Will at Work Learning

Effective E-learning with only Audio and Photographs

Is this effective e-learning?

Click here to see e-learning using only audio and photographs.

Sure, it's missing interactivity, retrieval practice, and a focus on application; but it does hint at the emotional power that can be created with good simple design.

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?

New Fonts Coming to the Web...

This article in Slate suggests that new fonts are coming to the web.

This opens up new territory for web designers and perhaps e-learning designers as well. Many e-learning designers think of web design as the default design for e-learning. Maybe the new web will usher in a new era of e-learning design as well.

One thing to watch out for: Do you or your team have the aesthetic training/empathy to know how to use fonts to set a mood, convey a meaning? Ahhh, something more to build.

The Pluses and Minuses of Social Media and User-generated Content

At the recent eLearning Guild conference in Orlando, I was asked to lead an Espresso Cafe roundtable discussion on a topic of interest.

My topic: The Pluses and Minuses of Social Media and User-generated Content.

I promised folks from my three sessions that I'd post all the results. Here they are:

Plusses:

1. Users engaged.
2. Relevant to the users.
3. Not-distracting, real-world.
4. Enables learning when training experts not available.
5. Can augment online courses.
6. Can capture water-cooler talk (that would have happened anyway).
7. Opportunity to debunk inaccuracies.
8. Capture institutional knowledge.
9. Enables the use of internal experts for informal learning.
10. Because informal, can be more comfortable to use for people of different languages and/or cultures. Or different socio-economic groups as well.
11. More of an equal exchange. Leveling the playing field. Creating more democratic or egalitarian organizations.
12. Novel, interesting.
13. Quick feedback on what doesn't work.
14. Not corporate-down, so more likely to be attended to without skepticism, jadedness, etc.
15. Opportunity to connect with customers.
16. Keep up with younger workers coming in.
17. Headquarters experts may not be as trusted as those who work on the ground.
18. Timely, instant updates.
19. Get details from someone who actually does the job.
20. Emotional connection.
21. Convenience.
22. No geographic boundaries.
23. RSS feeds enables more targeted info.
24. Employees may be able to affect policy.
25. Could make us improve our policies for fear of law suits. (Like this: stuff that's posted can be used in court. Organization then has impetus to make changes quickly).
26. Questions coming first is a good learning design.
27. Can give organization more of a sense of what's going on in the field.
28. Cheap.
29. Builds community if people are tackling serious issues together.
30. Feeling engaged.
31. Employees have instant access to experts.
32. Another data source.
33. Develop connections. Know who knows who AND who knows what.
34. Enables virtual relationships.
35. More reflective--learners have to reflect to write, to learn deeper.
36. Wisdom of the crowd.
37. Opens up links to other things. Sets agenda, letting people know that there are other things.
38. Generate buzz.
39. Smile sheets shared. (Rate my teacher. Rate my professor).
40. Best practices are distributed.
41. Will make things easier. Info at fingertips.

Minuses:

1. Might have to get used to it.
2. How do you make it usable?
3. Duplicate information.
4. How to make pertinent information instantly accessible.
5. Opening up floodgates.
6. Cultural hurdles and disconnects.
7. Competes with other channels of information.
8. Perhaps top-level buy-in is required.
9. A big distraction. Time user.
10. Productivity drain.
11. One more thing to do.
12. We are still learning how to utilize wisely.
13. May need support, maintenance, and the resources thereof.
14. Information may not translate to behavior without directed support.
15. How to confirm validity of content.
16. Info can be used in lawsuits.
17. Is the time beneficial?
18. Danger of noise. Hard to get to best information.
19. Time to create.
20. Hard to measure. Maybe we're fooling ourselves.
21. Could be incorrect/bad information.
22. Could be offensive information.
23. Must bring people up-to-speed on technology.
24. Can create cliques.
25. Time suck--filling up on candy.
26. Dangers of giving censors power.
27. Do these media self-select different types of people, biasing information gathered?
28. Time is our most limited resource. The key organizational-productivity leverage point.
29. Often implemented without planning, no marketing, no preparation, etc.
30. Sometimes systems have no purpose. So costs/time not parlayed to maximum effect.
31. Unnatural groups may not work, may have difficulties.
32. One or a few can take over.
33. Example: General in military told story of how soldiers posted how to defuse an IED. Info was wrong. 2 died. Enemies can use information too.
34. Many see this as the be-all end-all, creating big blind spots, overzealous implementation, poor planning, poor focus.
35. Potential permanence of information and/or systems.
36. Personal vs. work issues may arise.

