Will at Work Learning

We are Professionals, Aren't We?

Last year I was asked by Michael Allen--one of our industry's most influential creators and most successful entrepreneurs--to contribute a chapter to his first e-Learning Annual, which Pfeiffer had urged him to manage and edit.

Michael introduced my chapter as follows:

"In this article, one of the learning and performance field’s leading
visionaries looks back on his twenty-two years in the field with both love
and regret, while looking forward to the future by challenging all of us in
the field who see ourselves as learning-and-performance professionals.
Dr. Thalheimer’s challenge is simple. He asks every person in the field
to understand the forces that control their thinking and influence their
decision making. It’s as if the author wants to say: the unexamined
profession is not worth having." 

I'm still thrilled to hear Sir Michael call me a visionary--though I'm sure he was talking about hallucinations of some sort. Because the article still resonates for me, I thought I'd share it with you.

Download We_Are_Professionals_by_Will_Thalheimer_

I encourage you to take a look at the whole book. Michael Allen’s 2008 e-Learning Annual does a great job covering the historic and institutional foundations of the learning-technology field--with chapters from more than 20 luminaries who have been at the heart of the learning field for a long time, including folks like Thiagi, David Merrill, Allison Rossett, and Greg Kearsley, and so many more.

Here are some of my conclusions in the chapter:

1. Our graduate schools prepare
   technicians, not thoughtful
   scientist-practitioners who
   understand learning, think
   critically, and build wisdom over
   time.
2. We don’t measure the outcome of
   our work in ways that enable us
   to build effective feedback loops
   and make improvements that will
   lead to better learning, on-the-job
   performance, and business results.
3. The work pressures we face
   (for example, Internet-induced
   information overload and business
   demands for cheaper, faster
   results)—combined with our
   tendency toward professional
   arrogance—don’t predispose
   us to keep learning, to test our
   conjectures, to build a rich and
   complex knowledge base over time.
4. Our trade associations, magazines,
   and conferences provide us
   with information that sells, not
   information that necessarily tells
   the truth of how we should better
   design our products and services.
5. Our consultants and vendors are
   a large source of our information,
   and we tend to think uncritically
   about their offerings.
6. Learning-and-performance
   research is not utilized when it
   might provide substantial benefits.
7. Industry research is severely
   flawed, but we rely on it anyway.
8. Contests, awards, and best-of lists
   grab our attention and distort
   our thinking about what is most
   important.

Okay, those were the list of our failures. I also add a list that begs for hope for our profession.

What do you think of our current practices?

Of our future?

Take the Original Learning Research Quiz

For the last three or four years, I have provided a quiz on the Work-Learning Research website so that you can test your knowledge of research-based instructional-design fundamentals. The 15-item quiz presents you with realistic instructional-design scenarios and asks you to make decisions about which design will produce the best learning. The quiz also provides detailed feedback on each question, so that by taking the quiz, you're really getting a great learning opportunity for yourself.

When I compiled the results several years ago, the results were astonishing. I won't tell you how they were astonishing---because I don't want to bias your input---but they were astonishing. I will leave the quiz up for some time, but I'd like to make a big push in the first two weeks of February of 2007 so that I can publish the results on this blog. So, please take the quiz, and encourage everyone you know who is a learning professional (training, learning, instructional design, e-learning, performance improvement, education) to take the quiz now.

Take the Quiz by Clicking Here

Please take the Quiz by February 15th, 2007 so that I can do a large compilation by the end of the month.

Tell All Your Fellow Learning Professionals to take the Quiz. Send them this Link:

www.willatworklearning.com/2007/01/take_the_origin.html

(Hmmm. It's a little long, so you may have to click on it and then copy it from your address bar.)

And feel free to comment on the quiz below.

Storefront Learning Challenge

I hereby offer the following challenge---The Storefront Learning Challenge.

Here's my first entry:

Title: Lifetime Transfer

Explanation: One of our goals in the learning and performance field is to enable transfer, to help our learners minimize forgetting so that they can remember what they've learned over a long long time.

Location: Union Square, Somerville, Massachusetts, US.

This contest has no rules except this one:

Try to capture in a storefront photograph, some insight, truth, or humorous notion regarding our field---the training, development, learning, performance, e-learning field(s). Give it a title, caption, and/or explanation if you like. Tell us the earth location of the storefront. In the comments section below, tell us about your photograph and give us a URL to access it. You might try a free photo service to post it if you don't have a blog or website of your own.

Feel free to use video as well.

Learning Styles Instructional-Design Challenge

I will give $1000 (US dollars) to the first person or group who can prove that taking learning styles into account in designing instruction can produce meaningful learning benefits.

I've been suspicious about the learning-styles bandwagon for many years. The learning-style argument has gone something like this: If instructional designers know the learning style of their learners, they can develop material specifically to help those learners, and such extra efforts are worth the trouble.

I have my doubts, but am open to being proven wrong.

Here's the criteria for my Learning-Styles Instructional-Design Challenge:

1. The learning program must diagnose learners' learning styles. It must then provide different learning materials/experiences to those who have different styles.
2. The learning program must be compared against a similar program that does not differentiate the material based on learning styles.
3. The programs must be of similar quality and provide similar information. The only thing that should vary is the learning-styles manipulation.
4. The comparison between the two versions (the learning-style version and the non-learning-style version) must be fair, valid, and reliable. At least 70 learners must be randomly assigned to the two groups (with at least 35 minimum in each group completing the experience). The two programs must have approximately the same running time. For example, the time required by the learning-style program to diagnose learning styles can be used by the non-learning-styles program to deliver learning. The median learning time for the programs must be no shorter than 25 minutes.
5. Learners must be adults involved in a formal workplace training program delivered through a computer program (e-learning or CBT) without a live instructor. This requirement is to ensure the reproducability of the effects, as instructor-led training cannot be precisely reproduced.
6. The learning-style program must be created in an instructional-development shop that is dedicated to creating learning programs for real-world use. Programs developed only for research purposes are excluded. My claim is that real-world instructional design is unlikely to be able to utilize learning styles to create learning gains.
7. The results must be assessed in a manner that is relatively authentic--at a minimum level learners should be asked to make scenario-based decisions or perform activities that simulate the real-world performance the program teaches them to accomplish. Assessments that only ask for information at the knowledge level (e.g., definitions, terminology, labels) are NOT acceptable. The final assessment must be delayed at least one week after the end of the training. The same final assessment must be used for both groups. It must fairly assess the whole learning experience.
8. The magnitude of the difference in results between the learning-style program and the non-learning-style program must be at least 10%. (In other words, the average of the learning-styles scores subtracted by the average of the non-learning-styles scores must be more than 10% of the non-learning-styles scores). So for example, if the non-learning-styles average is 50, then the learning-styles score must be equal to 55 or more. This magnitude is to ensure that the learning-styles program produces meaningful benefits. 10% is not too much to ask.
9. The results must be statistically significant at the p<.05 level. Appropriate statistical procedures must be used to gauge the reliability of the results. Cohen's d effect size should be equal to .4 or more (a small to medium effect size according to Cohen, 1992).
10. The learning-style program cannot cost more than twice as much as the non-learning-style program to develop, nor can it take more than twice as long to develop. I want to be generous here.
11. The results can be documented by unbiased parties.

To reiterate, the challenge is this:

Can an e-learning program that utilizes learning-style information outperform an e-learning program that doesn't utilize such information by 10% or more on a realistic test of learning, even it is allowed to cost up to twice as much to build?

$1,000 says it just doesn't happen in the real-world of instructional design. $1,000 says we ought to stop wasting millions trying to cater to this phantom curse.