How action mapping can change your design process

18 January 2012 By 28 Comments

Happy action mapping users say that the model helps them create lively elearning. But would it fit into your design workflow?

Action mapping makes stakeholders work together to analyze the performance problem, commit to the same measurable goal, and agree to focus on activities rather than information. This can be a big change to the typical course development workflow.

Without action mapping:

  1. The client says, “I need a course.”
  2. You say, “Okay.”
  3. The client gives you a pile of content, the phone number of a subject matter expert (SME), and a deadline.
  4. You create a detailed storyboard or script, getting information as necessary from the SME. The structure of the information determines the structure of the course.
  5. The client and SME approve the script and you go into production.
  6. The course is made available and your job is done.

action mapping for instructional designUsing action mapping:

  1. The client says, “I need a course.”
  2. You say, “Great. Let’s get together to make sure we all understand what you want the course to accomplish.”
  3. You schedule a two-hour meeting in a space with a whiteboard or in a virtual meeting room where you can share a mind-mapping screen. You include the client, at least one subject matter expert, and possibly others from the table below.
  4. In that meeting, you identify your business goal and how you’ll measure success. You also identify the behaviors needed to reach that goal.
  5. As a group, you analyze why the behaviors aren’t happening, confirm that training will actually solve the problem, and identify how the training will be supported by managers, workplace changes, and other improvements.
  6. After the meeting, you work with the SME and possibly others to brainstorm and prototype practice activities for each behavior needed to reach the goal. Ideally, you test the prototypes on learners.
  7. You get approval for the prototypes from the client.
  8. You work with the SME and possibly others to identify the minimum information necessary to complete each activity and decide how it should be provided.
  9. You create a storyboard or script. The content has already been identified in the action map; you’re just filling in the details and arranging the material. The activities determine the organization of the course.
  10. The client and SME approve the script and you go into production.
  11. Once the material is being used by learners, you or the client begins measuring its impact, and you revise it as necessary.

The above list makes it look like action mapping takes longer, and it will take longer if you’re not doing much analysis now. However, the rest of the process can actually go more quickly than conventional course design. You save time by:

  • Not creating a course when it isn’t necessary or won’t help
  • Addressing only the specific behaviors that need to change
  • Excluding unnecessary information
  • Taking advantage of easily updated job aids
  • Designing activities that test multiple areas of knowledge at once
  • Creating tightly focused materials that don’t waste learners’ time

Who should be included?

The table below lists the four steps of action mapping and identifies who you might consider including at each step. The first two steps can often be covered in one two-hour meeting, if the client and SME are familiar with the learners and the performance problem.

One of the goals in action mapping is to identify what information needs to be memorized (put in the course) and what can be referenced on the job (put in job aids). Often, existing job aids are created and “owned” by someone in a different department. That person might be your SME, or they might be someone else. They need to be included in some of your planning to make sure the job aid can be used as you want, to approve any changes to it, and to offer their ideas about incorporating it into practice activities.

Step Client SME Job aid
owner 		Learner Graphics/Flash
person
1: Set goal Yes Yes Maybe No No
2: Identify behaviors & why they’re not happening Yes Yes Maybe No No
3: Brainstorm practice activities Approve prototypes Help brainstorm or at least approve prototypes Help brainstorm or at least approve use of job aid Provide ideas, feedback on prototypes Help create prototypes
4: Identify necessary info No Yes Approve use of job aid or changes to it Maybe, as tester No

 

What works for you?

I’ve added the above information to the Elearning Blueprint, where it’s easy to update. So please tell me: What did I forget? What processes have worked best for you?

Also, a reminder: I’ll be leading a two-day certificate program in instructional design for elearning on Feb. 11-12 at the Training conference in Atlanta. Use code CATMN to get a $150 discount on your registration. I hope to see you there!

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Are learners idiots?

13 December 2011 By 42 Comments

Be sure to read this paragraph. It tells you that in this post, you’ll learn how to manage stakeholders who want to treat learners like idiots. If you have trouble reading the paragraph, click the speaker icon located in the bottom right-hand corner of this screen and a professional narrator will read the text to you in a soothing voice that slides like oil over any functioning brain cells and gently smothers them.

Now read the next paragraph.

“Assume intelligence,” Jerry Weissman tells us in Presentations in Action. “Your audience has been there, done that, and they get it.”

Are your learners idiots?Contrast Weissman’s advice with what your stakeholders might be telling you, or what a small voice might be saying in your head.

  • “We should tell them how to navigate the course.”
  • “We should define ‘safety’ to make sure everyone knows what we mean.”
  • “We should explain that they’re about to be shown a story in which a character will have to make a decision, and they’re going to make the decision for that character.”

We’re all adults here

If you’re designing for the corporate world, which is what I focus on in this blog, your learners have decades of experience figuring out what buttons do, reading text on a screen, and interpreting what’s happening to them as it happens.

Unfortunately, stakeholders might focus on the possible exception, the one person who can’t figure out that a button pointing to the right will move them forward and who will sit staring at the first screen until the lights get turned off.

