To ID Degree or Not ID Degree. Updated Survey Results!

It's been awhile since I've updated the survey results from the ongoing survey on my blog.

Stats hold steady with almost 650 respondents to date.

If you work as an instructional designer, do you have a degree in instructional design?



Have you ever been denied work from that lack?



Are you considering getting an ID degree?



(I have no idea if those who were thinking about getting an ID degree went on to get one. A survey for another day, I suppose!)

Survey responses come from all over the globe, although 64% are from the US. 60% work in the corporate sector, and 21% in higher ed.


If you are a practicing ID and haven't taken the survey, you can find it here.

Missed the Kineo Valentine's Day Webinar?

So you were too busy this morning to attend our Kineo webinar because you were out buying chocolates and roses for me, right?

Well, don't worry, darling. We've got you covered. So sit back and relax and Happy Valentine's Day, you lover, you.

Eight Ways to Make Your Learners Fall in Love from Cammy Bean

Happy Valentine's Day from us lovers of e-learning at Kineo!

Wanna cozy up today and put on that lovin' feeling?

Join me today Friday, February 14th, 11:30 a.m (eastern time): 

Eight Ways to Make Your Learners Fall in Love

I'm in the mood for love...learning love, that is! Kineo Valentine's Day Webinar

Feeling a little romantic?

Join me on Friday, February 14th, 11:30 a.m (eastern time) for a seductive and thrilling Kineo webinar:

Eight Ways to Make Your Learners Fall in Love

Sign up today!

Join me at Learning Solutions for a Pre-Con Workshop! #LSCON

Well, actually TWO pre-con workshops!

Join me in sunny Orlando this March 17-21 for the eLearning Guild's annual Learning Solutions conference.

On Monday, March 17th (I'll be sure to wear green): The Accidental Instructional Designer

A day long workshop where we aim to get more intentional in our practice as instructional designers who had no idea this is what we would be when we grew up!

And for extra fun and learning, stick around for March 18 for another day of learning fun with me, Jane Bozarth, Tracy Parish, and Trina Rimmer The Essential ID Companion: The Other Skills You Need to Succeed

A day of talking about the nuts and bolts of the learning ID's job -- from vendor management to project management.

The rest of the conference looks to be a juicy one.  I'm presenting two concurrent sessions on Wednesday and Thursday.  Browse the whole conference here and register soon.

I've booked my flight and hotel already. Have you?

A Tale of Two Cases: Mobile Solutions with Phillip Neal #ASTDTK14

 These are my live blogged notes from a session on the final day of ASTD Tech Knowledge with Phillip Neal, VP of Business Need at Maestro.

One of the struggles with mobile is that organizations are used to designing the way they always have and that fits within their existing models of what training is.

Mobile is different.

(It’s like in the olden days of elearning when we all moved from CD ROMS to the Internet. Today, people are making a lot of mistakes. Just like we all did back then!)

When deploying mobile you have to think about partnering with marketing and other divisions within your organization.

Don’t eliminate core training – that still needs to take place. Instead we need to create pull through.  How can we pull learning content out into the field where they can continue to use it?

Phones just don't work for courses.  People might access courses on tablets, but if you want to be that mobile, you probably need to reconsider your design.

What is your pain point? Can mobile help with that? Start small.

Case Study:

Pharma company with lots of field reps.

Core training (LMS, webinar, elearning courses) vs Continuous Training (ways to extend that core training).

Client asked for one thing. Did some consulting and came up with a different solution to solve the business problem.

Challenges:

• They had no mobile support
• Limited extended training in the field after formal training
• Decentralized content
• No feedback loops to T&D team
• Slow adoption and IT support
• And did not want to tie this to their LMS (if they did that, it would have taken WAY TOO MUCH time). Decided instead to build the app native – but tie analytics to the back side for reporting.

