Learned vs. Learners

I have been deviating from the key themes of this blog, i.e., learning, performance, training and collaboration, for some time now. However, the deviations have been topics that moved me deeply, and I did not want to write about them in a separate blog. They are as much a part of me as all things learning. In the future too, I see this blog being intermittently peppered with posts unrelated to organizational learning but delineating experiences that are of personal import.

With today’s post, I am back on the theme of learning and its impact on performance—personal and organizational.

In times of change, learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. -- Eric Hoffer

This classic quotation summarizes in a sentence what takes scholars and academicians reams of paper to theorize and prove. And this is the trigger for today’s post. The difference between the terms “learners” and “learned” is crucial in today’s environment of constant change, and this is my topic for today.

I have recently been reading Building Expertise: Cognitive Methods for Training and Performance Improvement at a colleague’s recommendation. This is one of those must read books for trainers/learning and development professionals/anyone interested in the phenomenon called learning.

Building Expertise deals with learning and training as it needs to be. However, before I ramble on, I want to clarify that this post is not a book review. I want to highlight a few concepts from the book that impact how we think of learning, training and performance.

It is now common knowledge that an organization’s ability to innovate is its competitive edge in today’s economy. Innovation itself is a term that requires some unpacking. For example, it could be used to mean blue ocean thinking or innovation by combining the already existing in an entirely novel, unforeseen manner. But I digress.

In this post, I want to examine a few aspects of expertise and what that means for the workers of the 21^st Century.

According to Wikipedia (2007) “…an expert, more generally, is a person with extensive knowledge or ability in a particular area of study.” ~ Building Expertise, Ruth Clark

Today, we need experts and in more diverse areas than we even know. However, building expertise is becoming a challenge—an almost insurmountable one on occasions. In the earlier days, expertise came from experience. Often, years of it; 10,000 hours of it. This experience was then codified into best practices and the next generation of workers was trained to follow the best practices and get the desired results. Predictable, measurable, trainable! This worked wonderfully (when the world was stable and work was routine) till it didn’t anymore. We all know that we have reached a point where codified best practices have almost ceased to exist. Almost, because there are some routine tasks that still need to be done, but do human agents need to do those? More importantly, are those the kind of work that will provide us with the indispensable competitive edge? Maybe not. With everything changing at a pace never experienced before, there is no time to undergo the same experience repeatedly for the building of expertise around it. I am talking about knowledge work here. Not about playing the guitar or becoming a champion chess player. Those kinds of expertise will still need 10,000 hours of practice.

Ruth Clark, in the book, describes 7 lessons learned about experts:

1.       Expertise requires extensive practice

2.       Expertise is domain specific

3.       Expertise requires deliberate practice

4.       Experts see with different eyes

5.       Experts CAN get stuck

6.       Expertise grows from TWO intelligences

7.       Challenging problems require diverse expertise (this ties in with what Scott Page says in The Difference but that is for another post)

What most interested me are the last two. My Aha! moment happened when I read about the concept of two intelligences. While I have read about adaptability, understand its impact and importance in a world that is in a constant state of beta, I was not sure I could explain it to someone else with conviction and theoretical support.

She talks about routine expertise vs. adaptive expertise and crystallized vs. fluid intelligences. 

Quoting from the book below:

Routine experts are very effective at solving problems that are representative of problems in their domains. They are adept at “seeing” and solving the problem based on their domain-specific mental models.

In contrast, adaptive experts evolve their core competencies by venturing into areas that require them to function as “intelligent” novices.

Fluid intelligence is the basis for reasoning on novel tasks or within unfamiliar contexts; in other words, it gives rise to adaptive expertise. In contrast, crystallized intelligence is predicated on learned skills…and is the basis for routine expertise. 

Routine experts are the learned ones who have deep domain-specific knowledge; however, often this deep knowledge becomes a hindrance in viewing the world through fresh eyes. They tend to see everything through the lenses of their domain. Adaptive experts, on the other hand, are able to take on the role of inquiring novices when required and are thus able to view a problem from different perspectives. They are the learners.

However, it is also important to note that adaptive expertise is based on routine expertise. One cannot adapt to new situations and events unless one has deep domain-specific knowledge.

Who are Instructional Designers? The existential dilemma...

