Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the second part of chapter 10:

Experiential learning occurs whether we want it to or not, but there are good reasons why we should be actively supporting and encouraging it:

Because everyday work experience is rich with opportunities for learning: However hard you try to create authentic learning scenarios in the classroom, you will never match the real thing.

Because we don’t always take the best advantage of these opportunities: In the mad rush of everyday life, we don’t always take the time to reflect on what has gone well and what less well. True, if an incident has a major emotional impact on us, we can’t help but reflect on it, so much so that we may find it hard to sleep; but there are many less monumental learning opportunities that end up being wasted.

Because, if something goes well, we want to repeat it: Every effect has a corresponding cause, and when these effects are positive, we would be foolish not to try and pinpoint the causes. Obviously we may just have been the beneficiary of good fortune, but chances are there are some good practice lessons to be learned and ideally shared with our colleagues.

Because, if something goes wrong, we want to avoid it happening again: Children soon learn not to bang their head against the wall, because it hurts. But as adults we aren’t always so keen to learn from our misfortunes; we often just hope things will work out better next time. It may be more painful to reflect on our failings than our successes, but change is often painful, and learning is change.

According to James Zull, “Little true learning takes place from experience alone. There must be a conscious effort to build understanding from the experience, which requires reflection, abstraction and testing the abstractions. Testing our ideas through action is how we find out we are on the right track. The only pathway that seems unproductive for learning is the pathway that excludes testing of ideas.”

References

The art of changing the brain by James E Zull, Stylus, 2002

Coming next: The experiential learning toolkit

Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9

Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the first part of chapter 10:

As learning and development professionals we are most alert to those opportunities which will help employees to ‘learn to’ carry out some task or fulfil some responsibility; we want to get ahead of the game, to equip employees with the knowledge and skills needed to meet the requirements of current and future job roles. Even when we put in place facilities and resources to support just-in-time learning-on-demand, we still have a forward looking focus, trying to get ahead of the game, even if only at the last minute.

Yet for many people, the greatest insights come not through ‘learning to’ but by ‘learning from’ our day-to-day work activities. Experiential learning is literally learning from our experience. It occurs consciously or unconsciously as we reflect upon and react to our own successes and failures at work as well as those of our acquaintances. It introduces an extremely valuable feedback loop into our everyday work.

Without experiential learning, all we are left with is the ‘doing’. We repeat the same actions over and over again, never improving and constantly at risk to every new threat that appears in our environment. Experiential learning is ‘doing’ plus an essential additional ingredient – reflection. Without reflection, we can have many years of experience and learn less than someone who is a relative newcomer but who has learned how to learn.

The natural way to learn

Experiential learning is the natural way to learn. According to Charles Jennings, “70% of adult organisational learning takes place on the job. This learning is gained through experiences that develop, through facing challenges, through solving problems, through special assignments and through other activities that an employee carries out on a day-to-day basis.” We are hard-wired for experiential learning, as John Medina explains: “When we came down from the trees to the savannah, we did not say to ourselves, ‘Good lord, give me a book and a lecture so I can spend ten years learning how to survive in this place.’ Our survival did not depend upon exposing ourselves to organised, pre-planned packets of information. Our survival depended upon chaotic, reactive information-gathering experiences. That’s why one of our best attributes is the ability to learn through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas.”

And what’s more, this ability does not fade with age: “The adult brain throughout life retains the ability to change its structure and function in response to experiences.”

Employees are well aware of how important experiential learning can be. The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) asked 2076 employees in the UK to identify the activities that had been useful in helping them to do their job better. Here’s what came back. The figures show those who found the activity ‘very or quite helpful’, with those who found the activity ‘of some help’ shown in parentheses:

1. Doing your job on a regular basis 82% (13%)
2. Being shown by others how to do certain activities or tasks 62% (23%)
3. Watching and listening to others while they carry out their work 56% (26%)
4. Training courses paid for by your employer or yourself 54% (20%)
5. Reflecting on your performance 53% (30%)
6. Drawing on the skills you picked up while studying for a qualification 45% (21%)
7. Using skills and abilities acquired outside of work 42% (29%)
8. Reading books, manuals and work-related magazines 39% (24%)
9. Using trial and error on the job 38% (27%)
10. Using the internet 29% (18%)

Unfortunately these options are rather ambiguous and overlapping, but it is safe to say that numbers 1, 3, 5 and 9 are all aspects of experiential learning.

References

The Point-of-Need: where effective learning really matters by Charles Jennings, article in Advance series from Saffron Interactive, 2008

Brain Rules by John Medina, Pear Press, 2008

Practice Makes Perfect from NIACE, 2007, www.niace.org.uk

Coming next: The argument for experiential learning

Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9

Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

The book is for anyone with an interest in helping others to learn. You may be a teacher, trainer, lecturer or coach. You may be a subject expert with knowledge you want to share or an experienced practitioner who wants to pass on their tips. You may already be a creator of learning content, looking to update their skills. Whatever your interest, this guide will help you to design learning materials that really make a difference.

