BBC Learning Design Toolkit

You can find links to the BBC learning design toolkit and booklet below:

Learning Design Introductory Booklet


Learning Design Toolkit Cards




Towards the end of 2008 we began to realise that whilst learning was changing all around us, ways of thinking and behaving were not. For sure people were starting to talk about ‘learning 2.0’, ‘social networks’, ‘generation Y’ but there is always a danger with learning design that we build around our own preconceptions and practices rather than around the needs of our audiences – that is, we fail to make our designs truly learner-centered.

Mindful of some big projects on the horizon, we decided that we should look again at learning – considering it afresh - and as an experience rather than a set of conventions. We didn’t want merely to survey our learners (‘what do you like about training?’, ‘what don’t you like about training?’) because we were acutely aware that the vast majority of learning happens outside of the ‘training/learning’ social construct. To put it another way: if you ask people about their experience of learning or training you get a very narrow range of responses around the formal experience. We wanted instead to get a picture of the experiences and behaviours that had made a difference to people – to their careers, to their sense of self, to the way that the do their job. These, after all, are what make a difference to business performance.

We worked with a service design company on two pieces of work:
1) research that would enable us to understand more clearly the ways in which our staff were developing and how their natural patterns of development were changing
2)A framework, based on this research, which would help to guide the learning design process in future.
The project was led by our experience designer, Shane Samarawikrema, who already possessed many years’ worth of experience and himself responsible for much innovative user-centred learning design.

The research method was unconventional: we wanted insights into the lives of our learners; the things that had affected them most deeply, and into the resources and techniques that they use informally – strategies which are integrated into their everyday lives. We handpicked our research participants from a long list of high-calibre individuals across a range of roles. We didn’t want large numbers – instead we wanted to choose people who would be representative of best practice.

The research used a number of in-depth techniques: interviews with experts, one, two and three week diaries. The diaries themselves were highly structured, requiring each participant to document their experiences and reflect on their learning using a variety of approaches and perspectives. We then spent several weeks reviewing and analysing this material (using a POINTS analysis system), looking at emerging themes, and segmenting these by ‘tribe’. The sheer volume of insightful refection and telling comments was staggering.

Based on our findings we began the construction of the Learning Design Toolkit – an iterative process involving a range of people over a period of some months. The end result is something which incorporates some familiar elements of thinking about learning, with some new approaches in a conceptual toolkit intended to guide the work of anyone involved in learning design and deployment. Whilst some elements of the work may be specific to the BBC, we hope that there are many elements which are useful – or at least of interest – to anyone involved in learning.


The toolkit incorporates ideas that you will find familiar and some that you may not. At its heart is a theory of learning that suggests that all data is stored according to complex contextual cues which are predominantly emotional in nature – without these emotional ‘markers’ information merely passes through our system. Learning is a bit like the cognitive equivalent of those hooked seeds that get caught in your clothing – or like a virus. Sometimes we attach our own markers – as when something is important to us. This is pull learning. Other times an inspiring person in our lives will make something stick.

The design wheel then reflects those elements that we have found to be important – for example in building learners’ confidence it is important to equip them with the skills they need, make the learning relevant to their lives, and nurture their belief in themselves.

Once learners have this foundation, it is important to connect them to a world of resources and peers, allowing room for experimentation (whether in the classroom or online) and inspiration. Encourage them to stumble upon things that move them.

I don’t believe that these things are specific to the BBC, indeed a key finding was that our organisation subsumes a great many cultures – or ‘tribes’ Some of our tribes only like learning from an experienced authority, for example, and some tribes are happy to learn from anyone, anywhere so long as their work is ‘cool’.

We hope that you will find this work interesting, Shane and I would welcome your feedback.

A Unified Learning Theory

I recently read (can’t remember where) that any true lover of a subject is a sceptic. It’s a quote that I remember because it suggests that I have a love of learning rather than a bitter cynicism developed over decades of working in the field. Along these lines I was reading Donald Clark’s Plan B blog over the weekend. In a recent post he – yet again – trashes the notion of ‘Learning Styles’ and – yet again – savours the stinging retorts from those who make a living peddling this stuff. It actually can be quite fun stirring up the traditional learning community in this way – and Donald is fortunate, I suppose, that learning fundamentalists aren’t quite as reactive as say, religious fundamentalists (although the NLP crew seem well on the way. Only kidding!).

