In designing blended learning programs, we believe there are three key factors to think through: levels of competency, the learning timeline, and five key learning practices. The second factor is the learning timeline – what should be taught in the “training event” and what should be learned applying new knowledge and skills on the job?

As we think of it, the instruction phase consists of the training event – the time-limited period devoted to learning new skills. For instance, a one day class, or a 20-minute eLearning module.

The application phase consists of weeks or months where skills are practiced on the job and feedback is obtained in order to apply and reinforce learning.

It’s important not to confuse the one with the other. Often eLearning modules – perfect for instruction – attempt to cover the application phase as well, because the creators believe they will be used as a stand-alone, sole intervention. But having the “post training exercises” built into the eLearning module cannot compare with creating a blended learning program where we ask participants to engage in a series of stretch assignments with feedback from coaches or peers. The take away? Design blended learning activities to fit the timeline. Teach concepts, vocabulary and procedures during the instructional phase, and allow learners to practice them in a safe environment. Apply learning on the job in distinct, separate, application activities.

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A well-kept LMS?

At the HRD 2012 conference, attendees heard that the role of the learning professional is more and more shifting to that of “curator” of content already available to the public, rather than producer of proprietary content for the organization.

Color me skeptical.

Certainly, especially in consumer product fields, there is a great deal to be learned about the markets we serve from the public conversation around products and services.  And certainly, much of what organizational learners need to know around soft skills like negotiation and leadership is available in numerous formats from multiple sources outside the organization.  It’s inefficient to build what we can buy for cheap, or free.

But to the extent that our own organizations have a unique  value proposition, one which is the product of what our colleagues have learned about creating our solution to the problems our clients face, well, that is material which is not available on the open web, and it can’t be bought from vendors.

If our colleagues are to be effective, they need to be spending their time doing their jobs, not meandering  the web looking for serendipitous inspiration. So sure, part of the responsibility of the learning professional is the gathering and vetting of resources available outside the org, and making pointers available to the people who will find them valuable.  (Calling this activity “curation” though, rightfully sets the teeth of professional curators on edge. Real curators are charged not only with the gathering, thoughtful display, and placing in context of artifacts they make available to the public, but also with the preservation of those resources.   To the extent the resources we point to are not our own, we have no power over their preservation.)

We can possibly be forgiven for a lack of concern about preservation. We are not museums.   In the fast-paced environments in which most of us work, the danger is not so much in resources becoming unavailable as it is in their becoming out-of-date!

It seems to me that the most effective learning organization in these times is one which achieves the optimal balance among providing links to existing resources from which our learners will derive value, developing new material which incorporates the latest and greatest iteration of our own organization’s “secret sauce”, and providing opportunities for our colleagues to share what’s going on in the field, in the research lab, and in the executive suite  in the pursuit of delivering that secret sauce.  Challenging our colleagues to make meaning and action from the blend of public, proprietary, and “embedded” knowledge in the organization, and facilitating their efforts to do so, is what we should be doing.

Fortunately, we’ve got better tools than ever for doing so.  Do your online learning tools permit you to build courses which draw on publicly available resources,  along with the “secret sauce” embedded in proprietary job aids, and discussions with colleagues and coaches?  Can you ask your folks to reflect on what they are learning, produce a sample piece of work to demonstrate that understanding, and receive feedback from each other and/or a coach on that work?  Can you include field trips, ride-alongs and other face-to-face out-of-classroom experiences and track the participation of the learners and their coaches in a single, easy-to-administer platform?  If you can’t, you might want to give us a call…

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Most everything I’ve learned about what it takes to design training solutions that produce any kind of useful result I learned from my piano teacher Miss Kate. The primary reason I picked her as my teacher (really, she picked me) was because she was known for helping “adult” students develop and demonstrate passable proficiency on the piano fairly quickly.

At the time, I was about as adult as I could stand at fifty years old.  After several conversations where she grilled me on my level of seriousness, she decided she’d take me on if I promised to do exactly what she told me to do.  No exceptions.  It was a long-term aspiration of mine to learn how to make some decent music.  So, I agreed to her terms.

Surprisingly, not only did Miss Kate’s methods work in terms of helping me get good enough to entertain myself but, I learned some invaluable lessons about what it takes to create effective speed-to-proficiency workplace training solutions.

Kate’s Four (4) Essential Elements for Speed-to-Proficiency
#1 – Right Content/Material
In Kate’s world of music, right content meant several things:

• Appropriate level of complexity and difficulty to provide an optimal stretch for the student.
• Just enough new stuff to keep the student engaged but not overwhelmed
• Music the student could relate to.

