in social/informal e-learning, the common theme appears time and again: How can we make it sticky? How do we engage learners to take charge of their own learning, share it across organizations, locations, and technologies to create the kind of online learning community that is engaging, self-motivating and (most of all!) enduring?

It seems to me – and my thinking is constantly evolving on this, so forgive me if I contradict myself in a week’s time – that to build the scaffolding onto which a online learning community might take hold relies on two human dimensions.

First, insight. If a learner feels that what she does, what she knows, is solely wrapped up in their job function, she may have little reason to believe that what she has to share would be of any interest or consequence to others. What she lacks is the insight that her knowledge may be broadly applicable to a wide variety of potential learner/collaborators in dissimilar or even completely unrelated functions. She’s trapped in a silo and can’t see out.

The second dimension is vanity – in a good way. If a learner feels like he is an expert and couples that with pride (ego?) to share that expertise, that creates the backbone of social learning. Vanity here manifests as the confidence that others can benefit from what he knows.

The thing is, under the right circumstances, most everybody loves to be an expert.

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If you are working to support an online learning community, you may be lucky enough to have a number of folks who are will placed in the upper left of our simple matrix. However, if yours is like most attempts, you will have only a few if any who want to jump in. The trick, then, is to champion those who already reside in the upper left, and to nurture others to move in that direction. If you can get a conscientious fraction of your learning cohort to be active in sharing and learning (conscientious here means as interested in learning as they are in espousing), then you have a good shot at creating a self-sustaining social learning online community.

In the near future I will share some thoughts on how to move people up and over into the champion zone, but I welcome your thoughts if you’ve had experience (successful or not) in trying to make this happen. It is not an easy task.

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Linking Training to Performace

21 Mar

A course is just a course, but better performance is transformational.

Will Thalheimer, PhD, a big name in training and adult learning circles, has done quite a few short video presentations along with his articles, books, blogs and teaching. This is one of my favorites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdbReKzaYVY

It makes the strong case for looking at the overall job performance as the measure of a training program. The implication is that too many folks — clients, trainers and Instructional Designers included — focus on a course or curriculum rather than on performance outcomes.

It is too true. At times it is lack of time or vision on the part of course developers, but more often it is lack of organizational/institutional support (understanding!) for what training and e-learning’s mission really is.

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