10 Ways to Turn Your Learners into Zombies (Throwback to 2013!)

This was probably my favorite webinar/slide deck ever. And while it's now four years old, the concepts and ideas still hold true today. So, are you a zombie hunter or what?

Ten ways to turn your learners into zombies from Cammy Bean

Thanks to @espencedalton for unearthing this relic on Twitter. Happy Halloween!

Kineo Webinar: Getting Interactive with Video [Oct 5]

Hey all! Join me this Thursday for a Kineo webinar where we'll take a look at Interactive Video. 

Looking to supercharge your online training and see how interactive video can work for your business? We want to share our best ideas with you so you can make a higher impact, drive effective engagement and make elearning more fun all with interactive video!

During the webinar, we'll cover:

• What is interactive
• Making interactive video work with any budget
• Getting started
• And of course, we'll look at a bunch of examples!

Webinar details:

• October 5, 2017
• 1-2 Eastern Time
• Register here

It's been awhile since I've run a webinar. I'm getting excited to get back out there. See you there!

Deliberate Practice

Now THIS is what Deliberate Practice looks like!

Last night, the Fire Department used the house next door (which will be demolished on Wednesday) as a training ground.

It was pretty exciting to watch the smoke and fire streaming out of the windows and to see the firefighters climbing the roof and cutting holes in it.

Alas, they didn't burn the house completely to the ground, much to my daughter's chagrin.

Fun and exciting that is, until one of the firefighters had smoke or heat exhaustion. He seemed fine, but it definitely changed the tone of the whole event.

Preparing for the real deal means preparing at all levels.

So how can you set up training in your workplace with this level of deliberate practice?

Kineo Anniversary! Eight Years On...

Today marks my 8th anniversary with Kineo.

That's right, eight years ago TODAY we opened up Kineo here in the US.

Thanks to so many great clients and fabulous team members who have helped us do so much great work these past eight years.

It's been a fabulous experience, with lots of challenges, lessons learned, and triumphs along the way.

My anniversary present?

Training Industry just named us to their Top 20 list of Content Development Companies for our 5th straight year.  Check here for the full TI list.

Looking forward to the next eight years!

Play to Learn! (Book Tour Stop)

Karl Kapp and Sharon Boller have been banging the drum about learning games for years. In fact, one of my favorite ID-books back in 2007 was Karl Kapp's "Gadgets, Games, and Gizmos for Learning." 

Well, 10 years later, games have not gone away, in fact, they've solidified their place in our industry as clients and learners continue to ask for and expect modern learning experiences. At Kineo, we hear more and more from our clients a requirement for gamification, games for learning, serious games -- and all the many ways that need is expressed.

So, if gaming is on your dance card these days and you're looking for some tips on how to get started and what to do, be sure to add this book to your required reading list!

Play to Learn: Everything You Need to Know About Designing Effective Learning Games

Karl Kapp and Sharon Boller

ATD Press, 2017

Why I like it:

• Easy to read!
• Great balance of theory with a focus on practical how-tos
• Informative and practical -- with roadmaps to help you with defining game goals and instructional goals, learner personas, learning objectives; creating prototypes; play-testing; development considerations; deployment and more.
• Great table mapping bloom's taxonomy to different types of games
• Examples, examples, examples

My favorite chapter (Chapter 3) has some great tidbits and insights. Consider these teasers for the rest of the book...

Learning games need to be "fun enough":

"Learning games need to be what we call “fun enough.” A mistake made by many new learning-game developers is to try to design an entertaining game. Unfortunately, that often makes learning harder rather than easier. Remember, you are not creating the next great commercial game to entertain your learners; you are creating a learning game whose success will be measured by the achievement of learning outcomes." (page 23)

Remember the bigger system and design a game that's part of something larger:

"Commercial games such as Angry Birds, Assassin’s Creed, or Monopoly are usually played without context: A group of friends simply start playing a game, either online or in person. However, for a learning game to be the most effective, it needs to be part of a larger instructional plan and include instructional support elements. You can’t simply create a game and expect the players to learn from it without providing any context or guidance. For learning games to work, they need to be an integral part of a larger learning design." 

Don't make it so hard that people lose heart. Keep the emphasis on learning:

"The second principle is that both a losing state and a winning state need to lead to
learning. You need to design the game play to encourage learning throughout the game, and consider what happens when a player is not successful." (p. 24)

Check out the Table of Contents to see why this book is a must-read for learning designers.

