In Response to "My Take on the Typical E-learning Project"

This post is triggered by Sumeet Moghe’s My Take on the “Typical E-learning Projects”. You have to see his post first...


Why what happens happens the way it does?
The customer is typically in a hurry to have the project delivered. Timeline is always crunched.

a. The key reasons are:
1. Rapid change of content around which the training is being designed
2. Need for the training to be in place before the product/service/whatever is rolled out to all
3. Realization that a training is needed at all comes a little late in the day
4. Realization that the traditional method of training may not work comes even later


b. What ensues?
A training-solutions designer is engaged and asked to deliver a training program. The timeline for delivery is mentioned as a very crucial factor, which it is.

c. What gets sacrificed?
Often, in a bid to meet the timeline and begin with the delivery, the Analysis Phase is either shortened or completed summarily. Still, the analysis report may look good enough to begin work with.

d. What happens next?
Based on this report, an implementation plan/project plan is drawn up with all the subsequent delivery milestones. Still good.

e. The resultant confusion:
The loopholes in the report begin to show up when put to the test—that is, when the solution is actually developed and presented to the customer.

Branching 1.1

The scope of salvaging the situation: Rapid Prototyping
If the designer happens to follow the Iterative/Agile methodology and believes in rapid prototyping, then everything is not lost. The customer gets to see the prototype and while their BP may shoot up, s/he would be glad once the purpose is explained, fixes done and the solution approximates the needs.

What should the smart designer do?
I am a believer of a good analysis. A good, well-defined analysis report can be the guiding document for quite some time. A smart designer would take some time and go back to the Analysis Report and update it. S/he would then create a design document that captures the approved solution and sit with the PM (if they are not one and the same) and work out a project plan.

Branching 1.2

What happens in a linear approach? (No Rapid Prototyping)
Remember Point e above? In the absence of a rapid prototype, there is no way of testing the analysis. If the delivery plan follows a linear process (Waterfall Methodology), the designer and team could end up with a very very disgruntled customer. Someone who looks like this:




With some good communication and smart thinking, we can of course have a customer looking like this:

Social Media and Love

This is in response to a post put up by my co-blogger. The post highlights in a very straightforward, and therefore hard-hitting, terms the values and commitments one must bring in when engaging with social media. You can read the original post here.

Two statements that leapt out and struck a chord with me:

“Social media is your own child and once you are committed to it, you cannot stop loving it.”

“There is no room for translucency in the name of transparency.”

Absolutely true! I am first and foremost a mother before anything else. I know, no matter how troublesome, demanding, unreasonable and everything besides my daughter could be, I would gladly go to the end of the world and back for her.

It’s the same with social media too. Because we are interacting with real people. We are building relationships—of trust, of intellectual bonding, of respect. We sometimes forget the people for the tools we are using. We try to pull a fast one, try to create a quick impression, and fail miserably. Social media (the organic mass of thinking, living, breathing human beings) will catch you and make you an outcast. They can be as ruthless as they can be warm and caring.

As in all successful relationships, engaging with social media requires us to be patient, caring, respectful, and most of all, giving. The more you give, the more you will receive. If you can give without stinting, without holding back, you will gradually reap the benefits. But this giving has to be whole-hearted, uncalculated and honest. And you’ve got to be willing to listen—carefully and patiently listen.
Here are a few unwritten codes of conduct that rules the world of social media. These, I have gradually discovered are close to the values you’d bring to a love-affair or a friendship that you have committed to for life.

Honesty: There is no pulling the wool over the eyes of the people there. Be totally transparent. If you ask because you don’t know the answer, you will find a hundred friends out there ready with the answer for you. If you pretend, you are done for. You will be coldly shunned.

Patience: It takes time to get recognition, to form your own groups and get your own followers. No matter what Twitter says about getting 1000 followers and what not, it takes time. And the number is not important at all. What is important is to form engagements where you can share and receive, learn from, and expand your understanding. This is what is also called Knowledge Networking, a topic I will cover in a later post.

Being giving: Give of what you have, of what you know—no matter how meager this seems. If you keep your ears to the ground, this giving will lead to you receiving so much more in return that you will wonder why you did not do this earlier.

If something interests you on the web, if you have read an article that you honestly learnt from, put up the link on Twitter with a few words capturing the essence of the piece. This is sure to help someone out there the way it helped you. You will see how one response of gratitude from a completely unknown individual can make your day. Because you have helped someone to learn something new.

Being consistent: Just as you would expect your friends and lover to be there for you when you need them, to be consistent in their attention, to be dependable, it’s the same with social media. If you have formed a group, have followers, they expect you to be there. If someone asks you a question or directs a response at you, the worst thing you can do is to ignore it. If you don’t know the answer, admit it and experience the trust that develops.

Willingness to listen and engage: Whether you are using social media as a marketing tool or to expand your learning the way I am doing, LISTEN. Listen to the voices out there! It’s not only about accessing the links and re-tweeting what you like, it’s about engaging in a dialogue—a rich, multi-voiced, many-dimensional conversation that brings in people with diverse opinions and makes our thought processes so much richer.

One of the reasons I make it a point to attend #lrncaht is primarily this one. You can see the transcripts of different sessions here.