Process:

• Did a needs analysis – profile audience and understand their needs. Not just sitting in the board room to hear what stakeholders say. But talk to the people. To get the context as it applies to that need.
• Build a road map
• T&D education
• Designed a process workflow and governance to support the app.
• Socializing change
• Pilot
• Build momentum

Case example is an ipad app – Product Knowledge for sales reps:

• Has access to pharma products package inserts.
• Competitive section to stack your product against the competition – so you can see your messaging against the competition. (may have gotten this as part of core training, but now you can refresh)
• Mini learning lessons tied to competition - -videos and lessons.
• Uses a CMS to manage and update content.
• A Learning Center within the app: Flash cards, lessons tied to the application (5-7 minutes in length around specific subject tied to that product).  The challenge was figuring out how we narrow down the bigger formal content into mini-lessons, mini-quizzes, drag and drops. As ways to reinforce retention.
• Create a glossary with audio tied to it (so sales rep would know how to pronounce things and not make that mistake in front of the customer).
• Through the application, people can rate the content and give feedback to T&D group about how effective. (Had to figure out a good workflow for T&D group to handle this feedback). Users could now search for the BEST content. T&D group can look at the poorly rated content and improve upon it.
• Currently, feedback on quizzes given within the app – so user knows immediately – but that data is not tracked or sent back to an LMS. Didn’t want to duplicate an LMS.
• The goal here is that if we can prove they’re using the app in the field, then that’s the outcome.
• My Assignments area: your coach can assign you some content (e.g., the coach is on a ride along with the reps and identifies some gaps), you can assign yourself some content.
• Journal: for reps in the field, important to journal in the field and track what’s going in their cases and reviewing with manager and coach.

Results showed 22 sessions per user, 1.7 minutes per session. So lots of touchpoints as reference.

I had to duck out to catch a plane and so missed the second case study on Kellog's.

Learning Record Stores with Tim Martin #ASTDTK14

 These are my live blogged notes from Tim Martin's session at ASTD Tech Knowledge, wrapping up today in Las Vegas.

Tin Can 101: It’s a shared system for two systems to talk about the things that a person does. Unlike SCORM which was about content in a browser.  (There’s much more here: http://tincanapi.com/overview/)

TinCan allows simulators, servers, mobile devices, etc to communicate.

Tin Can is driven by a web service based solution. It uses a RESTful web Server (and yes, I had to ask what this is: a more commonly adopted web service architecture. Developers, apparently, will like this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer)

Two parties in xAPI/Tin Can: Activity Provider and the Learning Record Store

How might you use Tin Can today? Start small. Success comes from starting small, understanding something narrow and then expanding. Instead of trying to measure everything in your organization, think about designing experiments.  

This echoes something @reubentozman said in his session yesterday on Designing for Data (sorry – I didn’t blog it, but I did Tweet a lot for Reuben’s session): 

"Think about design as an experiment. Design your experiments to capture data you want/need."

Tin Can has a noun (the person, email address, ee identifier, etc), verb, object structure. “Cammy read a book.” “Cammy ran a marathon.” “Cammy presented at a conference.”

Learning Record Store = collects statements from Tin Can (A much better definition can be found here: http://tincanapi.com/learning-record-store/)

Organizations might use multiple LRS’s in their organizations – each one looking at the same set of data and presenting them in different ways for different parts of the organization. Use the data in the LRS from an interesting analytics view.

This page gives a really nice introduction to how you an approach the design process as an experiment.  http://watershedlrs.com/site/watershedmethod.html

So the analytics could help you identify completion rates if a course is designed with higher fidelity vs. lower fidelity (helping you test your hypothesis that the production value of yourx` course does matter).

Or “People who do that and this are more successful than people who do that and not that…” Follow the learning path and watch who succeeds based on the paths.

Experiment Design:

• The company was looking to look at cultural adoption of the code of conduct. They wanted people to do the right thing because they believed it, not because they were forced to. So they wanted to see the # of calls going up to report ethics violations and help desk.
• They had a piece of content from a rapid learning tool. The experiment compares high fidelity content (with video and simulations) to the actual text of the code of content. So completion statements for each modality.  “Tim completed this.” – can see the depth to which Tim explored the simulation. The sim sends statements.
• For the text version can just know if they got through all the pages of the document. So text doc sends statement.
• Quizzes to test comprehension.
• Pre and Post surveys to self-assess afterwards. Comes in from a survey tool. These make statements.
• Calls to the help desk can send statements. (“Tim called hotline.” Or “Tim reported violation.”)

So it's a fixed set of statements about a fixed population.

Gave one part of the company the high fidelity content and the other part the text. We think (the hypothesis) that high fidelity content is going to help people get it better.

The high fidelity group follows through on the path and completes different tasks, surveys etc. And if the data proves that high fidelity content creates better outcomes (e.g., more calls to help desk) then the business can make different decisions.

The first meetings are asking questions like “so where do you think you can make a difference in the organization.”

Some designers just think of themselves as designing content in a tool. Instead, let’s think about designing experiments.