I’ve lost count of all the crap that regularly resurfaces in the septic tank that is learning theory: Kolb’s learning cycle, learning styles, NLP, learning by doing, Kirkpatrick… about 15 years ago I was fond of Bruner and his ‘Modes of Representation’. Accordingly, we ‘pioneered’ work on the ‘see-hear-do’ model – the idea being that if we presented information in these three ways we were not only broadening the appeal to various learning styles but over-encoding and greatly increasing the chance of recall. I spoke about it at conferences, I think. But it wasn’t enough – I wanted research to back it up – and so, in a story I have told many times, we developed the same content in five different formats of varying richness to determine just how much better our multimedia learning actually was. And – lo – people learned most from the text-only version; proving that learning is a bit like eating: you might enjoy a Super-size McBurger meal, but most of it passes through your system and your body can get all the nutrients it needs from much simpler fare. It’s all about the context.

But this is not the point I wanted to make: what really strikes me is how desperately we learning professionals crave a unified theory – something of Keynesian proportions that we can use to guide what we do and justify our existence. In reality, though, there is no theory of learning that will serve and all we have are a series of traditions – such as standing talking to people who are sitting listening – which we can’t really justify satisfactorily.

Of course there is plenty of research into learning, and some well supported general models – such as classical and operant conditioning. But these are not theories that work well in an everyday environment (take a look at Skinner’s ‘learning machine’ if you doubt this). There is also a great many solid pieces of research of interest (the mirror neurons research is especially interesting, I think) but which we struggle to keep up with, and which to date have failed to amount to an overall paradigm.

Games are interesting – I digress slightly, but the most fascinating and addictive games, such as World of Warcraft, work because they do follow simple (operant) conditioning models. You get rewarded for every little thing that you do. Gradually your experience points will add up and you will advance a level. As you advance levels you have access to new abilities and – more importantly ostentatious gear. Imagine if such a model were truly applied to our profession: for each course completion (or good test score) I would earn experience points – and perhaps for my blogs and tweets too. I might never be a level 80 learning professional, but I am guessing that by now I have levelled enough to drive a 5-series BMW and wear the Rolex that only level 40+ learning professionals get to wear. Could we really be that petty? Just sit on my train in the morning and look at the rings, bags, watches and suits….

But back to business: what we need is a theory of learning on which to base things such as instructional design models and evaluation principles. That is not to say there aren’t plenty of useful resources – over the years I have learned most of the really good stuff from colleagues such as Laura, Clive, Donald, Charles who have developed a keen sense for what works and what doesn’t. And there are also some great commonsense books – such as Michael Allen’s.Guide to E-learning. But these fall short of a grand theory.

For those of us who have lost faith in all the learning mumbo-jumbo, I think it is not enough merely to scoff at those who are still peddling it – I think we need to try and come up with something original, something that we are happy to defend. Yes, I appreciate that in all likelihood this will only result in a net contribution to the mumbo-jumbo pool – and that in the absence of sound research we are probably just building castles in the sky: but I, for one, long for more creative discussions about learning, discussions which seem to make sense of our collective experience of working in this field – after all, real science often starts with theories derived from anecdotal observations.

To this end, I have started developing my own ideas around how learning works and, together with Shane from my team and an external agency, have been doing some research within the BBC on our peculiar group of learners. Some time in the next few weeks we will complete the set of learning design tools that we have been working on for the last six months – and I hope to share this with anyone who is interested. If only so they can tell me what a load of rubbish it is.

Memes, Vemes and two cautionary tales for elearning

Ideas, it seems, have a life of their own. In recent years the notion of ‘memes’, in an oddly self-referential way, has become popular and we have begun to think of thoughts in evolutionary terms. Thanks to Richard Dawkins we now understand that ideas have a life of their own, they reproduce and spread using people as hosts and may be either adaptive or maladaptive for us – assisting or hampering us in our quest for success.

The Internet has prompted the explosion of the spread of memes by providing a highly effective transmission mechanism – far better than word of mouth, newsprint or even television (although the SuBo meme was seeded on TV it spread mainly via YouTube). If you are still in the dark as to the kinds of things I am talking about, you can get a better idea here: http://knowyourmeme.com/

So it with some trepidation that I would like to lay claim to introducing the first deliberately engineered meme virus – a ‘veme’ if you like. This veme is infectious and works by altering the host’s processing of information in order to thrive and reproduce. It does not radically disrupt thinking and even has some beneficial effects. Before I proceed, though, I should caution you that if you want to avoid the risk of infection by downloading this veme you should not read below the dotted lines below. You have been warned.