A common solution is to provide optional help: a tab called “How to navigate this course,” links to definitions, and optional popup explanations like, “This is a fictional activity. You will pretend to be a person who is facing a challenge…”

A sign of a deeper problem

Unfortunately, stakeholders or small voices saying that you need to guide learners by the nose are symptoms of a deeper issue that can poison your materials, regardless of your optional help tabs. [Read more...]

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How to create a memorable mini-scenario

12 October 2011 By 20 Comments

Often we’re told, “Put this information into a course.” But what happens if we put the information into a job aid instead, and then design mini-scenarios that help learners use the job aid?

This approach not only keeps boring blather out of our elearning, it can also make our activities more memorable. Here’s how it could work.

Example

Let’s say we’re designing a course on needle safety for a hospital. A common approach would be to display some slides of information about dos and don’ts, and then to present a generic fact check, like, “What’s the best way to dispose of a used needle?”

Instead, we’ll plunge our learners directly into an activity that somewhat simulates real life and that includes real-life job aids. So here’s the first thing learners see in this module.
Magda has pricked herself with a needle that she just removed from a patient's artery. What should she do?

We’re tempting the learner to respond without thinking, but we’ve also given them access to more information. For example, the learner could click the first thumbnail to see the safety poster that appears in every examining room and that explains what to do with a needlestick injury.

But our sample learner thinks, “Everyone knows you pour Betadine on that kind of wound,” and they choose that without looking at any other information.

Here’s the feedback we give them. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Elearning examples, Instructional design, Scenario design Tagged With: ,

Do they just know it, or can they USE it?

28 September 2011 By 28 Comments

It’s easy and tempting to write activities that test whether learners know something. How can we make learners use their knowledge as well?

You might be familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy. Its current form identifies six categories of intellectual performance, from remembering to creating.

macheteTo make the taxonomy easier to apply, I grabbed my Unsubtle Machete of Oversimplification and in a few whacks reduced the categories to just two:

  • Know activities ask learners to retrieve and maybe categorize or explain information.
  • Use activities ask learners to apply information to realistic situations.

Often, a “use” activity includes a test of whether the learner “knows” something — you get two activities in one!

Example

Your learners create widgets. To speak with their coworkers, they need to know some technical terms. One term is “transmogrification,” which means modifying a widget so it will work at high altitudes. What can we do to help learners master this term and the related concept?

Know activity: Drag the term to its definition — drag “transmogrify” to “modify a widget so it will function at high altitudes”

Use activity:

Your client wants to use their widget at 2800 meters above sea level. What modification do you need to make to the widget?

  1. Transmogrify it
  2. Redorbinate it
  3. Neoplyordinize it
  4. No modification needed

The “use” activity tests whether the learner can apply their knowledge of transmogrification in a realistic situation, not in an abstract definition activity. At the same time, it answers three “know” questions for us. It tells us whether the learner knows that: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Elearning examples, Instructional design Tagged With: , ,

Are instructional designers doormats?

23 August 2011 By 33 Comments

If your client said, “Please create a course about our impossibly complex process,” what would you say?

A. “Hmmm. That process looks really complicated. Is there any way to make it simpler?”

or

B. “No problem. Would you like fries with that?”

Often we know nothing about our client’s processes, and it’s tempting to think we should never question what they do.

But I like to think that our ignorance gives us a valuable outsider’s perspective that can help our clients improve performance through every means, not just through a course.

Our contribution can include everything from writing job aids to helping the client troubleshoot and simplify their processes.

For example, I was once asked to write a super-whiz-bang Flash course on how to use a client’s internal software. To write the course I needed to learn how to use the software, so I asked for their manual. They didn’t have one. A cheat sheet? Nothing. There was a dense, cryptic screen you could get if you typed “help” and that was it.

I obediently wrote the course. It took eons and cost the client a bucket of money, but I think the most valuable part was actually the PDF quick reference that I wrote in just two hours.

Now that I have more of a spine, I’d propose just starting with the quick reference to see if that removed the need for a course.

But isn’t it risky?

In his post on this topic, Allen Partridge asks, [Read more...]

Filed Under: Instructional design Tagged With: , ,

Technical training: What do they need to DO?

1 August 2011 By 15 Comments

Here’s a common question:

All employees have to know how to use our software. Why isn’t that a good enough goal for instructional design? Why should I go through action mapping?

My answer: If you don’t identify what people actually do with the software and design your training around that, you could create an information dump that helps no one and can’t justify its own existence.

Identify what they need to do, not what they need to know

People use software to do things. If you know what those things are, you can design easily updated job aids or online help for the most common tasks. Then your elearning, if it’s necessary at all, can use realistic scenarios to give learners a safe place to practice using the job aids.

For lots more on this and a before-and-after example of software training, see the Technical training section of the Elearning Blueprint, which is public and free.

Photo: (c) iStockPhoto

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Sample branching scenario + cool tool

12 July 2011 By 36 Comments

Branching scenarios can be a pain to design. Happily, you can use a simple tool called Twine to easily draft the scenario and produce it. In this post we’ll look at a scenario that I wrote to demonstrate Twine’s basic features and to make a point about teaching through stories.