When I tried to apply Kate’s “Right Content” principle to the world of workplace learning I noticed several things that typically are done that sabotage the effectiveness of many training efforts:

• Kitchen Sinking – Since, most of the time, we only have one shot at training a particular subject, we saturate the learner with too much content. Unfortunately, in those situations the learner is often overwhelmed and most of the content leaks out of their brain.  The learning would stick a heck of a lot better if content were broken down into smaller chunks and delivered over time vs. in a one-shot event.
• Content Too General – Often times, there isn’t sufficient attention paid to transposing important conceptual material into terms and situations where the learner can see the direct relevance/application of the content to the world they live in.

#2 – Correct Practice
Kate had a number of rules about how I was to practice:

• Mastery takes consistent practice – practice every day for no more than an hour.  (She actually preferred around 30-45 min.)
• No mistakes — When learning new concepts/material slow it down enough so that I could play it correctly.  The theory being that making it ok to make mistakes when learning something for the first time means the student has to both learn the new stuff and unlearn what they practiced wrong.
• Practice patiently – proficiency will come.

The key learnings for my corporate training life I derived from her correct practice methods were:

• Developing true proficiency in any complex capability arena is a progressive learn-do-learn process – Learn a little, do a little, learn a little, do a little, etc., etc.
• If the end-game is proficiency, do not leave practice to chance – build sufficient practice opportunities into the end-to-end learning design – in the classroom, but most importantly practice on the job.

Expert Monitoring & Reinforcement
Kate is a masterful coach. Like all great coaches she knows how to weave in the teaching with the coaching.  A typical lesson with her looked like the following:
Phase 1:  Show What I’d Learned — Our sessions always started with me playing what I’d been working on. Even though there was always lots for Kate to pick apart, on but she was very adroit at the art at catching me doing something right and focusing any corrective criticism one or two areas.
Phase II:  New Stuff – Next she introduced some new concepts or material (max 10-15 min) and had me get the feel of the new stuff. In the instruction phase she focused on making sure I understood intellectually the what and why behind what I was about to learn.
Phase III:  General Q&A – She wrapped up every session by encouraging me to ask any questions I had, talk about aspirations/frustrations and set some goals for the next week.

I didn’t recognize the importance of the regular monitoring and reinforcement by a coach until after Kate moved out of the area and I was left to my own devices to continue developing my ability to play.  Even though my aspiration was still there, my discipline wavered and my progress definitely slowed down.  I discovered that there is something about knowing that I had to demonstrate progress to someone else that accelerated the learning process for me.

It was also when I was working with Kate that I was hit with a blinding flash of the obvious.  It finally dawned on me that the vast majority of corporate training has absolutely no structured follow-through monitoring and reinforcement process built into it.  No follow-through, no adoption.

To make things even worse, in the corporate world just having a coach often isn’t enough.   Experience shows that unless a learner’s boss is paying attention to and reinforcing their people’s development of new knowledge and skills the odds of the desired new knowledge and skills being applied on the job are very low.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that without follow-through, little, if any, learning transfer takes place.  But, because it is a challenge to get our customers to approve investing the resources in doing training correctly, too many of us proceed merrily ahead producing event-based trainings (i.e. ILT, Virtual Classroom & Web Modules) that don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of producing any kind of real capability shift vs blended learning processes that include the requisite kinds follow-through activities and then bemoan the fact that training isn’t valued.

Kate realized that if her students didn’t experience consistently getting better they would stop paying her fees altogether.  We workplace learning professionals would be wise to adopt the same view.

Enabling Environment
The last element was the learning environment itself.  Kate was also a fanatic about having the learning environment set up and outfitted with the different tools needed for the learning task at hand.  (e.g. piano tuned, paper & pencil for notes/notation, tape recorder, metronome, CDs of music being learned, etc.)

In the workplace learning arena a major part of people’s learning environment is the technology infrastructure used to support/enable learning.  Unfortunately, the majority of learning management systems in use today are designed to support traditional event-based training (which doesn’t produce much at all in terms of speed-to-proficiency).

The type of learning systems needed to support proficiency based processes are systems that make it possible to both seamlessly weave together the entire range of different types of learning activities and provide the ability to provide the nature of monitoring, tracking and feedback required to ensure the kind of application, reinforcement and coaching takes place to make the learning stick.  We at Q2 are very proud to be one of the first learning system providers to bring this type of next generation full-featured Social Blended Learning System to the market.

