The Accidental Instructional Designer: A Learning Solutions Workshop!

On March 19, I'll be leading a one day workshop in Orlando as part of the pre-conference program for the eLearning Guild's 2012 Learning Solutions conference.

From the workshop description:

Most of us working as instructional designers got here by accident, by showing an aptitude for training or expertise in a particular subject matter area. And now, here you are, responsible – in some way – for the design, development, and/or delivery of eLearning. And now you’re actually passionate about what you do. So now what? This workshop will help answer some questions: What does eLearning look like today? What flavors does it come in and do I need to be an expert in all areas? How do I know when to use what kind of eLearning, or whether eLearning is even the right choice?

If you're an accidental instructional designer looking to get better at what you do and willing to explore some new ways of looking at things, then please join me in Orlando!

There's still plenty of time to sign up.

The CBT Lady

In the spirit of trying to explain to people what I do for a living, I was trying to explain to someone recently what I do for a living.

“I help organizations design and deliver online training programs…”

The guy made a cross with his fingers and hissed at me saying, “Oh no, you’re the CBT Lady!”

Visions of hairnet covered lunch ladies. I haven’t recovered yet from this one.

The CBT Lady?

“Oh no. You create those horrible things that we have to sit through. Every screen is locked out.  And there’s a test at the end and if you get one question wrong you have to take the whole thing again!"

I then tried to explain, “We create elearning that is NOT that…we try to do that much better…”

“Oh no, the CBT Lady!”

Two weeks later.  Same guy. He introduces me to his wife. She and I start chatting about what we do. “She’s the CBT Lady!”  And then she starts hissing at me.

It was all in good fun. But seriously. This is how our industry is perceived by the world -- by those forced to suffer through hours of clicky-clicky blah-blah at the hands of the CBT Lady.

Whatever you do, don’t be The  CBT Lady.  I’m begging you.

Photocredit: “Always be nice to the lunch lady” by MelvinSchlubman

Write the Questions First...

"Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." ~ Rainer Marie Rilke, from “Letters to a Young Poet"

Words to live by. And, it turns out, words by which to design instruction.

Read more in Kineo Top Tip 64: Write the Questions First

Kineo Event in Los Angeles Feb 28th

If you're an elearning professional in the Greater Los Angeles area, please join us for a fun and informative networking and sharing event on February 28.  


Kineo clients from the entertainment and technology industries will be presenting case studies, and I'll be leading a conversation, along with Kineo's Tanveer Makhani, on mobile learning for  the enterprise.

Date:  February 28, 2012

Time:  8:30 AM – 11:30 AM

Location:  Warner Bros. Screening Room, Burbank, CA

For more information email events@kineo.com

Bring yourself, bring your elearning friends and clients!  See you in Burbank!

Photocredit: Hollywood by tolomea

ASTD TechKnowledge Wrap Up in Pictures #ASTDTK12

Back home now after another exciting week in Las Vegas for ASTD’s TechKnowledge 2012 conference and expo. (I took a redeye home Friday night and then went camping with my son’s cub scout pack Saturday night.  Crazy, I know.)
Held at the Rio in Las Vegas, this year’s conference featured great keynote sessions from Jane McGonigal, Stuart  Crabb of Facebook, and Lisa Doyle of the VA; concurrent sessions and creation stations with Jane Bozarth, Connie Malamed, Julie Dirksen, Kevin Thorn, Aaron Silvers, Judy Unrein, Kris Rockwell, Ellen Wagner, Reuben Tozman, Cindy Huggett,  and many others; TK Chats on varied topics; and endless hallway conversations.  I know my brain was full but invigorated!

I live blogged most of the sessions I went to:

• Jane McGonigal
• Stuart Crabb of Facebook
• Connie Malamed on Cognitive Load
• Cindy Huggett on the Virtual Classroom
• Julie Dirksen on Learner Experience Design
• Lisa Doyle of the VA

Here are some other highlights of the conference, in pictures:

 Talking authoring tools and HTML5 at TK Chat with Dave Anderson of Articulate, Patrick Krekelberg of Allen Interactions, Thomas Toth and Judy Unrein.
This year’s TK Chat sessions ran the gamut, with particularly hot topics around Social Learning, Gamification and tools.  One of my favorite conference moments was during the TK Chat on mobile when Kris Rockwell (@hybridkris) gave someone her conference AHA moment about QR codes. 