Apologies for a long post but it is one of those where I was internally debating and had to resolve this conflict with myself…

1. Post objectives:

• a. To gain personal clarity on the role of an ID in a business/corporate training setting
• b. To pinpoint a few critical skill sets required of an ID
• c. To summarize the different tasks of an ID during a PLC

2. Post type: reflective, discursive, open ended
3. Acronyms used:

• a. ID = Instructional Design
• b. BA = Business Analyst
• c. PS = Performance Support
• d. PLC = Project Life Cycle

4. Similar post in this blog: In Response: Accidental Instructional Designers #dl09--Part I

5. Comments on other blog(s) regarding qualities of an ID: Perfect Behaviour

6. Typical ID Resume I came across on www.Naukri.com that really made no sense. I have tried hard to ignore the painful lack of Parallelism in the bullet points! Can we blame anyone for either undervaluing the function or becoming glassy eyed by the jargon thrown at them…?

Role: Instructional Designer:

Exp: 5-9 yrs

Qualification: Any Graduate

Job Profile:

1.The candidate should understand instructional design theories and models and should effectively apply them to develop eLearning content.

2.You should analyze client requirements, assess learner profiles, and design teaching/learning models that are tailor made for the target audience.

3.You should have a minimum of 2-3 years of experience in a corporation, educational institute, publication house, or journalism.

4.You should have experience in designing curriculum based products.

5.Professionals from the E-Learning industry are preferred.

6.Soft skills: Good communication & written skills.

Quote from Harold Jarche: Skills for learning professionals

“Today, active involvement in informal learning, particularly through web-based communities, is key to remaining professional and creative in a field. Being a learning professional in a Web 2.0 world is becoming more about your network than your current knowledge.”

Note: For the purpose of this post, I have approached the ID function from the perspective of online training.

Preamble:
The ID debate raised its head once again in one of my conversations with my colleague. The conversation is not new—it has been played out across various platforms and networks. Blog posts have waxed eloquent about the roles and functions of an ID. Comments have flown back and forth faster than one can say Jack Robinson. The role models of the ID community like Dr. Karl Kapp, Cammy Bean, Connie Malamed, et al have shared their thoughts. Yet, the debate continues. The business world still glances at the role of an instructional designer with skepticism. The belief that writing skill is tantamount to an ID’s skill still abides. And as technology advances and Web 2.0 phenomenon becomes firmly entrenched, the ID's role becomes even more complex and thus nebulous. Who are these people? Where do they all come from? Where do they belong?

Some of the questions—and pertinent ones indeed which helped me a great deal—that my colleague posed were:

1. How will you convince a business organization that ID is a necessary function when designing learning solutions?
Many organizations are investing in Authoring Tools like Articulate and Captivate and strongly feel that their SMEs who have in-depth knowledge of the subject can deliver the e-learning courses. I have attended a Captivate Training session where many attendees were SMEs from different orgs.

2. What does an ID do that a Business Analyst (BA) cannot do?

Wikipedia has a page devoted to the role of a BA and there are umpteenth other websites that define the role too. A BA’s role today seems to be as volatile and evolving as an ID’s.

Some relevant reads:
i. What is a Business Analyst?
ii. Duties of a Business Analyst
iii. Rethinking the Role of Business Analysts: Towards Agile Business Analysts?

3. Is Instructional Design a specialized function? If yes, in what? They seem to be doing a whole lot of things.
Have tried to answer this in the post below.

4. Are IDs generalists?
Yes; because “facilitating learning” is a general function that impacts all areas of an organization. An ID must be a generalist to be able to see the big picture, spot the larger patterns.

The questions set me thinking—partly because in spite of being passionate about my chosen field of work—I could not really defend it with rationale. And it has taken me quite a while to summarize all that I feel in this post.

Some questions that raced through my mind were:
Is the ID function under-valued because the field welcomes almost anyone to its fold and allows them to develop the skills? Would it be appreciated more if becoming an Instructional Designer was restricted to those with valid ID certifications/degrees? I am not so sure.I had written a post along similar lines some time back called New Skills for Learning Professionals.