Table of Contents:

Preface...
Section 1. Playing Games to Learn About Games....The Basics....
Playing Entertainment Games...
Exploring Learning Games...
Section 2. Making Game Design Choices That Support Learning ....Setting the Right Foundation for Your Learning Game...
Linking Learning With Game Design...
Two Game Design Case Studies....
Matching Scoring to Learning Goals...
Section 3. Putting Game Design Knowledge to Work....Creating the First Prototype....
Play-Testing...
Section 4. Development and Implementation...Development Considerations...
Deploying Your Game..
Final Thoughts....

The Final Word

This is an easy to read, accessible book, chock full of practical ideas and tips for helping you make the leap from learning designer to learning game designer.

Be sure to add Play to Learn to your essential reading list! 

And check out all the stops on the Play to Learn book tour.

Job Opening: @KineoUS seeking Lead Instructional Designers

We are hiring!

Are you a sharp, sassy, instructional designer with at least five years experience?

Can you inspire a client, lead a project team, and design fantastic learning experiences?

Find out more about this Chicago-based (or remote for the right person) position!

L&D Disruption Debate: Shifting the Titanic with @totaralearning @larshyland

I had great fun chatting with Lars Hyland (@larshyland) of Totara LMS last month.  We talked about disruption in the Learning & Development industry, ticking off boxes, and selecting toothbrushes.

It's now an article, available for your reading pleasure....

Real life vs work 

“There is a fundamental disconnect,” said Cammy, “between the technologies we use in our real lives and many of the technologies we use at work. This gap is particularly bad, with regard to learning technologies. Old school e-learning courses and learning management systems give e-learning a bad name because they don’t meet people’s needs.”

Read the full article Disruption Debate with Cammy Bean: Shifting the Titanic at the TotaraLMS site.

Training Conf 2017 Keynote:Temple Grandin, Anant Agarwal, Ken Blanchard #trngcon

My live-blogged notes from the opening keynote at Training Conference 2017, happening this week in San Diego, CA. Forgive any typos or incoherencies.

Three keynotes speakers in this morning’s session: Temple Grandin, Anant Agarwal, Ken Blanchard

Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin was non-verbal as a child, autistic.

Through great teachers, mentors, she now has a PhD and is a professor in Animal Science at Colorado State. She’s designed humane cattle systems used at 60% of slaughterhouses in the US.

She’s written loads of books about autism.
(I got two of them at the conference!)

Her advice for getting jobs/building skills of students/adults with autism:

• Get in the back door
• Get early job experience.

Creative geniuses – didn’t follow conventional educational path…

Autistic Brain (her book)– different ways that people think. These labels are half-science and half squabbling in conference rooms.

• Photo Realistic Visual Thinking – Object Visualizer – poor at algebra
• Pattern Thinker Spatial Visualizer Music and Math – poor in reading              (engineers)
• Verbal Facts Language Translation – poor at drawing
• Auditory Thinker – visual perception fragmented

You need all of the different kinds of minds in design….

Get away from being abstract.

Visual thinkers are associative thinkers – keywords trigger visual associations.

Lots of our talented visual thinkers are getting screened out.

AI will replace super specialized tasks – it can’t do tasks that require generalized knowledge.

Top town visual thinkers tend to overgeneralize.

Lots of people tend to go too abstract.

Skilled trades are good ways to go and they’re outsource proof.

“Beef Plant Video tour with Temple Grandin”

Take the thing the kid is good at and build on it.

A good boss will know how to work with these quirky guys. Train ‘em like being in a foreign country – you’re standing too close, you’ve told the Star Wars story five times and they’re bored with it.

Keep the projects very concrete…make it well-defined.

Project loyalty – my job was to get the project out. So I just corrected technical mistakes. Don’t get lost in the personality of things…

Keep it simple – five things that they measured for the cattle plants.

For safety – what are the critical safety concerns? Don’t focus on the coffee cup lid, when it’s the bigger stuff that matters.

Engineers do the super abstract things…

Industrial mechanics.

Different people think differently. They have different skills and they complement each other.

Apple: an artist made the interface; engineers had to make it work

“Get the job done, don’t be abstract, get out in the field.”

“Drag the suits out of the office” – get the senior leaders out into the field so they can really see what’s going on They may be kicking and screaming.

Anant Agarwal: “The Digital Education Disruption”

Anant Agarwal is CEO at EdX and professor @ MIT

Think ahead to 2030 – it’s not that far away.

What fraction of jobs today will still be around in 2030?

50% of today’s jobs will go away.

By 2030, 1 out of 2 people will not have a job due to automation, AI, technology.