Kineo was onscreen as-large-as-life every time I walked past the the Adobe Booth, where they had a Kineo Captivate project running on endless loop. 
Although Kineo’s Managing Director Steve Rayson was in London at the Learning Technologies conference, there he is on the screen behind Adobe’s Allen Partridge.  Kind of a fancy magic trick, eh?



This year was the second annual Monsters of Instructional Design TK Chat with esteemed ID professors: Steve Villachica (Boise State), Allison Rossett (SDSU), Karl Kapp (Bloomsburg), and Ellen Wagner (Sage Road Solutions).
We talked about the disconnect between many ID programs and the demands of the industry, and tried to resolve the big problems of the biz – like trying to hire talented professionals well-versed in the whole elearning professionals pie: the Science of Learning, the Art of Learning, the Technology of Learning, and the Business of Learning.


Thursday’s general session was keynoted by Stuart Crabb, head of learning at Facebook. With over 70% of Facebook employees born since 1979, they’ve got some different cultural challenges than a lot of orgs.  Perhaps a picture of the way things will be?
I took it as an opportunity to go all meta and posted to Facebook while listening to Stu talk about Facebook.







But not all of the magic happened during the day. One night I hit the town and saw Penn & Teller. Here’s me with Judy Unrein (@jkunrein) talking to Teller (yeah, he talks). Later, Judy’s phone ended up inside a frozen fish in the back of the auidence.  I got to call her phone while it was in the fish. Talk about thrilling! (Photo credit: Kevin Thorn @learnnuggets)








My role as chairperson of this year’s Planning Advisory Committee for TK12 included emceeing all the general sessions.  (Photo credit: Kris Rockwell @hybridkris)
Here I am looking particularly passionate about something. Either that or I was ready to break into song – it was Vegas after all. 
All in all, a great conference and I was thrilled to have been able to play the role that I got to play.  Thanks to ASTD for letting me play along this year!

Lisa Doyle Veterans Affairs Acquisition Academy #ASTDTK12

My live notes from today’s closing session at ASTD TK12 in  Las Vegas. Lisa Doyle is the Chancellor of the Veterans Affairs Acquisition Academy and named Chief Learning Office of the Year by CLO Magazine for 2012.

“The more we understand our Veterans, the better we will serve them.”

VA – second largest cabinet level agency in the US. 300,000 employees. 152 medical centers and hospitals across US. Second only to the Dept of Ed in providing educational benefits. Largest cemetery system in teh US.

55% of VA workforce is eligible for retirement in the next ten years.

Opened the Acquisition Academy in 2008. Competency based programs.

Opened five schools to train. (acquisition internship school, contracting prof school, facilities management school, program management school, supply chain management school).

Critical success factors:

• environment
• holistic model
• theory to practice
• quality control (maintain and evaluate learning across the enterprise)

The Academy is a two story brick and mortal building. A learning environment and not a workplace. It’s full of color and curved surfaces. The board room has no square walls to inspire innovation and creativity and risk taking (properly managed).

16 classrooms – can train 450 people a day. With interactive whiteboards, etc.

The walls are painted with the mission: why we’re here: “To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.” ~A. Lincoln

The holistic model

3 year internship program—training the next generation of professionals (second careers, those out of college)

technical skills, interpersonal skills, writing, speaking, self-understanding, leadership skills (you serve as a leader at all levels – so this begins on day 1), skill building (learning laboratory). mission service.

Scenario Driven Learning Laboratory

Preparing interns to do the work when they go out on job rotation. VAAA’s IDs use VA work to create scenario driven exercises, case studies, etc to expose learners to the actual job environment

Job rotations are critical – so they can be added bench strength – in medical centers and hospitals throughout the US.

Decreased time to competency.

Education with a purpose.

Internship program for wounded warriors. Over 100 million veterans are unemployed. The rate for post 9/11 Veterans is higher than the rest of the veteran population (particularly those ages 18-29).