Digital learning content takes a wide variety of forms, including tutorials, scenarios, podcasts, screencasts, videos, slideshows, quizzes and reference materials. This guide provides you with fundamental principles that you can apply to any content creation activity as well as practical information relating to specific content types.

The book is currently only available through Lulu, priced at £19.95. Distribution through Amazon and other online book-sellers will commence in the next few weeks. E-book versions are in development.

For a table of contents, see here. Or, join us on stand 133 at Learning Technologies in London this Wednesday or Thursday where we’ll have plenty of copies for you to leaf through.

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the fourth and last part of chapter 9:

Top-down approaches

A number of options exist for organisations to support employees with on-demand learning:

Performance support materials

Mobile learning

Help desks

Online books

Bottom-up approaches

On-demand learning can also be supported from the bottom-up through the use of technology:

Online search

Using forums

Using wikis

Conditions for success

On-demand learning occurs whether or not an organisation takes active steps to provide encouragement and support. Every time an employee turns to a colleague for help with a task, they are engaging in on-demand learning. However, on-demand learning is more likely to thrive when l&d professionals recognise that:

• it is often unnecessary, if not completely futile, to try and teach employees everything they need to know to do their jobs; there is too much to know and it changes too quickly;
• resources need to be shifted from teaching everything there is to know, to covering the key underlying concepts, principles and skills formally (unless, of course, the job situation clearly demands that these be memorised / fully embedded) and then providing high quality, context-sensitive, usable, easily-accessible information at the point of need;
• in many organisations it is impossible to provide all necessary information on a top-down basis; employees need to be encouraged and empowered to form communities of practice, to develop knowledge networks, to share best practices, and to collaborate in seeking solutions;
• everyone knows something, nobody knows everything.

Coming next: Chapter 10 – experiential learning

Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Creating animations

There is nothing trivial about creating animations and this is usually a job for specialists. Those who don’t count themselves in this category can still produce quite decent results in PowerPoint, but this will only be of benefit if you are going to deliver your end product in PowerPoint or you are working with an authoring tool that will convert your work – including the animations – into Flash. Specialist animators will almost certainly choose to work with Adobe’s Flash Professional software, which is designed specifically for the job. As the name implies, this outputs to Flash, which means you can use the animations in most authoring tools and embed them directly in web pages.

Video editing

If video is part of your mix then, at very least, you’ll need the ability to import all your video clips into a project, select the ones you want to use, trim them and place them in sequence. You may also want to add music or a voiceover, superimpose captions, and apply effects or transitions. Luckily, all of this can be accomplished quite easily with low-cost or free tools such as Windows Live Movie Maker or Apple’s iMovie, as well as the budget versions of professional tools such as Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro. Like audio, video is surprisingly easy to work with and it should not take more than an hour or two to become familiar with all the most common operations.

Desktop publishing

Desktop publishing tools are normally used to lay out high-quality print publications such as brochures, newspapers, magazines, books and reports, but these days you’ll probably want to make this content available online as well as in print, almost certainly in PDF format. If so, although you can get by with standard word processing tools, you will almost always get much more professional-looking results with a specialist desktop publishing package, such as Adobe InDesign, Quark Express or Microsoft Publisher. Where these score over normal word processing packages is the compete flexibility you have over how you lay out text and graphics on each page. Look at a typical magazine and compare it with a typical Word document and you’ll soon see the difference.

We could go on. There are tools for creating cartoon books and for building 3D models; tools for developing games and for capturing screens from software packages. Some tools you will use every day, some just once. But to get started you certainly do not need them all. Kit yourself out with the basics and add to your collection as your skills and your creativity grow over time.

Part 1 Part 2

First published in Inside Learning Technologies, January 2012

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the third part of chapter 9:

On-demand learning is necessary because, in many jobs, it is impossible to know everything there is to know. And even if, through prolonged study and training, you were lucky enough to get to know it all, you’d soon find that most of it had changed. There’s too much to know and it changes far too quickly. In the knowledge economy, it is more important to know where to look – or who to talk to – than it is to have the knowledge yourself.

Alison Rossett and Lisa Schafer have identified a number of situations in which performance support makes particular sense:

When the performance is infrequent: There’s no point learning how to carry out a task if you rarely get to perform it, not least because, with insufficient repetitions, the information is unlikely to stick. An example might be setting up a home office network – chances are, you’ll only have to do this every 4-5 years, with little reinforcement of the information in between. An exception would be a task that, although carried out rarely, simply has to be carried out proficiently from memory, the most obvious example of which is an emergency procedure.