Thanks to all the folks who contributed to my discussions. It was kind of hard to hear, but here are the names to thank: Nancy, Leslie, Terra, Pat, Sonya, Betsy, Michael, David, David, Ann, Joyce, Nancy, Chris, Chris, Richard, John, Susan, Paula, John.

Generating Interest at the Beginning of Learning

Robert Gagne's 1st event of instruction was "Gain Attention." Michael Allen's company, Allen Interactions, has been saying for years, "No More Boring e-Learning." We've all heard the stories of how often e-learning turns learners off. And yet, there is still a whole lot of boring e-learning out there.

An article from the eLearning Guild helps us avoid the trap, specifically by helping us start our learning interventions in ways that grab attention. Paul Clothier interviews Carmen Taran, author of the book Better Beginnings.

Dan Balzer and Susan Manning offer an excellent Podcast on the topic. You can find the link to the Guild article at their web page as well.

Eye Movement Studies. Should we be using them for learning design?

Google has a nice blog post out on its use of eye movement research.

I remember getting a tour of Fidelity a few years ago and learning that their eye movement studies on web browsing showed that people were beginning to ignore big dark chunks of graphics because they thought they were advertisements.

My dissertation advisor, Ernie Rothkopf did a classic study (with Billington) in 1979 using eye movement data to test whether learners actually paid more attention (had more and higher-quality eye movements) toward information in the learning material that was targeted by learning objectives than to information that was not so targeted. It turned out that learning objectives worked to boost learning because they prompted learners to pay more attention to the objective-relevant material and less attention to the rest of the information.

See: Rothkopf, E. Z., & Billington, M. J. (1979). Goal-guided learning from text: Inferring a descriptive processing model from inspection times and eye movements. Journal of Educational Psychology, 71, 310-327.

To answer the question I posed above. Yes, more of us should be using eye-movement research to support us as we do e-learning design.

And by the way, as web pages change their strategies to gain our attention, our learners may change their strategies to avoid things deemed irrelevant. Moreover, as our learners see more and more of our company's e-learning, their eyes may learn where to go...In fact, a lot of them already have a well-learned capacity to find the NEXT key through a swarm of bees.

Adobe E-Learning Suite

As predicted, Adobe is on the march to monopolize the e-learning development world.

Their new suite.

Have they really integrated intelligence about human learning in there? Not sure, but I'm skeptical. If you're a competitor, that's probably your only path to success. If you're Adobe, that may be your only weak link.

My services are available.

Virtual Conference on Teaching Science in Immersive Virtual Environments

On January 30th, there will be an online conference, costing only $65, hosted in Second Life (so you can learn about Second Life as well), and it sounds intriguing with some solid speakers/hosts.

Check it out. It's called Stepping Into Virtual Worlds.

Purchasing eLearning Tools? Consider Adobe!

I'm writing you from the eLearning Guild's annual conference. I went to a session presented by Silke Fleischer and colleagues at Adobe and was blown away by the work Adobe is doing to create products that support learning and related efforts. I then asked a number of industry thought leaders who confirmed my interpretation: Adobe is now a 500-pound Gorilla, likely to continue out-investing their competitors and thus creating better and better products for folks like us to use.

If you're considering elearning tools, you owe it to your organization to consider Adobe products. I have no financial relationship with Adobe, by the way. This is not to say that other products aren't worthy and/or do some things better than Adobe products. My thinking is this: Companies who invest in their products are often more likely to be there for you in the years to come. I've seen many clients who started using a particular tool five-to-ten years ago, and they are basically stuck with it because of their large installed base of learning courses.

