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?
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)