This Wednesday (July 21), I’ll give an online workshop on action mapping, thanks to the Los Angeles chapter of ASTD. The one-hour session starts at 10 AM PST (convert to your time zone). Register here.
We’ll apply action mapping to a compliance training example and discuss how it helps with other types of materials as well. You’ll see how the approach can help you:
- Pinpoint the business improvement that your materials will help create
- Identify what people need to do in the real world to create that improvement
- Brainstorm compelling online activities that help people practice those real-world actions
- Identify what information should go into the course, what should go into job aids, and what should be cut
This workshop covers the same instructional design approach as the Baton Rouge workshop that you can see here, but we’ll use a compliance example and put more emphasis on tying job aids to the course.
In these workshops I ask for lots of ideas, so come prepared to join the chat!
The webinar will be recorded. I’ll post a link to the recording when it’s available.
Hi Cathy,
The recording will be much appreciated! The webinare will be at 3am Melbourne time – even I am not that dedicated!!.
Jen
How do i join this session?
I wish I’d picked this up a couple of days ago. I look forward to seeing the link for the recording.
Simon
Cathy, will there be a link to view the presentation for those who could not attend at the scheduled time?
Gene, I’ll post a link to a recording of the session in the comments to this post when the organizers have made it available.
The webinar recording is now available at the Elluminate site here. You can also download the slides.
How does the menu look/work for these courses? How do you get from scenario to scenario?
I get the activity info activity info info activity approach. But how is the template/UI designed?
One approach I’ve used is to have a little icon/menu item appear after a scenario is completed so the learner can revisit it. I also start with all the scenarios laid out and some are ‘locked’ if it makes more sense to do the scenarios in order (easy to hard, start to finish).
I also start out with a little motiongraphic/animation to set the scene (the health and safety managers are looking for someone on the inside to help them keep staff safe and they play the role of an undercover H and S person helping colleagues.)
Are there any examples in your ‘samples’ page?
Cathy
Thanks for your post on the task specific instructional job aid (The anti-course: An instructional job aid post). As a beginning instructional design student your comments parallel what I have been thinking about as I create training for my employer’s business processes.
The whole point of training and learning is to make students and employees more valuable to society and the organization. One of the more important things I picked up on in the Walden Organization class (EDUC 6105) was the connection between learning and innovation. Learning and innovation are tools that influence each other and create the ability for an organization to be competitive. The basic relationship between learning and innovation was illustrated by Schermerhorn, Hunt, & Osborn (2008) stating that “the challenge is doing to learn and learning to do” (p. 418). Organizational learning leads to innovation and innovation leads to new and better ways to do things. Finding the best way for a student or employee to learn strengthens the student and ultimately the organization. This is in line with your blog post when you mention moving the training closer to the job and use instructional reference to help people learn by doing. (Moore, 2010)
Here is the second half of my post (must be a size limit on the post, since the entire post won’t post correctly).
Last spring the company that I work for received a Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) assessment at a maturity level 2 with some level 3 capabilities. CMMI is a Department of Defense (DoD) initiative for contractors that define how companies can use the CMMI framework to define, manage, and improve project management and software development processes. Included in the level 3 capabilities are the process definition, process focus, and organizational training. As the project manager for the change effort and the lead for the organizational training portion I created role-based training for each process. Since the completion and evaluation of the effectiveness of the initial round of process training I started to break the training into smaller units by zeroing in at the activity or task level.
Here is the next part of my post (must be a size limit on the post, since the entire post won’t post correctly).
This is consistent with your elearning blueprint and action mapping process where you start with the goal to be achieved and map it to the required actions and information (content) needed to achieve it. Any process can be decomposed into activities and tasks with an input-process-output (IPO) flow definition. This IPO mapping would be to your action-activity-information (AAI) flow. The important part of your elearning blueprint is identifying clear, concise business goals mapped to the AAO flow, with the declarative and procedural knowledge needed to execute the flow mapped to this IPO or AAI flow. Also many business processes have job aids defined for their execution that include templates, documents, spreadsheets, tools, and data files. Activity or task specific training could be created and made available on demand.