The more I reflected I realized that an ID’s role is an amalgamation of a number of functions. During the life cycle of a project, the ID function involves:

1. Business Analysis with a focus on how training/performance support can impact the bottom line. This comprise:

• Organizational gap analysis
• Strategic needs analysis
• Performance and task analysis
• Understanding the ROI
• Target audience analysis (psychographics, demographics, etc.)
• Spotting where knowledge flow is being bottle-necked and opening up those channels
• Interviewing all stakeholders (CIOs, training heads, HR representatives, line managers, team leads, technicians, engineers, SMEs, et al) to gather all the perspectives
• “Training” all stakeholders so that they understand the positive implication of training and PS

2. Solution designing with a goal to bridge the gap through performance support, training, designing of a “learnscape” which may involve creating both formal/informal learning opportunities, suggestions for collaboration tools, PS solutions, and much more in this world of Web 2.0...

3. Presenting the solution to all the stakeholders for inputs, guiding/moderating such discussions, simplifying ID concepts and presenting the ROI of it all in business terms.

4. Designing the blue print of the final, agreed upon solution roadmap. This is where a lot of the ID concepts and theories of Andragogy and also Collagogy or Heutagogy (applicable in today’s learning scenario) come into play. This should also ideally encapsulate:

• The scope of the training program
• The overall notional learning time
• The solutions used to support/enhance the assimilation like, scenarios, stories, case studies, simulations, animations, etc.

Note: the solutions should be firmly based on learning theories and not used at random. E.g., a training program requiring a learner to problem-solve lends itself to the Constructivist Approach like the use of scenarios/case studies.

5. Gathering the content relevant for that training program from the SMEs (Wearing the SME's Shoes: Recalling a #lrnchat Session)

6. Designing the content into learner-friendly chunks or creating the micro-design documents.

7. Creating storyboards (documents that will help graphic designers, illustrators, programmers, integrators).

8. Sometimes, turning the storyboards into functional modules using Authoring tools like Articulate.

This means that during the entire Project Life Cycle (PLC), an ID plays a gamut of roles beginning with that of a BA and ending with content writing and sometimes developing. I had to write it down to visualize the span. And I have not even ventured into the depths of design thinking that an ID should understand to be able to effectively represent the content in a multimedia format.

In short then, an ID’s functions involve BA to understanding the concepts of storyboarding during a PLC. And an ID typically begins her/his career with storyboarding and climbs up gradually as s/he gains an understanding of all the different tasks and duties involved.

Can anyone become an ID?
Yes, they can provided they are willing to go through the steps, provided they have a passion for learning.

An ID’s role entails certain characteristics:

• Have a questioning mind--ask about the learners, the need for the course, the organization's need, about the content, about anything and everything that is remotely connected to the training...
• Be observant--learn to see the underlying meaning and hear the unsaid, unstated needs when talking to learners, client, project managers...
• Be analytical--when going through content, needs analysis, organization's goals and business needs...
• Be empathetic--think from the other person's standpoint...be it the learner, the graphic designers, project managers, and most importantly, the client...
• Be meticulous and diligent--capture and reflect all observations and analysis in the training programs...
• Have a strong understanding of instructional strategies--think of the learners taking the course...learners who are super busy professionals and make the course easy for them using the right instructional strategies...
• Be willing to learn and change and own up to mistakes--this requires no qualifier.

Should IDs be called by some other name?
Probably yes; Instructional Designs are sets of theories that are applied to create sound learning experiences. The role is essentially an amalgamation of BA, and L&D, and Human Capital Management functions. Maybe, it’s time to rename instructional designers to Learning and Development Facilitators Consultants/Strategists. What say?

Go through the slide share: http://www.slideshare.net/cammybean/new-skills-for-instructional-designers

Switch: When change is hard...

The subject matter is a book called Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard! I finished reading it this afternoon.

When one completes a book that tells you how to change or bring about change and it coincides with what is topmost on your mind, it does cause you to reflect a little more than usual. My reflection usually circles back to how people learn. And the same happened with Switch.

In their inimitable manner, Dan and Chip Heath have once again excelled in pinning down the abstract, in tackling that bugbear called Change that every manager and leader conceptualizes and envisions, but can seldom bring to pass. This is a book that should be on the shelf of every manager, leader, change management gurus, teachers, learners and anyone else who believes that change is the TRUTH, is inevitable for survival but often perceives the barriers as insurmountable.