Our learning system is called the xPERT eCampus.   If you would like to learn more about it, we would love to talk to you about it.
I’d also like to thank Miss Kate for opening up the world of music to me and, as important, for opening up my eyes to what needs to be done to improve how learning takes place in the workplace.

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Adobe commissioned a global study on creativity and released it this week.  It’s an interesting and light read, since it’s mostly charts and graphs.  It’s nice to see that around the world, (or at least in the US, UK, Germany, France, and Japan)  we agree that people are inherently creative,  irrespective of age and opportunity to share our creative products online.  A minority  of the respondents believed themselves to be creative, but most figure they are not living up to their creative potential. We all tend to value that creative spark in ourselves.  Most of us do most of our creating outside of work hours, but spend 20-30% of work time in creative pursuits, as well.

Adobe, of course, is very interested in selling tools for creativity, and training on these tools, so their questions, and interpretations of the answers to them, might be just a touch self-serving.  But I do find it interesting that 23-38% of respondents expressed interest in training on how to use creative tools.  Whether it’s lessons in oils and watercolors, or the latest photoshop, many of us recognize that upskilling is part of the process in becoming more effective creators.

Of course, upskilling in our not-so-creative work might be another road to creativity. Becoming more efficient and effective in ourwork would help us address the major barriers people see to creativity – lack of time and money!

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Mobile Learning or Mobile Support?

I remember the first demonstration I ever saw of mobile learning some years back at one of Elliott Masie’s conferences. A person from IBM had a beautiful slide show that took us through a scenario where a sales person on a commuter train had to prepare for a Big Sales Meeting. From his phone, he accessed information about the account. He then looked up potential sales objections, and reviewed his sales binder for ways to address each. He found professional information about the key players, and reached out for a quick help question to members of his team. At the time, it seemed quite magical and the value-add was obvious to all of us.

A second early slideshow dealt with mobile learning via wearable computers. A technician was repairing something inside an access panel on the tail of a Boeing 747. Using his wearable arm-piece, he looked at the instruction manual for the electronic widget he was fixing. It was pointed out that not only was he on a scaffold a couple stories high, but the nearest kiosk was a hundred yards away – he was learning at the point of need.

Both of these were – and are – powerful examples of mobile learning, but we need to use a broader view of learning as we think of them. We could perhaps more accurately refer to them as mobile performance support, understanding that performance support is a type of just-in-time, just-enough informal, self-directed learning.

As we have thought about how to support our customers on the go, we’ve been thinking more and more about what types of learning are best optimized for the “m-experience.”

Turning Training on its Head

A couple years ago, we introduced our knowledge management module to the eCampus. It is a process mapping tool that allows our customers to map the workflow of a job such as project management, claim adjusting, or even an instructional design model like ADDIE.

The process is displayed in a collapsible menu on the left, made of steps and sub-steps. When you get to a step, you don’t just see a bunch of files you have to fish through; you see a concise description of the essential parts of that step, presented in a template. For example you might see who is responsible, required inputs, step by step procedure, outputs, and who they are provided to. On the right you see resources appropriate to that step – worksheets, supporting documents, etc. You also see links to relevant experts, help forums, wikis.

You also see – for each step – any relevant eLearning modules. Our customers make quick 3-5 minute “knowledge nuggets” designed to teach one thing, and fit into the support system. This is the secret sauce that can turn training on its head. Rather than going to something called an LMS and browsing through catalogues to take something called a course, the knowledge base becomes the persistent performance support system from which learning is launched as needed.

What’s your Mobile Learning Strategy?

As you think about your organization supporting mobile, how do you visualize it? For informal, social learning, is anything needed other than apps for Yammer, Chatter, or whatever your social platform is?

Do you think about people taking traditional eLearning courses, except published in HTML5 to be IOS compatible? Peering at little screens at social simulations, taking training games, or simply reading page after page of death-by-PowerPoint-called-eLearning?

Or do you think more of people learning by googling information they need? Cause honestly that’s what’s happening.

For myself, I tend to think that knowledge management and performance support are going to really come into their own as organizations start converting their intellectual property, best practices, and P&Ps for electronic consumption. This is wildly different than making horrible PDFs out of horrible Word documents. It’s a matter of thinking carefully about what information workers need to answer 80% of their questions, and organizing that information so it can be easily browsed and searched in a performance support system, and making that system accessible to mobile users.

That’s my thinking on a foggy spring day in 2012, anyway.

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We at Q2 have been doing a lot of thinking about mobile learning these days.  I’ve been reading all over the place trying to come up to speed. This post is likely the first in a series of reflections on the challenge.