Although I am more of a lurker in these sessions, these have introduced me to the spirit and power of social media. Even as a lurker, I can feel the web and flow of the conversations, the multitude of opinions and the respect for each of those view-points though they may be vastly different. Where else would you get a comment like this: “God grant me serenity to train who I can train, dismiss who I cannot, and wisdom to know the difference.”

Willingness to change views and adapt: As we delve deeper, engage with others, reflect on the conversations ebbing and flowing around us, many of our pre-conceived and earlier held notions may appear shallow, one-sided, immature, biased, or plain wrong. This is the time to step back, take a hard look and discard notions and ideas that can actually be an impediment to your intellectual growth. In short, you’ve got to be OPEN TO LEARNING ALWAYS when you are out there. And be willing to let go off your dearly held notions.

Sometimes, it will be intended learning, information you have been seeking that comes your way and makes you go “Aha!” Sometimes, it can be something that completely throws you off kilter and makes you rethink…It’s the latter kind that we have to open our minds to accept and truly commit to being a lifelong learner.

Courage to accept mistakes: We all goof up! The biggest and the best do it. And when you goof up in a social media platform, it’s out there for all to see, comment on, criticize. The web has a long memory and spread… If you goof up, say sorry. And with sincerity. Your followers will love you for it and your customers will respect and trust you for it. Then, most importantly, follow up the sorry with an action that is genuine and shows you have listened and care and are willing to change. Simple rules you’d follow with a friend you love too.

These are some of my beliefs garnered from my experiences over the past one year. It’s a very short span of time to have gained any form of expertise in the use of SoMe and am looking forward to evolving my thoughts…

I would love to hear your thoughts and learn from you.

Some interesting reads:

1. For those interested in the ROI of Social Media from a marketing perspective, here’s an interesting post: http://www.altimetergroup.com/2009/07/engagementdb.html

2. A post by Chris Brogan about how you can extend yourself across the social media spectrum but I think should be attempted by the more mature users: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/extending-yourself-into-a-platform/

3. Interesting perspective here-- What Social Media Can Learn from Multicultural Marketing: http://adage.com/bigtent/post?article_id=138864

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?

Homophily, Group Think, and the Internet

Homophily is a fancy word for the human equivalent of birds of a feather flock together.

The past few months have been one of exploration for me—within and without. As I forayed into social media, social networking, informal learning, knowledge sharing, connecting, collaborating—topics that fascinate me—I found myself connecting with people around the world. People hailing from different countries, continents, cultures with singularly different world views. However, some similarities brought us together—these are shared passions, interests, professions, and the willingness to learn and explore and connect.

Technology (read Twitter, FB, LinkedIn, etc.) helped me to find such people. Our human tendency to bond, to create communities, to be part of and accepted by a group(s) is all supported by technology today. My world suddenly seemed to have opened up from my very desktop and this world was populated by people who thought and felt the way I did. I was in bliss till I came across the term Homophily and its connotations. I call this serendipity.

Three posts and a paragraph from a book gave me a jolt. The following question raced through my mind: Was I expanding my horizon or just looking for verification of my existing beliefs, prejudices and world views so that I could rest in complacency in my comfort zone. So that I would not need to transform myself, challenge myself, but be happy with incremental learning and think of that as self growth.

I retraced the means through which I connected—content. Be these in the form of posts, links to posts, tweets…they are all different forms of content that attracted me because of the shared passions displayed.

I will quote the passages that jolted me out of this self-induced bliss and made me reflect.

1. Worse, I think we're living under this delusion that we're actually BROADENING our experiences because we're connecting to such large groups of people. I suspect all that does is further reinforce our pre-existing beliefs while at the same time making us believe that somehow we're being broad-minded because there are so many more people in our network. More of the same thinking isn't exactly a recipe for learning. (Read the remaining post for a wonderful exposition on how Homophily is actually encouraged by technology. Even Amazon suggests books we would like to read based on our current choice.) http://michelemartin.typepad.com/thebambooprojectblog//2008/04/why-the-interne.html

2. “Cass Sunstein, an amazing legal scholar, says that one of the dangers of the internet is that we’re only hearing like voices, and that makes us more polarized. Homophily can make you really, really dumb. What’s incredible about the net is we have this opportunity to hear more voices than ever. But the tools we tend to build to it have us listening to the same voices again and again… Search in the future needs to lead us to people, to places, to voices. My hope is that in the future we get over homophily and we start looking for really productive serendipity…” http://www.contentious.com/2008/04/20/breaking-out-of-the-echo-chamber/

3. From Wisdom of the Crowds: The wisdom of crowds comes not from the consensus decision of the group, but from the aggregation of the ideas/thoughts/decisions of each individual in the group. Quoted in “One of us is smarter than all of us” : http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/03/one_of_us_iisi_.html

Some questions I am still struggling to find answers to:

1. Are the aggregation and collective wisdom we are talking about only of “like-minded people”?

2. Does such an aggregation contain conflicting voices, different world views, radically different representations of situations?

3. Are we trying to “deliberately” find disparate voices so that our understanding can be more holistic, rounded?
   

4. Is “mass collaboration” also reinforcing the feeling of Us vs. Other?
   

5. Is “Wisdom of the Crowd” only the dominant voices we are hearing, the privileged with access to the Internet? What about the remaining silent part of the world? How do we gather that wisdom?

   
   

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.