Analysis
I am a teacher. At least that is how I started my career; I am still a teacher marketing myself under fancier terms like “instructional designer” and “learning solutionist” and “performance consultant”.

Once I put down the book, I tried to map Switch to teaching strategies or, to use the terms more relevant to today’s corporate setting, Performance-Focused Training. Since the goal of any training program is to bring about a change in the behavior of learners, all the 3 parameters of change advocated by the two brothers can be applied in toto to a training program, and it would be a resounding success.

Using the metaphor of the Rider (mahout), the Elephant and the Path, Switch advocates 3 criteria for bringing about change. I have tried to map each of these 3 criteria to the designing of a performance-focused training program. The Rider stands for the anlytical mind, the Elephant is representative of our emotions and the Path is the environment one operates in.

1. Direct the Rider:  what looks like resistance is often lack of clarity. So provide crystal clear direction.

Make training laser focused; trim the flab. Identify the key areas/workflows a learner needs to know to be able to perform on the field. Tell the learner precisely what they will be able to “DO” after the training, and then go about showing them how.

2. Motivate the Elephant: what looks like laziness is often exhaustion. The Rider can’t get his way by force for very long. So it’s critical that you engage people’s emotional side—get their Elephants on the path and cooperative.

Don’t make the training resemble a Switch (noun): a slender flexible whip, rod, or twig. Force never got anyone anywhere, at least not for a long time, and never when seeking to bring about change. Avoid cognitive overload, which means, don’t overplay on the learner’s analytical abilities. The “how” or delivery of a good training program should also appeal to a learner’s emotions—perhaps through the use of simulations, stories, games, case studies, videos, movie clips, podcasts, anything that can engage the heart as well as the mind. A complex table of data maybe what they need to understand, but converting that into meaningful and impactful knowledge is the training designer’s job.

3. Shape the Path: we call the situation (including the surrounding environment) the “Path”. When you shape the Path, you make change more likely, no matter what’s happening with the Rider and the Elephant.

Training designed and delivered right may motivate learners to change. However, without a supportive environment that encourages implementation and application of the new behavior, no amount of training can successfully bring about and sustain the desired change.

Realms can be written about designing engaging training and creating a performance-focused environment, but these are topics for other posts.

Collaborative Enterprise - Social Learning Introduction

View more documents from Frédéric DOMON.

Telling Ain't Training: Snippet #1--Declarative and Procedural Knowledge and the Expert-Novice Divide

I have been reading the book Telling Ain’t Training by Harold D. Stolovitch and Erica J. Keeps, a combined ASTD and ISPI publication. This is a must read for all trainers, performance analysts, and learners. This is a short, seemingly easy read but packed with practical advice, analytical insights and great suggestions from these experienced trainers.

I have planned to document a few points in my blog for future reference and to capture my reaction to the book as I read it. I may also go back and revise some of these posts, but recording my thoughts now.

In this post, I am going to discuss what Harold and Erica say about declarative and procedural knowledge and the novice-expert divide.

Here is a graphic for reference:



Declarative knowledge is about describing how things are done, what we see, and what we know. This is a uniquely human skill. No other living being is capable of describing what they do or know, they “just” do.

Procedural knowledge is about “doing.” It is, as the term implies, the process of doing, like typing without looking at the keyboard, cycling, driving.

The expert-novice divide
Most experts “know” how to do something (whatever it is that they are deemed to be experts in). They have acquired this expertise over the years by doing, by applying.

With increasing expertise, their views of situations and ability to assimilate, analyze, synthesize evolve and change. They begin to “see” the world differently from a novice.

For an expert, the information coming their way is grouped in larger and larger interconnected bits. Whereas, a novice gets mired in the details because, for them, each piece of information is a separate bit. They soon go into information overload mode without a clue as to how to connect the small pieces to arrive at the big picture. Their short-time memory rapidly fills with disjointed bits of relevant and irrelevant information in equal abandon.



When does the divide occur?

When an expert is expected to convey information to a novice in a manner that will enable the latter to translate that information into performance output.

For great examples, you must read the original.