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This past week I attended one of our local ASTD chapter’s monthly meetings specifically for the evening’s program titled: “Developing Metrics that Prove the Value of Training.”

The presenter clearly knew her Kirkpatrick Four Levels of Learning Evaluation  & Phillips ROI stuff.  As is typical for this subject matter, there was lots of lively discussion. Many of the group’s comments were variations on the old lament,  “It’s so difficult it to measure the ROI of training.” The group had played right into our presenter’s capable hands.  She immediately got us to talking about how a training professional would go about:

• Determining what kind of metrics to use for any given type of training.  (e.g. leadership, business process skills, critical job skills, etc. etc.)
• Developing a business case for their customer to justify the training
• Using the correct methods for calculating ROI.

Once again, the thirty or so of us had a fabulous time sharing our wisdom with each other.  However, it wasn’t until almost the end of the 90 minute program that one of our more junior members made several observations.

The first question he asked was,  “Rather than go through all the hoops making up metrics to measure the effectiveness of training, why don’t we simply use the metrics the organization is already using and kicking peoples’ butts about achieving everyday already.”  (i.e.  For leadership things like retention, employee satisfaction/engagement, team performance, etc.  For sales training  things like increased sales, close ratios, renewal business, etc.  For critical job skills things like quality metrics, service metrics, variances, etc.)

The second question he asked was,  “Why should we training folks be making the business case?  It seems that is should be the customer who should be making the business case.”  He went on to say that, “The customer should know, not only what metrics are important to her or him, but what the payout would be if the training were successful.”

I think the kid has a point.

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I was a newly minted undergraduate student, and a rather imposing (if not to say famous) philosopher was sitting on top of a table, legs crossed, staring at me. Well, I guess he was staring at all of us, but I felt pretty intimidated, especially when he said “I assert to you that this table does not exist. What do you say?” The table in question was, of course, the one upon which he was sitting.

And no matter what it was that we did say, for 90 rather exciting minutes, he had a brilliant, cogent counter-argument. At the end of class, he suggested some readings that might help us frame our thoughts better. And to the library we dutifully went.

And so it repeated the next class. And the next class. And the class after that. And learn we did. We learned how to formulate our thoughts. We learned how to critically think. We learned points from the traditions of materialistic, idealistic, and phenomenological schools of metaphysics that could support our points.

Some times, when I look at how we substitute eContent for eLearning, I worry.

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Gary Duffield did a wonderful post earlier this month on Why a great coffee machine is like a great (instructor led) course. While his organization offers a range of training methodologies, he writes:

I fly the flag for training delivered in the classroom, by a subject matter expert. Possibly because Instructor Led Training supported by a quality coffee machine, has many advantages and benefits for learners:

• Face-to-face interactions with the instructor and real-time discussions are powerful ways to learn. Having an instructor answer questions and validate a learners’ understanding in real time.
• The instructor can adapt how they deliver the learning based on the learners’ levels of understanding. Even the slowest of learners can be accommodated by an experienced instructor. Although even the best instructors will struggle when a student doesn’t meet the pre-requisites for the course.
• Classroom training allows for some individual 1:1 attention from the instructor.
• Instructor Led Training provide the opportunity for learners to make mistakes in a controlled environment, to learn from those mistakes and take the value of that back to the workplace
• Classroom events provide the all-important “human touch,”  it’s hard on virtual training events to eat lunch with your instructor whilst discussing the merits of ITIL in the work place
• Group interactions enhance the learning experience and allows for learning from different organisational cultures.
• Hands on training in the classroom helps in learning kinesthetic skills – technical courses use real servers and routers – imagine learning to swim without access to a pool. (Mind you I learnt to programme without a computer)
• People like classroom training and see it as a privilege resulting in better motivated learners.

So, if it’s an important training initiative, why would anyone go virtual?

For a lot of organizations, the answer to that question comes down to money.  It can cost an extra thousand dollars per student to transport folks to the training venue and put them up for a night or two.

But let’s, for just a moment, imagine that we could design the optimal learning experience, one in which cost was not a consideration.  I fly the flag for a blend of face-to-face and online activities even when money is no object, because I think online can sometimes more effectively meet our learning transfer goals.