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The Veme is an ‘acoustic-substitution’ type and consists of over-writing the word ‘elephants’ in sentences where the word ‘elements’ is used.

Having been infected with this veme, I now immediately substitute the word ‘elephants’ whenever I hear someone say ‘elements’. So, for example:

They say: “I need Photoshop elements on my machine”
I hear: “I need Photoshop elephants on my machine”

(There then ensues a brief, ‘Scrubs-like’ moment, where I picture elephants expert in the use of photoshop squashed into an office chair, thumping at a keyboard with their feet.)

Other examples include:
‘This project has a number of discrete elements’ – I like the idea of elephant discretion generally, or:

‘What are the key elements for success?’ – and where are they hiding? Damn those sneaky elephants.

The benefit to the host of infection by this particular veme is that it does lighten up the occasional meeting or lecture; although on the downside I have occasionally crashed mid-sentence having inadvertently used the word ‘elements’.



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In the world of training there are some familiar memes/vemes: ‘blended learning’, Kirkpatrick, virtual environments.

Two memes that are swilling around at the moment are ‘rapid development’, and ‘social networks for learning’ – and since we have pioneering development in both areas – and have shared this work quite publicly – I feel some sense of responsibility for the associated, and infectious, discussion.

What worries me is this: the cautions are being missed in the hype. In both cases (rapid dev and social networks) if you simply introduce these solutions technically into your organisation they will fail. They will fail badly and they will fail very visibly.

I have tried to explain why – for example at the #CIPD09 speech – but perhaps unsurprisingly the possibility that the bandwagon may be missing a wheel has been largely overlooked. I’d like to briefly recap the problems, based on our experience:

Rapid development: hardly anybody will produce any content and those who do will produce rubbish.

In the early days of our deployment we trained literally hundreds of enthusiastic SMEs in the use of rapid development tools for content production. Very few of these ever produced anything of a decent standard. The model now works very effectively only because we have produced standard support and coaching plans which pair enthusiastic SMEs with learning consultants who can
a) structure the project and keep it moving along,
b) help them to overcome technical obstacles,
c) ensure that the output is good visually and pedagogically.

Social Networks: you will set it up and nobody will use it (except those people you force to use it).

Just because people are using social networks, it doesn’t mean they want to use yours – in fact, the opposite is true: if they are posting stuff to Facebook or Twitter why on earth would they want to waste time contributing to your paltry Web 2.0 experiment? In brief,
1) only a small percentage of people actually post worthwhile content to the web,
2) social networks need significant critical mass to get going,
3) organisations have yet to recognise and reward activity on social networks so it is effectively tacitly discouraged.

It is possible to make social networks work, but in the near future this will involve artificially driving contribution (for example by requiring trainers to find and share best practice using them) or by incorporating existing activity into your solution (so, for example you could act as a ‘curator’, identifying the most interesting twitter feeds from respected professionals and incorporating these as a section on your intranet page – you can imagine how this might work for HR professionals, for example).

For example I was recently asked to outline how social media could be used for an ‘opportunities portal’ and suggested the following five potential applications:
1) PUSH: using, for example a twitter account to replace the ‘click here to receive email updates’ option and additional raise the profile of the sitte’s activity.
2) PULL: drawing feeds from selected social networks (such as those used by recruiters) to create a fuller and more immediate environment
3) SEX APPEAL: incorporating short video stories (by force) into the site itself to give a (false) YouTube feel – possibly allowing comments – but with the intention of making the site feel less intimidating and more easy to identify with,
4) RANKING – using a site blog to improve the ranking, (as well as the ‘homeliness’ of the site)
5) COMPANION SITE – using an existing mechanism (such as Facebook groups) to establish a companion network where interested audiences can connect in a free-for-all fashion, at arms length.

In other words – rather like the heyday of e-learning – whilst rapid development and social networks offer huge benefits, without an effective implementation strategy both approaches will almost certainly fail to progress beyond the pilot stage. And I hope the elements I have outlined above will help.