The experts are what the authors of Made to Stick call, “Cursed with Knowledge.” They are unable to view the world from the perspective of a novice who receives and processes the same information very differently. It is very difficult to imagine what it is like not to know once you know, if you know what I mean.

So, when an organization takes an SME (the formal term for experts) and asks them to communicate their knowledge to the novices and hopes for performance improvement, there is a major gap although both the sides are trying very hard.

The information flows somewhat in this manner:




Can this change?

Yes, it can and this is where, we as Performance Analysts and Instructional Designers come in as facilitators in the process.



“Learnable” information is a term I use to describe that which is not about “telling and transmission, but about training and transformation” and performance.

In my next post, I will describe how declarative knowledge can be transformed into “learnable” information that can impact performance.

Reflection Point

Below is an image showing a few examples of how declarative knowledge can be coded to become "learnable" information.



Watch this space for more snippets from Telling Ain't Training.

Training Must Be Inconsistent!!!

Consistency in training is one of the advantages of e-learning, we claim, as opposed to a human facilitator who could be tired, irritable, not in the mood, or just not well versed with the subject s/he is conducting the training on.

In comparison, once an e-learning program is created, it comes with the following advantages:
Easy dissemintation
Wide reach
Self paced...blah blah blah
And CONSISTENT

An e-learning program does not have mood swings or give in to frailties of the body. It will behave in the same way even if you click the Next button at wee hours of the night...

It is always blessedly consistent. But what is the nature of this consistency?

Two questions I think of importance are:

1. Is this consistency to do with the presentation style?
2. Is this consistency related to the message/information being communicated?
3. Have we somehow confused/conflated consistency with quality?

Let's take the questions one by one.

1. Is this consistency to do with presentation style?

Just imagine a few f2f training sessions where a trainer is "perfectly consistent"--always saying the same things, presenting the same information in the same way, asking the same questions, carrying out each step flawlessly. Each of his/her sessions are perfect replicas of each other.

Are you shuddering with horror? Probably. How BORING you are saying. What about the learners and their different learning styles. A good trainer has to take into account different learner types and mould his/her sessions accordingly. A good trainer is flexible, intuitive, moving with the learners. To make his/her sessions impactful, s/he MUST BE INCONSISTENT.

I am a learning professional and am absolutely for e-learning. This brings us to question #2.

2. Is this consistency related to the message/information being communicated?
I think when we speak about consistency, it is important to clarify its attributes. In e-learning, consistency IS an advantage. And consistency does not mean the same presentation style all the time, for all learners. This is where e-learning has the advantage.

With sufficient Learner Analysis, it is possible to design programs that take into account different learning styles.

With e-learning, it is easier to design a program that has multiple entry points.
Imagine a program that has 3 entry points:
>An audio-visual
>A quiz
>An introductory write-up with diagrams

The learner analysis has shown that learners are a fair mix of the Auditory, the Visual, and the Kinesthetic types.

It is easy to guess which learner type would opt for which kind of entry points. The advantage of course is that any learner can choose to opt for all three and experience the same information presented differently.

Consistency then is not about presentation. Consistency is about:
~Communicating the same information without any loss of key points and emphasis
~Ensuring the same outcome and proficiency level for all learner types post the program
~Ensuring different learner types and learning styles are accomodated in the program design always, consistently
~Implementing multiple learning pathways in programs for maximum efficacy and impact
~Being consistently inconsistent and considering each learner as an individual

These are some of my thoughts. I would love to know more from you.

I am leaving my 3rd question with the hope you will help me with the answer.

Have we somehow confused/conflated consistency with quality?

Love-Hate Theory, Learner Motivation, Connectivism and Other Such Thoughts...

Preamble

I missed IDCI session yesterday but am thankful for the tweets from @gargamit100 and @sreyadutta. These followed by Sreya’s post gave me some idea of the discussion. You can read the post here: Business-driven Learning and LH Theory (Love-Hate Theory).

The post set me thinking about when do we use “Love vs. Hate” to design a training program. This triggered thoughts related to learner motivation and how even a “business driven” or “business centric” program benefit from motivated learners.

This further led me to mull over some of the fundamental theories all of us IDs start out our ID career armed with. In the initial years of being an ID (when we are still at the novice level as per Dreyfus Model…for discussion on this, please check here: http://learningsolutions.ning.com/forum/topics/in-a-learning-organization-how), these learning theories become our guiding light. Subsequently, we internalize them and they inform our design decisions and instructional strategies almost at a subconscious level.