1. It is great to be able to ask questions, get answers, and have one’s learning validated in real time. Unfortunately, not every learner is comfortable asserting themselves in this way in a classroom, and some people are comfortable taking up the majority of Q&A time!  Furthermore, some questions don’t really occur until after class is over.  Including an asynchronous discussion forum activity in which learners may ask, and have answered, questions which occur later, as they apply what they’ve learned on the job, provides reinforcement, opportunity for reflection, and a place for the shy to speak up.
2. Adapting the pace of instruction when the class has a wide range of ability and background  is one of the central challenges instructors face.  In the synchronous classroom, absent some prequalification of people into different tracks with different activities,  there’s no way to slow the pace down for the folks at the low end of preparation which does not require those who are better prepared to wait, and possibly lose out on material which is not presented because  time runs out.  Skilled instructors make compromises, because at some point, it’s unfair to the others not to move ahead, even if some are still struggling to understand what’s been presented so far.  Online, it’s possible to individualize the pacing in a way which just isn’t practical in a group face-to-face situation.
3. Classroom training does allow for some 1:1 attention, but obviously, that time is limited, and again, there’s the issue of allocating time among those who clamor for more than their share and those who are “hiding” in the back of the room.  If we move to an asynchronous modality, in which, say, we ask learners to do an assignment and then give them individual coaching on that assignment, the quality of that individual attention is likely to be much higher.
4. The opportunity to make mistakes in a controlled environment is where online solutions really shine.  Simulations are one example, but it’s not necessary to use elaborate technology.  In private coaching space, it’s possible to coach a learner on a written response to a case study, and let them continue to improve it until it meets the standard – and only then share it with the larger group.
5. Ok, he’s got me here. Sadly, there are no lunches or coffee breaks with the instructor in online space. It is possible, though, to structure activities as conference calls in which learners reflect with the instructor on their challenges applying what’s being learned, and give the opportunity for the telling of war stories.
6. As you’re probably noticing, at Q2, we think group work is important, so we’ve got a bunch of ways to make it work as part of a blended course.   People work with each other via computer in numerous ways these days, so just because a course activity is virtual doesn’t mean it has to be a solo experience.
7. Obviously, some training really requires hands-on. It may be possible to learn programming without a computer, but nobody would call that ideal.  And if you’re learning how to fix engines, at some point, you need to have an engine to work on, and a coach to oversee your work.
8. People DO really like classroom. It is indeed regarded as a privilege and as recognition of value to the organization. Plus, there’s coffee!  There is also a non-trivial boost to attention which accompanies being taken away from one’s desk to a place where one is unlikely to be interrupted.

It’s a mistake to imagine that it’s possible to accomplish everything that an ILT Classroom offers by moving those classroom activities online.  People were evolved to learn from each other in full-bandwidth, and we spend at least 12 years training young humans how to learn in a classroom, so it’s smart to leverage that investment.  But by the same token, there are highly effective strategies  we can implement online which are not easily replicated in the classroom.

My personal bias is that if you’re trying to teach people a new way to work together, it’s a really good investment to introduce them to each other in person, and give them some shared experience in a traditional classroom. But once you’ve done that, you can actually solidify those relationships  and deepen the learning by providing ongoing reinforcement activities after the classroom event is over.

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To Everything
There is a season
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

Pete Seeger’s lyric from the famous folk song Turn, Turn, Turn speaks to the raging debate about formal learning versus informal learning that has a lot of buzz in workplace learning professionals’ communities.

We believe that there is a time and place for formal learning and a time and place for informal learning.  The challenge is figuring out when to use these different approaches.

To set the stage, first a few operational definitions from Quality Research International’s Analytic Quality Glossary may be helpful.

Formal learning is planned learning that derives from activities within a structured learning setting.

Informal learning is learning that derives from activities external to a structured learning context.

In the realm of workplace learning I would argue that the goal for all formal learning ought to be that the learner is able to demonstrate they can apply the new knowledge and skills on the job (some compliance stuff excluded).

How does the learning architect decide which types of situations are most appropriate for informal learning methods/approaches and which types of situations are most appropriate for more formal approaches?  In my experience the answer is very simple:

“When the organization can not afford to leave the development of the desired level of capability to chance – formal learning is required. “

In other words, formal learning is needed when one hears things like:  It is critical to the business that people master (fill in the blank). (e.g. new business process skills, leadership skills, the fundamentals of their new job, product knowledge, etc., etc., etc.)  by (fill in the blank) time. Of course, it goes without saying that, if the needs analysis determines that the lack of knowledge and skills is not the issue then formal learning is not the solution.

In conclusion, there is a time and place for everything.  The time and place for formal learning is when:

1. The knowledge and skills are critical to the business
2. People need to get right the first time
3. Development of capability is time sensitive
4. You can’t leave the learning to chance.

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