I’ve been tweeting a daily idea to spark your instructional design creativity. To get your daily ID idea, follow me on Twitter. (I don’t say much!)

Some recent tweets in the series:

• Ask your SME, “What are the 3 most common mistakes people make?” Turn them into branching scenarios.
• Using a story? What challenge is your character facing? Make them suffer!
• Are you solving a performance problem, or are you just turning information into a course?
• What are you creating to support your course? Job aids? Guidance for managers? Follow-up discussion? Additional tips in emails?
• Teaching a complex procedure? Course: How to use the job aids. Job aids: Everything else.
• What compelling scenario can you use to start your course? P.S. “A new employee is wondering…” isn’t compelling.
• Have your learners finish an almost-completed problem, then take away support in stages until they’re flying solo.
• What do you really want? “Describe the Heimlich maneuver” or “Save lives?” Don’t stop at declarative knowledge.
• How can you turn a dos/don’ts list into something more memorable? Try short scenarios that show the results; have learners draw the conclusion.

I use the #IDideas hashtag, and other people sometimes chime in with their own ideas. You can see past ideas here.

Image © iStockPhoto: mattjeacock

What happens if you don’t set any boundaries in your relationships? You wear yourself out doing everything for everybody and the next thing you know, you’ve cursed everyone out, grabbed a couple of beers, and slid down the escape chute.

The same thing can happen to your course. If you don’t set any boundaries and try to cover everything for everybody, you end up with a stressed-out course that can’t do anything for anybody.

Just say no

It’s fun to say “no.” Try it!

• “I’m sorry, but we can’t teach novices and experts simultaneously. We need to pick one or the other.”
   
• “Let’s focus on people who need to do X in situation Y. If we try to reach ‘everyone who’s interested in X,’ we’ll just create an information dump.”
   
• “Since widget sniffers and widget snarfers have very different jobs, we should create a separate module for each role.”

No one wants a lukewarm experience

An entrepreneur was convinced he had a great idea. “Some people like hot tea, and other people like cold tea,” he said. “Let’s sell lukewarm tea and dominate both markets!”

Is your course lukewarm?

Image © iStockPhoto: BijoyVerghese

Need to design lean, lively elearning? You might get ideas from this recording of a webinar that I gave today for the Baton Rouge ASTD.

It’s about 45 minutes long and shows how to use action mapping to quickly identify which content and activities will be most useful.

The webinar shows how to:

• Choose a goal that leads to a measurable business improvement
• Brainstorm realistic activities that help learners apply their new knowledge on the job
• Identify what content really needs to be included—and what can be cut
• Decide what should information should go in a course and what should go in a job aid

You can also download a PDF of the slides, but they don’t make a lot of sense on their own.

I’ll publicize future webinars in this blog and through my Twitter account. I didn’t announce this one because it was my first time flying solo as both a presenter and moderator in Elluminate.

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:

Part 1

• Super-quick overview of action mapping
• “Awareness” and “tracking” aren’t good reasons to create a course

Part 2

• 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

(more…)

Here’s a short presentation that includes:

• The one powerful change that will make our elearning a lot more effective
• A quick demo of action mapping
• A fun example of the type of information that should go in job aids
• How to get people to stop telling you, “Turn this information into a course”

To see a bigger version on YouTube, click the movie when it’s playing. Can’t access YouTube? Here’s a Flash version.

To practice steering your client away from an information dump, you might try this challenge. (more…)

You’re a US Army sergeant in Afghanistan. Can you help a young lieutenant overcome cultural differences and make a good impression on a Pashtun leader?

That’s the challenge behind “Connect with Haji Kamal,” a decision-making scenario that my cool client Kinection and I developed for the US Army. The online scenario is the homework part of a lesson plan that includes in-class discussion about how to build rapport across cultures. It’s part of a much larger effort in the Army to strengthen soldiers’ cross-cultural and peacekeeping skills.

Turn on your speakers and give it a spin, and then come back here if you’re interested in the design decisions behind the activity.

The goals

The activity is designed to be completed as homework before a culture class, and it includes a facilitator guide with debrief questions. Our goals were to model specific rapport-building behaviors and inspire class discussion.

To follow the “good” paths, you need to see things from Haji Kamal’s point of view, show respect and patience, and otherwise apply cross-cultural skills that will be discussed in class. You end up on less successful branches by making more ethnocentric choices. (more…)

You want to create an action-packed online experience that revolutionizes learners’ behavior. Your subject matter expert wants you to faithfully reproduce every lovingly polished bullet of their 217-slide PowerPoint presentation. Is there any hope for your relationship?

Everyone knows that in any relationship, it’s the other person who needs to change. So let’s change your SME.

1. Read what they gave you.

Before you do anything else, read all 217 slides. Respect the effort that the SME has put into their work and try to understand what they wrote. And make a note for future projects: Don’t let SMEs create PowerPoints. Ask them for an informal brain dump instead, or an interview, or any other format that they won’t put so much work into.

2. Involve them from the beginning

If you use Action Mapping, include the SME in the very first discussions with your client, when you identify the goal. Ask the SME to help answer these questions: (more…)

When employees of the US Internal Revenue Service need to find out what taxpayers are doing, they look online. How would you train them to dig deep into the web without violating privacy laws?

David Anderson has linked to the script of an online course that the IRS uses to train its employees. It was released during a Freedom of Information Act case and posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). As David points out, the script uses the common tell-then-test approach.

What could they have done differently?

Here’s the script, thanks to the EFF. You’ll see that it’s clearly written and organized, which is great.

Like most elearning, it presents a lot of information and then quickly tests our understanding of that info. It also uses some interesting examples from real life.

The course is a perfectly capable information presentation. But since my tax dollars helped pay for it, I can’t help wishing they had done it differently. So let’s give the IRS some friendly suggestions.

What would happen if we changed the objectives?

The IRS course has these objectives: (more…)

Are you dreaming of an immersive simulation while your team members plan yet another Jeopardy game? If you want stakeholders to expand their horizons, a working prototype is your best friend.

A working prototype has simple placeholder graphics, but the clicking and dragging work as they will in the final activity. Build a quick-and-dirty version of the activity of your dreams, and use it to convert everyone on your team.

Here’s a two-part video that shows what I mean. Leif Cederblom of SmartBuilder compares two prototypes of the same activity and highlights the goals and benefits of prototyping.

Part 1: The conventional drag-and-drop: busywork that’s easy to forget

Part 2: A more realistic activity that’s more likely to change behavior

Try both prototypes yourself and see how the contrast between the two underscores the power of the more realistic activity. No amount of polish would make the drag-and-drop more than a rote activity, while the “leave the lab” prototype is effective even in its raw, prototype form.

Imagine that you’re in a competition to overhaul an information-heavy course so it creates a real change in the world. What changes would you make? Check out this story-based presentation to see what one fictional company did.

If some type is too small, click the “full” icon in the player and you’ll get the big-screen version.

The presentation is an adaptation of a talk I’ve been giving at the Australian Flexible Learning Framework conferences. It’s designed to help people break free of the traditional information-first approach to instructional design.

One of the challenges with using the approach described in the presentation is that it usually requires more design time. Since many clients don’t actually measure the effectiveness of their materials and just want information put online quickly, it can be hard to argue for immersive scenarios. Have you successfully used scenarios? Did you have to convince stakeholders to let you use them?