Two Worlds

There’s a remarkable disparity within the world of elearning – probably common to other areas of work, but no less noteworthy as a consequence: namely, the divide between what gets talked about and what is being done. A divide between the world of the commentators and the players, if you like.

It’s easy to miss: if you spend any time reading industry publications or attending conferences you can easily get a distorted perception of what is actually happening in the world of online learning. This is mainly because the sorts of people who regularly speak at conferences are the same ones who regularly contribute to industry publications – and the vast majority of this group are not directly involved in managing elearning within organisations.

In practice this means that elearning events and magazines are something like a parallel universe – full of conversations about sexy but largely out of reach stuff: web 2.0, emotional intelligence, building learning organisation, blogs and wikis, virtual worlds, gaming, strategic alignment etc. If, on the other hand you take the time to talk to people whose job is to implement elearning their ambitions are decidedly more modest: rolling out a online induction course, improving completion rates, using simple authoring tools, introducing a basic level of ‘blending’, getting agreement to use a single LMS, finding a cheap but reliable supplier.

I confess to being in a fortunate position and therefore something of a hypocrite: I do have the luxury of being able to experiment at the frontiers of the technology, and I do regularly talk and sometimes write about these things - but I am conscious that the majority of my peers work within more severe constraints. In summary, I still think the day-to-day needs of the elearning practitioner are largely overlooked by our own chattering class, of which I am a part. Must try harder.


I saw some extraordinary films over the holidays – notably Avatar – a film which itself concerns two worlds and the conflict that arises between them. As you probably know the film concerns the identity crisis faced by a wheelchair-user living what becomes an increasingly desirable second life via the magic of technology. Aside from the fantastic setting it’s something of an allegory for the lives of the audience: just as our everyday lives are governed by attempts at a systematic reduction of risk and the unexpected, so our lust for adventure grows. I have heard it said that films are simply life with the boring bits left out – but you would be hard pressed these days to find a single episode in most people’s lives even half as exciting as those routinely strung together in a Hollywood storyline. Precisely those things which appeal to us in film are those things denied us in life.

I suppose I find it ironic that the more we control and regulate our everyday lives the further we find ourselves from the excitement and adventure that we crave. The film ‘Surrogate’ illustrates this quite nicely: in a future not far from now, an obese population lies permanently in the embrace of machines which allow them to live out their dream lives via a robot proxy – a self that, if not indestructible, is replaceable and upgradeable.

It is indeed becoming possible to separate out our thrilling virtual lives from our safe physical ones - but a problem remains: just as the classroom is now becoming a painfully boring environment for GenY, so is the modern workplace.

Back from a short trip to the future...

It actually wasn’t that tough getting there (I went with the peanut butter sandwiches in the end): the hard part was finding a decent edge, once I found one it was quite easy to peel back and squeeze through. I only went as far as 2020 – I figured I might not be able to cope much beyond that.

Superficially, quite a lot of things are the same: people still take the train – no, they don’t all have jetpacks (but cars are a lot quieter). The main thing that has changed is data integration – and it’s really a massive shift. Just as the PC is the hardware that acted as a portal to the internet, the WorldView is the device that allows us to access integrated reality. WorldView is basically a head-mounted display – which sounds like some cyberpunk monstrosity but is actually about the size of those wraparound sunglasses people wear to ski in. Not everyone wears one – there are people too poor to afford one, and some older people refuse to wear them, but almost all kids and most adults do.

The headset is wirelessly connected a pocket-sized device a bit like the iphone (only with no screen). The first time I put one on I felt sick. It was a couple of hours before I could actually look and move at the same time. Basically, the thing operates in two modes: opaque and semi-transparent. When you are walking around it’s in semi-transparent mode and the effect is incredible: firstly, you can see all the information about people as they walk around; their profile is displayed around them and by shifting your eyes from one person to another the information zooms and comes into focus. It’s a bit like the Heads-Up display in Warcraft – there are colour-coded dials, scrolling boxes – you can configure it however you like – the most important feature though is matching: the system detects people with matching profile features and prioritises them in your field of view. It makes it a lot easier to find people with similar interests (unless their profile is completely restricted). And if you wanted to chat with someone in your real space and someone in integrated reality you can just pull them all together – I’ll come back to that.

