Need to make an impact on a budget? You might find some ideas in this presentation.
It shows five decisions you can make that will help you save money and create more memorable elearning. It’s split into five short videos for easy idea-snacking and to meet the restrictions of YouTube.
Highlights include a matrix that helps you decide if training will solve the problem (part 2) and an example of a storyboard that emphasizes activities, not information (part 5).
Here’s the first part.
These links go to YouTube:
- Super-quick overview of action mapping
- “Awareness” and “tracking” aren’t good reasons to create a course
- Handy matrix to help you answer, “Why aren’t people doing what we need them to do?”
- Will a course really solve the problem?
- Example of a multiple-choice question and feedback that simulate the real world
- Put the information in the real world, not the course
- Example of an activity that points to job aids in the challenge and feedback
- Create a series of activities, not info screens
- Example of an activity that points to external info and makes learners think independently
- Start with an activity, not information
- Example of a brainstorming storyboard that puts activities first
- Summary of the main points
The five ways to save:
- Don’t create a course unless it’s really necessary and useful.
- Write activities in which a character faces a realistic challenge.
- Put the information outside the course.
- Use the course to show how to use the job aids.
- Let the activities, not the content, drive the design.
The presentation was my part of the “Value for Money” event organized by the UK eLearning Network on May 14. It’s actually a backup recording made before the event, to be used if internet trouble prevented me from speaking live.
Since the presentation was intended for people at an elearning event, it assumes that viewers want (or are required!) to create elearning. Of course, there are many other ways to solve a performance problem, and elearning is just one of them.
Thanks for sharing your ideas. I love your focus on putting the learner into realistic scenarios even if it is just a multiple choice question you are asking them. Keep up the good work and hopefully we can put an end to info dumps.
Hi Cathy – you are spot on with your thoughts and ideas!
hi cathy,
I have just found your articles through one of my friends. we both are doing mtech in education tech. from NIIT Univertisy in Neemrana, rajasthan, India. I din’t have much exposure and experiance in contnet and trying to understand nitty/gritty of same. I am finding your articles really interesting, easy to understand and to the point. Thanx.
Hi Cathy, part two of your video series was just pointed out to me due to this single slide you have in there with images from Second Life. As one of the images was from me, the person who sent to me was quite surprised because the activities at the time in Second Life had nothing to do with “eLearning” as you describe and of course there was no attribution on the image which they found odd as well.
Now I don’t mind if you use my images, and I’d be happy to explain the project within Second Life and the areas that did touch on learning materials (although that aspect was very limited) however to use the image in such a blanket way and with no context was a bit surprising as well as unfair.
Craig
Hi Craig, I’m sorry that you felt that my brief display of an image from your Second Life project was unfair. The images were intended to simply help define what I was describing as “realistic” by showing what some in my field might have assumed when I said “realistic.” I wasn’t choosing learning projects from Second Life, I was just looking for Second Life images that could be displayed in a business blog.
I don’t believe I said anything derogatory about your project or any virtual world project except to point out that it can take more time and, therefore, expense for businesses to develop learning activities that use 3D worlds as opposed to the PowerPoint conversion software that many of my blog readers use.
If you’d like to describe and link to your project here, please feel free to do so. In the meantime, I’ll remove the image.
Cathy, thank you for your insight with these videos. I have a frequent scenerio that we often run into. We are a very large organization and have been doing virtual instructor led training for many years. Quite often we get people come to us and tell us they want to convert their vILT into an eLearning module, to allow for greater scalability and greater delivery, as the live model doesn’t always work for large deliveries. Have you written anything or can you point me to any steps on how to determine if it makes sense to convert a vILT course to an eLearning module? Look forward to your insight.
I haven’t written anything specifically about this, but I would suspect that moving from virtual ILT to standalone, self-paced elearning would require a lot of the same thinking that goes on when people go from classroom-based to standalone elearning.
On the surface, the scalability would be appealing, but removing the human instructor could be detrimental, depending on the type of learning that’s supposed to happen.
For example, a course that’s supposed to develop something a little fuzzy like creativity or leadership probably benefits from having an involved instructor and discussion among the learners. The same is probably true of courses on communication skills, like business writing–tailored, human feedback is really helpful.
Other materials, like software training and other skills that have more clear “right” and “wrong” answers might survive the transition to standalone elearning more successfully.
One thing to consider would be how to make sure that any questions that the instructor usually answered are covered in the standalone material. The current instructors could probably tell you what the common questions and misunderstandings are, so you can make sure the new material covers them.