The Love-Hate discussion made me cull them out from the depths of my subconscious and pin them down for my own scrutiny and examine their application in what we do.

Below is the result of my self-reflection and soliloquy that I spent the better part of my Sunday morning engaged in.

Recently, while surfing the web, I came across the National Survey of Student Engagement Report (NSSE) for 2007.

The report begins with the following quotation:

More than anything else, being an educated person means being able to see connections that allow one to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways. Every one of the qualities I have described here—listening, reading, talking, writing, puzzle solving, and truth seeking, seeing through other people’s eyes, leading, working in a community — is finally about connecting (Cronon, 1998).

Point 1

Learners learn best when they are able to align the new knowledge with knowledge from the past. Motivation is intrinsically connected to this ability to make the connection; as soon as this connection happens, we feel that we are progressing, that the new knowledge/skill is not beyond our ability to master, and we feel confident. This confidence sustains motivation and engagement. Thus, while the learner has some initial motivation that prods him/her to take up the challenge of learning a new skill, chances are that de-motivation will set in unless s/he is able to “construct” associations between the existing knowledge and the new knowledge.

Conclusion #1: When designing with “love” and to have motivated learners, help learners to connect new knowledge to their pre-existing ones.

Supporting Theory: An understanding of the Constructivist Theory helps to conduct Learner Analysis keeping in mind the importance of capturing the existing knowledge level.

Point 2

Once this connection has been established, the learner will very likely exert himself/herself to acquire the new skill. All learners (I am not talking of compulsory schooling) come to any course with a “What’s In It For Me” approach. Constructivism plays a large role coupled with Cognitivsim in catering to this aspect. As soon as a learner is able to make the association, s/he is able to add to the existing schema for that area of knowledge. Thus, that specific schema expands, increases, instilling confidence and increasing engagement.

Once the learner is motivated to learn and attains the new skills/knowledge/understanding of a process, this brings about a change in his/her behavior. This is a definite requirement in most business driven training where the learners have to perform certain actions to meet the business objectives.

Conclusion #2: Motivated learners will make that extra effort to acquire and internalize the new skills required to meet the business objective.

Supporting Theory: An understanding of Constructivism and Behaviorism helps in designing training solutions using instructional strategies that leverage the existing knowledge, provide feedback at critical points to reinforce the correct “learning” and act as deterrent for the incorrect behavior.

Point 3

In today’s Digital Era, Connectivism adds another crucial dimension to the traditional learning theories. With the shelf life of knowledge rapidly decreasing and new “knowledge” increasing exponentially, the importance of the ability to synthesize and make connections has increased manifold.

Ongoing change is going to make current knowledge obsolescent. Thus, even the most current information is not going to be current by the time it goes through the design-development phase and reach the learner’s plate as a packaged training program. This is where, to quote Tony Karrer, we need a shift from the design of pure courseware solutions to reference hybrid solutions designed to be just-in-time supports.

These can be in the form of just-in-time aids, access to experts via social networking tools, podcasts, screencasts, and anything besides that address the need of the moment. Such aids are ephemeral in nature and thus suit today’s rapidly shifting “knowledgescape”. From a business perspective, they are cheaper and faster to create and deliver.

We moved from an oral tradition that was discourse based to the written medium with the invention of the printing press. The latter innovation began the process of codification or “capturing” of knowledge from individual sources in the form of text. With the advent of technology and the rise of web 2.0, we are going back to the discursive model of knowledge acquisition where how we make connections and network is more critical. Knowledge and understanding is being constantly reshaped and built through interactions across different platforms.

Conclusion #3: Today’s learners will benefit from being guided to make connections, be given access to information just in time and in just the right amount, and be exposed to technology that will help them in creating their own learning environments.

Supporting Theory: An understanding of Connectivism is important in such cases where the “knowledge is needed, but not known, and the ability to plug into sources to meet the requirements becomes a vital skill. As knowledge continues to grow and evolve, access to what is needed is more important than what the learner currently possesses.”

This is my understanding and I am still grappling with the dilemma of applying these when creating programs under time constraint.