The other thing you notice immediately about integrated reality is how all the surfaces come to life. Anybody with so much as a garden shed can sell the space for advertising, so as you move around you are constantly surrounded by adverts tailored to your profile. This is really, really distracting for a noob – advertisers will know, for example your favourite actress so don’t be surprised when she appears beside you and asks if you want to go for a coffee in Starbucks. It’s really quite bizarre. Depending on your subscription level you can control how much advertising you see.

But data integration is much more than targeted advertising: it’s really easy to get anywhere (sat nav is integrated into your field of view), and overall doing things in integrated reality is fundamentally different. Let me try and explain from a familiar perspective: there is still elearning, but now it is in the form of brief infomercials which raise awareness around things like the importance of diversity or safety. They carry links to more information. Now at first I worried that people wouldn’t actually ever learn anything using this approach, but in fact the process is built into the integrated reality – so if, for example, you sit at your desk and you haven’t completed a workplace self-assessment – a warning message flashes up in your visual field and you can’t continue. Likewise, when you are interviewing someone the system will prompt you for appropriate questions and screen any that you input. Effectively you ‘learn as you live’. You might think that things like ‘riding a bike’ would be exempt from this, but toddlers with WorldView can actually see the correct hand positions overlaid on their environment as they attempt to balance – the same approach works for manual procedures ranging from cooking through to boiler maintenance. The upshot is that things you do frequently you get good at, the things you do rarely you tend to rely more heavily on reference.

The opaque environment is really interesting as well: there are times when you are sitting down – at home, at work or on a train for example – and then switching to opaque gives you an immersive environment in which you can work with applications, watch a movie etc. Text input is via the thing around your neck that detects sub-vocalisation. As with the semi environment, shifting your eyes brings different areas of the screen up or down, and typically there are several active areas at any one time. Immersive gameplay is absolutely awesome – it just feels like you’re there.

I was testing this out on a train when Nick2 conferenced me in to a meeting. Again, a really weird experience – one minute I was fighting for my life against the Orc Hordes, then I noticed this icon bouncing up and down bottom left and I stared at it - the next thing I knew I was sitting on a Caribbean beach with three other people. What I hadn’t realised is that Nick2 had configured my avatar to be female as a joke, so I got quite a shock when I looked down. The others laughed at my reaction. When the message eventually flashed up saying I had reached my destination I had actually forgotten that I was on a train!

Avatars are an interesting aspect of integrated reality – people spend a lot of time customising and shaping their avatars – you can even turn them on in semi mode, so that the people’s avatars are overlaid as they walk around – it makes the whole world a bit like the bar scene in Star Wars.

Overall the toughest thing to get used to is just how much stuff people are able to juggle at any one time: I struggled just to take in the information I was seeing about people as they walked around me, but most kids will be simultaneously gaming, chatting/conferencing, working etc. by rapidly shifting focus a few times each second. I would have thought it was impossible – but they are clearly able to do it. I’m ashamed to admit I had to take the WorldView off after every few hours – I just found it emotionally and cognitively draining, and it gave me headaches if I wore it for much longer. To be fair, I did refuse the cognitive enhancers which might have helped – but apparently there are concerns over the long-term effects (although their use is now as prevalent as coffee-drinking).

The big debates are familiar: whilst the level of profile information different parties have access to is now a much more sophisticated mechanism, there is ever-increasing anxiety regarding privacy and illegal trafficking of data. The work-life balance issue is now much more than an abstract debate, as companies seek more control over the employee’s integrated reality and individuals assert their freedom to deliver performance in whatever way they wish. I suppose I find it odd that people get together in schools or workplaces – but they still do, though to a lesser extent. I also find it odd that when they are together most of there interaction will be with people or experiences that aren’t actually ‘there’ but I guess there are just parts of human nature that aren’t so easily extinguished. Success is a far more volatile thing – an individual’s creative work may suddenly earn them a significant amount of money, even while their employer vanishes overnight. Most people try to cultivate a ‘portfolio’ of revenue streams, therefore.

It was actually easier to get back than it was to get out – there were just more edges: I guess it’s because in 2020 people care less about their real environment so it’s all a bit more derelict. The problem with these trips is they leave you feeling a bit discontent and displaced – you realise that you don’t belong in the future, but now you feel really impatient with all the ridiculously primitive technology in the present: stupid little screens that you carry around with you, having to email messages, not being able to see people’s profiles – so you find yourself in a crowded room and have no idea whether or not you have anything in common with any of these people. It feels a bit like losing a sense. And I forgot to eat my sandwiches.

