We have a wheel, we built a cart

I wanted to share this project and am grateful to my colleagues at BP for allowing me to do so.

It had always seemed to me that making significant progress in an area requires an understanding of that area, so for much of the early part of my career the lack of a theoretical basis for learning practice troubled me. In 2006 I proposed the Affective Context model, and began thinking about how to develop tools and techniques that could translate theory into practice, in areas such as learning design and evaluation.

We now have new approaches to learning design and evaluation. I'd like to share with you an example of the former - our online induction programme. Previously this comprised 8hrs worth of conventional eLearning modules.

I'm not going to talk at length about why or how we did what we did, but two central tools were 'care curves' and 'disaggregated media'. In the case of care curves the idea is that if the essential nature of learning is affective (either extrinsic concern or intrinsic) then the starting point is an understanding of  the things that learners really care about. Accordingly, your role as a learning professional will either be to respond to these concerns or to generate new ones. For performance support folks this won't seems alien - but it goes a little further than enumerating tasks. When people join an organisation they may be concerned with 'unwritten rules' or 'norms' for example. We ditched the conventional TNA process in favor of structured enquiry groups. Armed with an understanding of the range of concerns (a sort of affective heat-map) one can match media types to each: checklists and infographics where the individual concern is high - more emotive media forms where individual concern is low but organisational concern is high. By avoiding the temptation to bolt all these bits of media into a SCORM object we create an online learning experience akin to that which learners 'design' for themselves when on the web. Stuff which needs tracking is tracked, but the LMS is invisible.

The final result owes much to the efforts of Mark, Jacques, Shane and Jon. The results – qualitatively and quantitatively - have been on a different scale altogether to typical responses to eLearning. Many more of our projects are developing along similar lines, and it has meant rethinking every stage of the ADDIE model.