Veterans are ideal candidates and make excellent employees. The attributes that Vets develop during their time in service are attributes that employers look for: leadership skills, discipline, rigor, team members, they take care of each other…

It’s a little different from standard intern program:

• infused education (it requires 24 hours of business credit – they’re in college 2 days a week onsite at the VA Academy – they partnered with a local college and the professors come to them)
• peak performance training (managing mental emotional and physiological responses to perform at peak levels – helping wounded warriors transition back from the battlefield). Also includes study skills – many of these went from high school to the battlefield. 

Wounded Warrior program helps VA with succession planning. Allows them to hire experienced employees. Creates a career path for wounded warriors where they can progress in the VA.

It’s Veterans serving Veterans.

Learner Experience Design with Julie Dirksen #ASTDTK12

My live blogged notes from Julie Dirksen’s Friday session. Julie wrote the book: Design for How People Learn. www.useablelearning.com

Learner experience design: overlap between user experience design (uxd) and instructional design

User experience design – how Amazon makes sure that customers can buy a book. – as long as someone can get to the end of the process, it’s a success.

With Instructional design – we have a higher standard – it’s not just about getting to the end of the process – it’s about creating behavior change.

Making the user interface invisible to the learner. Reducing cognitive load – don’t want the learner thinking about how to get through the program, want them expending their cognitive load on the content…

Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett – the layers that go into user design (http://www.jig.net/elements)

When something doesn’t work in classroom training, you know immediately. You’ve got an immediate feedback loop and you adjust it.

So how do we get that type of feedback into the process?

Question: How do you do analysis? Send out surveys, interview SMEs, job shadowing, observation…contextual inquiry.

Job shadowing/contextual inquiry: following them around. Go in for a 2-3 day engagement to kick off a project – 1st day you talk about the problem you’re trying to solve…then “can you sit me with someone who’s doing it?” (you get a ton of information and it really doesn’t take that long).

You learn things that the SME might not have told you – they print out the form to compare it, there are other reference materials he has nearby, he jots some notes down that he’ll need 3 screens later. If you watch them do it, you can find out all sorts of interesting things. If you hadn’t done this, you would have missed some big things.

We do a bad job matching up context of our learning environments to context for use.

The best place to study for a test is not a coffee shop, but in a windowless classroom with noisy HVAC system – study in the environment where you’ll be taking the test. Context matters.  By having more context in our learning environments, we help with retention. (this is very well researched – if you study with a vanilla candle, you’ll do better on the test if you’re burning a vanilla candle…)

Creating a trigger response (if you hear an angry customer, what triggers for you that you need to use your angry customer training…?  If you see this, do this..if you see that, do that…)

high context vs. low context training

metaphors that are cute waste the opportunity (e.g. a course on lean manufacturing that uses a world soccer cup metaphor is a bit of a waste – we want to trigger lean process when they’re on the job and not watching soccer on the weekend).

User Personas

In User Experience Design, you use PERSONAS to do your audience analysis.

“This is Alice, age, job function, description – She’s been with the company for 3 years and started as a tester…she uses this at home, she says this type of thing…” – it’s much more of a fleshed out story of the person.

Typically have 3-4 user personas.

It’s not fiction writing.

Takes a bit of time – typically do it on bigger projects.

Prototyping

Really important when you’re creating more interactive learning…(not as critical if just doing page turners)

(Trying to prevent the problem of building something and THEN having people say “oh, that’s not going to work…”)

Create a wireframe prototype in PowerPoint – can take an hour…Get feedback on what the interaction is going to be (roughly).

Keep it quick and dirty – if people get hung up on “it’s the wrong font” then you’re having the wrong conversation.

The act of prototyping helps you uncover design issues…

Usability Testing

Test your designs.

Steve Krug’s books on usability testing: Don’t Make Me Think; Rocket Surgery Made Easy

What it isn’t: not user acceptance testing, focus groups, demos, sending out for feedback.

It IS watching someone using your application. You sit next to them or you do it on a WebEx.

• Create a test plan (there’s a sample on Julie’s resource page I’ll list below).
• Recruit users 5-6 users; 1-1.5 hours each. By the 3rd user you’ll start finding the big issues.  You could do 3 users and then make some changes.
• Write a script. Let them know why you’re there; I’m here to test the interface and not you; don’t help them as they go through it (don’t say “oh, you just click on that..”; Have them talk aloud as they go through it.
• Then document your results.

Julie’s resource page: http://bit.ly/tk12_LXD