A Taxonomy of Trainers

I am not intending to make a habit of blogging about training, but it recently struck me that people become trainers for very different reasons – and that this is reflected to varying degrees in the approach that they take to training. It might even be possible to define something like a ‘taxonomy of training types’. Donald Clark prompted me to make a start on this Linnean endeavour, in the hope that others might add their own discoveries:

Authoritative Andy: Andy is the expert. Worship his monumental expertise. Often a highly experienced practitioner, Andy sees his role as sharing the wealth of his knowledge with his hapless students. Sessions tend to be delivered as ‘information dumps’ often in a style which owes more to Andy’s quirks than the needs of learners. He’s not really a big fan of argument or alternative approaches. By slide 571 you will convinced that nobody in the world knows more about this topic than Andy.

Caring Karen: this type could equally have ended up in nursing, what they like above all is just how rewarding it is to help people – and especially to build their confidence. First and foremost what matters is nurturing the people in their care. Karen works well with people at the bottom of the personal development ladder, but evaluation is often expressed in ‘cards and flowers’ terms.

Performing Paul: wow. Is this a training session or a sales presentation? Could be either. Performing Paul is an entertainer, often with good interpersonal skills and always something of a showman. Brimming with confidence, performing Paul will leave a lasting impression – but not necessarily any lasting learning. Great at audience engagement and persuasive patter, Paul often focuses exclusively on his performance during the session, rather than that of his audience members after it.

Marathon Mark: you have to give him credit, he has overcome so many obstacles to get where he is today. For a some trainers training itself represents a personal challenge, and every session is a personal triumph of sorts. Marathon Mark delivers sessions which exact a huge toll on his energies – and sometimes leave learning and learners feeling as if they are just there to cheer.

Organised Olivia: ‘If you turn to section 4.1.3 of your colour booklet…’ you will find you are utterly overwhelmed by the sheer effort that has gone into planning and organising all this stuff. Organised Olivia is master of the training project, each element of the 427 step programme slotted into a spreadsheet and stapled carefully the night before. The terminator of the training world, brilliant at large-scale complex training rollouts, Olivia can come across as a little impersonal and fail to bring passion and enthusiasm to the table.

Look-at-me Lucy: you may feel as if you are in a scene from ‘Little Britain’: quite a few trainers clearly just like to be the centre of attention. Expect exaggerated performances and a holiday-camp atmosphere ‘let’s all have FUN!’ - and some of her sessions are, even if not in quite the way she intended. It has never occurred to Lucy to worry about learning effectiveness – the happy sheets say it all.

Evangelina: …probably knows more about training than you do. Evangelina lives, breathes and loves learning. Master of the holistic learning experience, this pedagogical Joan of Arc will seek to convert you even as you reach for your pitchfork. Capable of selfless devotion to learning, expect Evangelina’s rich and original sessions to reach parts of your shortcomings you didn’t know existed. So persuaded is she of the intrinsic value of learning that a hard-nosed analysis might be entirely unnecessarily.

Peter Pan: some people just didn’t have their natural sense of exploration and delight in learning beaten out of them whilst at school. Thankfully for us, a handful of these types have made it into training roles where they run highly learner-centered sessions buzzing with challenges and chit-chat. Peter is so at home in the classroom experience that he is unlikely ever to venture far beyond it, or sadly to achieve much influence over the training organisation.

Don’t get me wrong: this may sound very cynical, but I’ve seen trainers of every type achieve great things. And I recognise myself in at least one of the caricatures above – I only wish I had them all: I guess the perfect trainer would have just the right mix of enthusiasm and authority, a perfect balance of organisation and showmanship – equally caring and calculating in their assessment of what they do.

But if this type sounds rare, it’s been my experience that the rarest type of trainer of all is the one who can prove that they have made a difference; most will rely heavily on positive comments from delegates, some will cite impressive numbers of people trained. A very few will produce sophisticated-looking business cases promising ‘improvements in efficiency’ and ‘reductions in errors’ – promises so persuasive that nobody ever bothered to check them. It seems trainers either ‘just know’ they make a difference or can’t find a way to prove it. In my line of work the business outcome is often merely that we wasted less money – hardly something to write home about.