One alternative that’s still scalable is to design standalone elearning but release it on a schedule, so a group of learners goes through it together. That way, you can encourage discussion, which could be moderated by a former instructor in (I assume) a lot less time than delivering the course used to take.
For example, in week 1 you could deliver module 1, which contains some questions or provocative statements for learners to discuss in a forum.
If you put the learners on an email autoresponder, you could also send a weekly email that includes a discussion-provoking statement and a link to the forum, or that includes tips to reinforce what module 1 covered.
This synchronous-but-standalone approach could also help mitigate another big change that could challenge learners: live training has a schedule, while most self-paced doesn’t. Some people might need that schedule to stay on track.
Hi Cathy,
I am an ardent follower of your blog. I must say that you have changed the whole way that I look at eLearning design. Often, I have loads of information to convey, and feel that by providing all of it through my course, I might bore the learner to death. Off late, I have been using your “activity” method to design courses. Though designing activity-based learning requires a slightly different approach from designing traditional courses, it’s more fun at the end of the day. I particularly liked part 3 of this presentation. Keep blogging.
Kavita, thanks for your comment. I’m glad the method has been helpful.
Hello Cathy,
I read this and watched all the videos on youtube. I have been a follower of yours for a while now and like others have said, you have changed the way I look at design and elearning. I also find your video narration style quirky and fun… just as they should be coming from you. Good work.
I was led to another video you did about effective prototyping. I would love to see you dissect more courses and discuss how you would improve them to be more learner-centric and activity based.
You are an inspiration to me and I look forward to more. Please don’t stop.
Anna
Cathy,
I enjoy reading your blog and thought this post was particularly interesting. However, I am frustrated by the inclusion of YouTube videos since I am unable to view these at work. Our internet security policy prevents it. Also, I found the volume on your videos to be very low – even at the maximum volume, it was often difficult to understand.
Julie
Excellent series!! Thank you for making this available. We’ve been successfully using your model for our e-learning and are making progress in helping our internal customers start to make a change in their thinking. I’m pushing for Action Mapping to become the design model for our classroom training as well.
Anna, Julie, and Anne, thanks for your comments. Thanks for the ideas for future videos, and for the heads-up about the low audio. I’ll boost the volume on future videos. I’ll also look into using another video host.
A concern was raised earlier about my use of three cropped, reduced screenshots to give examples of virtual worlds in the original presentation. If you’re worried about your own use of screenshots as examples in presentations, according to the Nolo Press Patent, Copyright, and Trademark blog, such informational use of screenshots is very probably fair use under US copyright law.
Hi Cathy,
Thanks for the great videos. In segment 5, I’m a little confused about how the learner in your course interacts with the character Jane. Does the learner get to click something to actually “interrupt” her speech? Or is it more like- The learner listens to Jane delivering speech and then tries to identify what’s wrong with it?
Thanks again for this great learning resource!
Ethan
Ethan, thanks for your question. I’d suggest that the way the learner interacts with the scenario should depend on what you want the learner to practice.
For example, if you want the learners to practice creating elevator pitches, then you would probably want the learner to choose what Jane should say. You could then show the results of the learner’s choice (for example, lack of interest from the listener) and use feedback to diagnose the problem.
However, if the learner’s real-world job really is to tell people what was wrong with what they just said, then you would probably want learners to listen to Jane and then identify what was wrong with what she just said.
Obviously, all sorts of variations on these approaches are useful, depending on your instructional goals and what you want learners to do in the real world. For example, you could start out by having the learner diagnose a weak elevator speech from Jane and then progress to creating one for her.
Cathy
Hello Cathy!
I recently found you blog and is really changing my way to see ID.
Is a great approach for most of the courses, but do you think that is suitable in all cases?
For example to explain how works a complex machine (not how to use) or simply a wine course made by a winery? That the objective is gibe some information in a nice way …
Thanks for all the information! Congratulations for your blog.
Felipe
Cathy,
Thank you so much for your compact-but-chock full of ideas approach to Instructional design! As a new student in an ID program, I felt a bit overwhelmed at how to even brainstorm ideas let alone design an instructional program. In particular, Part 5 you mention the ways to save time by sticking to these main points:
1.Don’t create a course unless it’s really necessary and useful.
2.Write activities in which a character faces a realistic challenge.
3.Put the information outside the course.
4.Use the course to show how to use the job aids.
5.Let the activities, not the content, drive the design
The way you laid these main points out, I feel very confidant that I can draw from them and come up with a clear and concise program (one day) that is useful, relateable and loaded with activities to drive home the point of the material. Thanks again.