Here are a few of the things that made me wake up and take notice:

1. Adobe's update cycle on Captivate seems to be shrinking, as they are aggressively moving forward in the development of Captivate 4.
2. Captivate is being used for many purposes, including the development of Podcasts, Advertising, etc.
3. You can embed a working Captivate file into Adobe connect and then have webinar or online-learning participants each interact with Captivate objects.
4. PDF files can now include fully-functional interactive images. So documents are not static anymore!!
5. Adobe is working on a new platform called AIR, which will enable the compilation of many types of objects for display and interaction.

What Work-Learning Audit Reveals

I recently completed one of the most comprehensive work-learning audits I've ever been asked to do for a major U. S. retailer. The goal of the audit was to find out how their learning programs AND work-learning environment were supporting the stores in being successful. The audit involved (1) structured and unstructured interviewing with all levels of the organization, especially with store personnel, (2) focus groups held across the country with specific groups of store personnel (e.g., clerk, store managers, assistant managers, etc.), (3) task force meetings with senior line managers and representatives throughout the company, (4) learning audits of e-learning courses, (5) learning audits of a mission-critical classroom course, (6) review of company artifacts (CEO messages, publications, databases, intranet, etc.), (7) interviews with learning-and-performance professionals, (8) discussions of business strategy, (9) discussions regarding corporate information and data-gathering capabilities, (10) job shadowing, (11) store observations, etc.

Who/What Do Workers Learn From?

One of the most intriguing results came out of a relatively simple exercise I did with focus-group participants. The following is a rough approximation of those results.

What I did was ask focus-group participants who they learned from. I would hold up a large 6 x 8 index card with a position label on it, for example, "District Manager," "Clerks," or "Corporate." The group would shout out where they thought that card should go on a large diagram I had created on the wall. I would place it on the wall in a particular category based on the verbal responses and then we would negotiate as a group to determine it's final positioning. So for example, participants could say that they learned the following amounts from that person/position, and we often compromised using in-between placement:

• Learned Most
• Learned a Lot
• Learned Some
• Learned a Little
• Learned Least
• Had Little/No Contact with

See the diagram below for a rough example. This one is actually a composite based on several focus groups and more than one position. It gives a fair representation for how frontline retail clerks responded. Note that the orange boxes represent fellow employees, while the blue boxes represent other groups of people or things that they learned from.

There are several key insights from these results:

• People learn the most from those who they work closely with.
• People learn the most from their experience doing the job.
• People learn the most from their self-initiated efforts at learning.
• The more contact, the more learning (for the most part), however there are benefits from learning from experts (e.g., store managers, head clerks), though the worker has to have at least some signicant contact with them to create this benefit. You'll notice that district staff have only a little impact and regional and corporate staff have none.
• E-learning is seen as somewhat facilitative but not a place where workers learn the most. This result may be organization specific as different e-learning designs and implementations might easily move this result higher or lower.

Frontline clerks didn't get much from company magazines and the like, but managers (not represented in the results above) did find value in these. Store managers also reported that networking with other store managers was on of the "Learn Most" entries for them. For this company, this network was even more important than learning from their district managers (their direct bosses). This makes sense because their network is more accessible throughout the heat of the daily grind.

These results were eye-opening for my client, and they are still wrangling with the implications. For example, district managers and district training staff seemed to produce very little learning benefits. So, should their roles for learning be de-emphasized or re-emphasized?

These types of result have to be understood in the larger data-gathering effort of course. Analyzed alone, they suffer from the problem of de-contextualized self-report data. Combined with multiple other data sources, they paint a really robust picture of an organization's learning environment.

Informal Learning, Social Networks, etc.

Vendors are out and about in our field now selling the benefits of complicated and expensive analysis tools for looking at how people learn through so-called informal on-the-job mechanisms. The example above shows that if you don't have the big bucks, there are simpler ways to get good data as well.