I do sometimes tire of the management obsession with measurement – as one wise colleague retorted ‘you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it’. True, but if you stopped feeding your pig and they didn’t lose any weight you might wonder if you were feeding them the right stuff.

What do you think – have I missed a few off the list?

Designing world-class elearning

I don’t usually blog about learning, because it’s not really a topic in its own right: you don’t really learn anything interesting about learning by reading about learning – you find out interesting things about learning by looking, for example, at developments in cognitive psychology, memetics, philosophy or online trends.

But I thought I should blog some thoughts about why and how we are creating the best elearning programmes: this year we won both the top UK awards for best online content (WOLCE and elearning) and have done so a few times in the past.

1. Perhaps the first thing to say is this: forget about all the instructional design mumbo-jumbo. Most of it is patently unsupported, the rest is at best thought-provoking.

2. A good starting point is to think about the emotional journey that you want to take your learners on. Your objective is, after all, not to get information across but to make people care enough to do something differently (even if that is looking up information). You can sketch this journey as an emotional line if you like: hopefully it doesn’t ‘flatline’ like most courses, or start with a peak and peter out thereafter. A good course looks more like a mountain range. Think about great speeches you have heard, good movies, memorable plays – this is more like what you are trying to create. This applies even if what you are trying to create is a humble IT training course – I spend quite a lot of time capturing screens, and bringing this to life with commentary is a real challenge in itself. And it’s much more than ‘being funny’: is the tone right, do people feel a sense of belonging, does the course connect with their core values, does it feel real?

3. Start to think in terms of the ‘rhythm’ of your course – learn to spot those bits where it is just dull for several minutes. Try to break up the rhythm – people like surprises and exploration (insert long story about dopamine). Variety is your friend.

4. Try to look beyond tired expressions like ‘engaging’ or ‘interaction’: what you want is ‘traction’ – something that grips your audience – and things that lack interaction can have traction, just as interactions often fail to grip anyone. Expectation failure – one of the few traditional concepts I have found worthwhile – helps at the start of courses: people are often only ready to learn when they realise they have something to learn.

5. Remember that when you want to say something, how you say it is the most important thing. Nobody believes those creepy emails they get from Internal Comms. Very few people like being patronised or lectured. Probably the most powerful message is one delivered passionately and honestly (i.e. unscripted) by your colleagues – or someone you really respect. Recently I have seen some really high-budget movies that just failed to stir me: the acting was poor, the emotions inauthentic. I have also seen TED talks – with no slides – that moved me to tears (Chris Abani, for example)

6. For this reason, video is a good medium – we unconsciously mirror the emotions of the people we observe, and these feeling in turn are encoded along with the information – in fact it is largely this that gives information its sticking power. People are interested in interesting people. We remember best the enthusiastic teachers.

7. Tell stories. Ever since Schank story-telling has been a topic that bobs up and down in learning conversations – but generally people fail to question why storytelling works: it’s because it attaches emotional and contextual cues to information, and suits our natural mechanisms for information storage. Instead of thinking about pictures to illustrate the objectives you want to get across, default to thinking about where you can find someone who personifies the point you want to make, and capturing their spark.

8. Polish your work. Sadly, a big part of the perception of quality is in the design. The bad news is that if you don’t have a clue about graphic design, it is unlikely that anyone will ever think your courses are really great – the good news is that it is becoming easier by the day to learn about good design (I have some good links on delicious) and to practice it (Jane Hart’s ‘100 tools’ will get you off to a flying start). In truth, our suppliers often deserve credit for this (they rarely miss an opportunity).

9. Get the text off the screen (as much as possible). Why does news have a newsreader? Why not just bullet-points? (I’m sure you can complete the rest of the argument). Try to create a rich visual experience. Human brains are devoted in large part to processing visual data, and making sense of things in 3D environments. Learning in its basic form is contextualised – so ideally learning should be in the form of a ‘journey’ – where you go different places and learn different things (some interesting research on chimp learning around this).

10. Know your tribes. Connecting with your audience means getting to know them. You may well be able to make a good guess, but you won’t always know what they will respond best to unless you find out more about the experiences they naturally gravitate towards.

Broadly, there are two classes of learning: the stuff that people want to know, and the stuff you want them to know. These principles apply to the latter – in a world where people can hunt down skills and knowledge if they care enough there is a diminishing demand for ‘push’ learning – but all the more need for it to hit the mark.