We need a planet-wide upscaling of skills…technology has changed so much – transportation (uber), theater (Netflix), hospitality (airbnb)

Every single industry has been completely disrupted, but we haven’t changed education.

Education is too costly and of poor quality; tech is building too fast (whole new fields are emerging – e.g., data science – how do we train people that quickly?), scalability, turnover

For education – who is your customer? Your employee (in corporate education) – who are they?

In 10 years, 75% of your employees will be milennials.

Tomorrow’s learning will be digital:

• On-demand (fits into busy lifestyles)
• Connected (social, peer recommended, global)
• Personalized (experiential, fun, self-directed)
• Flexible (anytime, anywhere)
• Mobile (learn on-the-go)

Milennials rank professional development as the highest thing.

We need to disrupt education as we know it. 

Median age of a learner on EdX is 28; Age range from 7-90+

Microsoft – 6,000 employees from MS taking EdX courses (just based on email addresses)

Lots of employees from lots of orgs learning on EdX.

• 43% say they’re getting career advancement opps.
• 47% including EdX certificates on LinkedIn
• 45% included EdX certs on their Resumes

More than 1,300 courses; 10 million global learners 120+ global partners; 35 million course enrollments; 28 median age of EdX learners

Learning has to be different. Using techniques from Big Data & Neuroscience to rethink how we do things

Active Learning is proven to work for corporate learners – study by John Gabrielli at MIT of corporate employees – studied them to see what was most impactful:

• Learn from video (learning outcomes at 55% - post test accuracy)
• Interspersed video with discussion (outcomes better at 60%)
• Interspersed with interpolated testing (68%) – this is active learning and the foundation of the EdX platform.

Why does interspersing videos with interactive exercises improve outcomes? They looked at EEG – the video EEG shoes more consistent/passive brain waves; Interpolated testing/active learning - -shows a lot more engagement with the brain. The brain responds differently to these techniques.

Using Big Data in learning – capture all the mouseclicks etc to improve learning. 

What’s the right video length?  The answer is SIX MINUTES. Philip Guo (University of Rochester) – video length vs. engagement – maximum engagement shows when video is about six minutes in length. Done by analyzing over 5,000,000 videos.

EdX is seeing huge demand in soft skills content – aka “power skills” – negotiation, critical thinking, etc.

On average – a millennial will be at a job for TWO YEARS.  So why should I invest in my employees? Because they see prof development as the # one ask – they want credentials. So EdX has come up with a new form of credentials.  “MicroMasters” – a smaller masters that you can learn completely online.  MOOCs where you can learn for free.

If you want the certificate, then you pay for that. About $1,000. You can learn for free, but you pay if you want the cert.

With online learning, you can pretty much teach anything. So much you can do through virtual reality and simulation. They have virtual labs on physics, chemistry, etc.

Ken Blanchard, Author “The One Minute Manager” (Cornell class of 1961 – Go Big Red! Masters from Colgate, PhD from Cornell)

Leadership can change the energy.

We need planet retraining in leadership. The world needs more than self-serving leaders.

Leaders think that they know everything. But “none of us is as smart as all of us.”

His wife, Margie, said: “Write a children’s book for managers.” – out of that came the One Minute Manager. Only three secrets,. It’s about keeping it simple.

The only way to get great results is through servant leadership.

• Keep the message simple
• Wander around
• One minute reprimands

Servant leadership: “just as I have done for you, do to others” – this isn’t about the inmates running the prison.

Southwest, Nordstrom, Wegman’s, Disney – they all think leadership is all about your people and not about you.

Leadership = vision, direction, goals. People need to know where you want to go and what that vision is…”people without vision perish” – need to have a sense of what business you’re in, where you want to go, what your values are.  That’s the role of the hierarchy – make sure people know what they’re being asked to do and why they’re there. If your people don’t know why they’re there, then shame on you.

[The # leadership style in the world is Seagull Leadership – the manager only swoops in when something goes wrong and makes a lot of noise and dumps on everything and then flies off].

Turn they typical pyramid upside down.

Lead with Luv (a book he wrote with the head of Southwest, Colleen Barrett)

Leader: meet with your direct reports for 30 minutes every two weeks. Let them talk to you about whatever they want to talk about. Your job is to be in constant communication with them. Your goal is to help them win.

The key = loving relationships.

(He tells the story of the end of the movie Ghost: “The amazing thing, Molly, is you can take the love with you.”)

Servant leadership is love in action. Get with the program and take the love with you.

(What gets in the way of leaders doing this? The human EGO).