When the situation is complex, involves many steps or has many attributes: The more complex the task, the less likely you are to be able to remember every important detail. Even if you have been trained formally, performance support materials are a good backup.

When the consequence of error is intolerable: Highly critical skills may need to be formally developed through intensive training, but when every detail is important, it pays to provide clear instructions at the point-of-need, just to make sure.

When performance depends on knowledge, procedures or approaches that change frequently: There’s no point acquiring knowledge which is soon outdated. Take that example of the home office network – five years ago you’d have been laying Ethernet cables, now it’s all wireless.

When there is a high turnover and the task is perceived to be simple: It’s not only information that’s constantly changing, it’s people too. In some industries with high employee turnover, there’s little point in devoting training time to simple tasks – just provide clear instructions.

When there is little time or few resources to devote to training: In other words, if all else fails, at very least make sure you provide a decent job aid.

References:

Job Aids & Performance Support by Alison Rossett & Lisa Schafer, Pfeiffer, 2007.

Coming next: The on-demand learning toolkit

Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

It has the functionality required for you to produce the type of content you need

You might expect this to be a given, but in fact different tools tend to be geared to different types of content. While some tools, such as Adobe Captivate, Lectora and Articulate Studio, are relative all-rounders, some are more specialist. For example, Camtasia is a great tool for producing screencasts, Caspian Learning’s Thinking Worlds lets you develop immersive, 3D learning environments, and the new Articulate Storyline is geared to the development of learning scenarios. There are many other tools to choose from, all with their particular strengths.

It works the way you want to work

Most of the tools mentioned above are desktop applications, licensed for use on individual computers and these are by far the most commonly used. However, other tools, such as Rapid Intake’s Unison and Edvantage’s CourseBuilder, that run online in the cloud, are geared towards a team approach to authoring. These are more likely to be licensed on an enterprise-wide basis, so that all members of a content development team, from project managers to designers, subject experts to graphics specialists, can work together collaboratively.

With an online authoring tool, all project data is stored in a central database, accessible from any web browser on any device; components, from images to complete learning modules, can be easily shared between projects; reviews and tests can be conducted online and comments stored alongside the content for auctioning by other members of the team; versions for different devices and languages can be exported from the same core material. You can expect to see a wide range of new online authoring tools appearing in the coming years, as more and more of our computing switches to the cloud. For large teams working on building substantial content libraries, the benefits will be obvious.

It has legs

There is nothing more frustrating than having to re-develop a whole load of material because the tool you used to originally develop the content is no longer supported or available. If you go out on a limb and purchase an esoteric tool from a little-known vendor, you are taking a real risk. That risk is even greater if you’re working in the cloud: at least with a desktop tool, you can still make changes because the app and your data are sitting there on your computer; when an online tool is closed down, your work vanishes without trace. There is no kudos to be gained by using the same tools as everyone else, but you will sleep better.

It outputs in the right formats for you

Before choosing a tool, you need to be aware of all of the devices that might be used to access your content and the formats that are supported on these devices. If your tool outputs in Flash and this is not supported on your users’ PCs, or you want to deliver on iPhones and iPads, then you’ve got the wrong tool.

Part 1

Coming in part 3: Tools for special occasions

First published in Inside Learning Technologies, January 2012

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We start the new year with the second part of chapter 9:

The abundance of information is weighing heavily on the knowledge worker. The statistics are frightening, as Jay Cross reports:

• “In many professions, knowledge workers spend a third of their time looking for answers and helping their colleagues do the same.”
• “Only one in five knowledge workers consistently find the information they need to do their jobs.”
• “Knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information they were unaware of than creating original material.”

While we’re doling out statistics, let’s add some more from Charles Jennings:

• “The information available to humans is currently growing at a rate of 30% per year. This growth is increasing year on year and showing no sign of slowing.”
• “Ninety percent of the new information generated each year is stored on magnetic media of some type.”

The message hasn’t necessarily got through to the l&d department, as Jennings explains: “Even though we are all aware that we are operating in a world awash with unstructured information, many learning professionals and managers are still obsessed with the task of transferring information into the heads of learners/employees. They, and many of their managers, see that as the end-game of their endeavours.”

The inability to find the right information at the right time has a huge cost, as Paul Strassman, former VP at Xerox, reports: “Most businesses that are well endowed with technology lose about $5000 a year per workstation on ‘stealth spending’. Of this, 22% is for peer support and 30% for the ‘futz factor’. The second includes the time users spend in a befuddled state while clearing up unexplained happenings and overcoming the confusion and panic when computers produce enigmatic messages that stop work.”

So how do we respond to these pressures? Well, according to John Seely Brown and John Hagel: “Because you don’t know what to expect, planning is folly. It’s better to be as responsive as possible when the future arrives.” That’s on-demand learning.

References:

Learning is strictly business by Jay Cross, 2007

The Point-of-Need: where effective learning really matters by Charles Jennings, article in Advance series from Saffron Interactive, 2008

Quoted in The Social Life of Information, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duquid, Harvard Business School Press, 2002

The only sustainable edge by John Seely Brown and John Hagel, Harvard Business School Press, 2005

Coming next: The argument for on-demand learning

Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

Obtain your copy of The New Learning Architect

Here are basic tools that everyone needs:

Office suite

It’s hard to imagine that you could get by very long as a content creator without a suite of office applications. The most essential element of this is going to be a Microsoft Word-compatible word processor. Even if you do most of your own writing online or in some other application, you’re almost bound to get material sent to you in Word’s .doc or .docx formats. If you don’t want to pay for the Microsoft suite, Mac and iPad users have the option of Apple’s iWork apps, and there’s always the free OpenOffice.

If you are going to be creating slide-based material, then you must have PowerPoint. You can produce e-learning materials in PowerPoint alone, but more likely you will be using an add-in, like Articulate Presenter, that converts your work into a more web-compatible format like Flash or, looking to the future, HTML 5. Be careful, because these add-ins only work in PowerPoint itself, not compatible programs, and then only on Windows, not Mac. A bonus is that, if your content development is going to centre on PowerPoint, you may not need a separate image editor. Recent versions of PowerPoint (2007 on) have fantastic imaging capabilities that may mean you’ll never need to work with another program.

Image editing

Assuming, like most content creators, that your work will extend beyond PowerPoint, then you will definitely need some basic image processing capability. Let’s start with photo editing. You must be able to crop, resize, flip and rotate, adjust exposure, white balance, tone and colour, as well as remove red-eye. A little more functionality can also come in handy, like isolating a figure from its background, correcting blemishes, creating photo montages, adding frames and shadows, and superimposing text.

There is only one professional choice for photo editing and that’s Adobe Photoshop, although Adobe’s much cheaper consumer offering, Photoshop Elements, has almost as much capability. If you have no serious graphic design pretensions, then almost any other photo editing tool will do everything you need. There are plenty of free tools, including Windows Live Photo Gallery and iPhoto for the Mac and iPad, as well as open source options such as Gimp.

Of course your graphical work is unlikely to be restricted to photos. Most photo imaging tools, including Photoshop, also have excellent capabilities for producing diagrams and charts, as does PowerPoint. Serious illustrators have their own specialist tool in Adobe Illustrator and web designers laying out interfaces and creating icons are likely to turn to Adobe Fireworks, but if you just need to dabble from time to time there’s absolutely no need to spend any serious money.

Audio editing

It’s possible that audio plays no part currently in your content plans, perhaps because you have severe bandwidth limitations, but without doubt that will change over the next few years. Audio editing might seem complex, with all those intimidating-looking waveforms to manipulate, but in practice it’s no harder than working with text. You need a tool that will allow you to record audio from a microphone, edit this audio to remove bad takes and hesitations, adjust and equalise the volume and then save to a variety of different file formats. Any audio editor will do this, including those built in to many authoring tools.

It is possible you’ll want to go further than just capture a single voice. You may want to record from several different microphones at the same time; perhaps mix in music and sound effects; maybe even record and mix your own music. In these cases you will need a dedicated audio editor. The free option is Audacity and this is a very capable tool. Professionals and enthusiasts will undoubtedly want to go further and use a tool like Steinberg’s Wavelab, Sony’s Sound Forge or Adobe Audition.

Coming in part 2: E-learning authoring tools

First published in Inside Learning Technologies, January 2012

They taught us how to cross-stitch,

They taught us how to sing,

And how to model animals

From paper, card and string.

We worked out long division sums

Without a calculator,

And so built many useful skills

For life, that we’d use later.

We learned through play;

Our lives were filled with laughter and elation,

And though we sat in serried rows,

We learned through exploration.

My first kiss was with Gillian

Aged 8, and none was cuter

We both developed social skills

Without phone or computer.

On team game sport

Our every thought was focused at Assembly,

We’d dream and thrill, imagine skill

At Wimbledon or Wembley.

Each minute planned, inaction banned,

No time for idle yearning;

A merry dance with not a chance

Of sitting back in learning.

We didn’t need a garage for

Nobody had a car in

Those distant days of black and white

And *Wireless and Gagarin

And when I say we “walked the walk”

I simply mean we found

The whole world was our classroom

And a world of light and sound.

In case the message isn’t clear

I hope that you can see

It’s possible to feel the joy

Of learning without “e”.

But if you do go digital

and take the online road

Inform, inspire, set minds on fire

But just don’t overload.

• Footnote: Wireless meant something else in those days!