In the scenario, you’re a journalist in a hurry to get to a hot story in Zekostan, and your “guide” can’t speak English or drive. You have to quickly learn the necessary Zeko terms to navigate the roads and respond to events along the way. The scenario was inspired by a language-learning activity designed by Kinection.

Try the activity, keeping in mind that it’s a casual, unfinished experiment. Then come back here for more about Twine and my design decisions.

Twine

Twine works in Windows and on the Mac, it’s free, and it publishes scenarios in easily customized, accessible HTML. It’s based on TiddlyWiki, a lightweight information management tool.

Each scene in a scenario is really a small record in a wiki database. The links you create determine the path that the learner takes through the records. Thanks, Steve Flowers, for pointing out Twine in the Articulate forum.

Here’s the flowchart view, which Twine automatically creates as you link your scenes (click for a bigger image):

Screenshot of Twine flowchart view

Twine offers some advantages over other ways to write scenarios. You can:

  • Quickly switch between flowchart view and story-editing mode
  • Link scenes using simple text
  • Add images and sound files and otherwise use HTML
  • Export the story in text format for review and proofing
  • Publish the finished story in HTML
  • Use simple codes to keep track of variables or limit learners’ choices (not shown in the sample scenario)

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Elearning examples, Featured scenarios, Instructional design, Scenario design Tagged With: , ,

Checklist for strong elearning

5 July 2011 By 22 Comments

Do you want a checklist you can use to evaluate elearning? Here’s my contribution (PDF).

I’m calling it a checklist because several people have asked for one, but it’s not really a checklist. Instead of checking a box to say, “Yup, got that covered!” you choose a spot on a spectrum between “action-oriented materials” and “information dump.”

There are 14 items to evaluate. Once you’ve rated them all, you can glance down the “spectrum” column to see which items are closest to the dreaded “information dump” and therefore need the most work.

elearning checklist

This range-finding approach acknowledges that we’re all facing forces that push us toward information dumps. My goal is to suggest specific items to assess and discuss as we move stakeholders closer to the “action-oriented” side of the chart.

The tool can also be used to clarify what I intend to be the end result of action mapping. For example, if a client asks for an “action mapped” course, show them the chart. If they say, “Yes, I want everything on the left side of the chart,” then they understand the goal of action mapping and will probably buy in to the design process.

Please feel free to share the checklist. Please also post your suggestions for changes in the comments section below or send them to me at the email address shown in the About page of the blog. Thanks!

Filed Under: Instructional design Tagged With: ,

Highlights from the Learning Technologies conference

31 January 2011 By 12 Comments

Last week, I presented on action mapping at the lively and thought-provoking Learning Technologies conference in London. It was great to meet and share ideas with passionate advocates and critics of elearning. Thank you, Don Taylor and the hard-working conference team, for bringing us all together!

As some readers requested, here are the main points that I hope people took from my session:

  • The goal of action mapping is to design experiences, not information. We want to help learners practice making the decisions that they need to make on the job.
  • Set a measurable business (not learning) goal for your project. Show how you’ll improve business performance to justify the expense of your project.
  • Identify what people need to do in the real world to reach the goal and determine why they aren’t doing it. Lack of knowledge might not be the real problem.
  • In activities, have learners practice making the decisions that they need to make on the job; don’t make them recite information.
  • Show the realistic consequences of learners’ decisions (Bill is accidentally cut by the scalpel) and let learners draw conclusions from them. Don’t say “correct/incorrect.”
  • Have learners start with an activity, not information. Embed the necessary info in the activity and make it optional, or have learners refer to the real-world job aid.
  • Success in the decision-making activity shows that learners know the information. Avoid fact checks.
  • Surprise and failure are memorable. Let learners make mistakes—they’ll remember them.
  • Everything in your material should directly support the business goal. Have your client and subject matter expert participate in the entire process to get buy-in and avoid having to fight off the “nice to know” stuff.

Are vendors clueless?

The vendors at the conference appeared to focus on content delivery, while several speakers emphasized providing realistic experiences that build decision-making skills or sharing knowledge with social tools. This apparent disconnect between the “upstairs” speakers and “downstairs” vendors inspired some discussion at the conference. [Read more...]

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The anti-course: An instructional job aid

8 December 2010 By 11 Comments

Here’s a short video that shows how we can break our addiction to the course and move training closer to the job. It shows how we can use an instructional reference to help people learn by doing at work.

Click the video once it’s playing to see it bigger on YouTube, or watch a Flash version.

My point: If you’re teaching a process or other practical action, consider creating an instructional job aid that helps learners apply the new process immediately to a real-world task. The mega job aid:

  • Provides the how-to information typical to a job aid
  • Includes the kind of thought-provoking questions and motivational messages often found in a course
  • Emphasizes immediate application of the new process to the real world
  • Takes as long as the real world task requires—it’s not a 30-minute insta-cure

Obviously, you could include this sort of tool in a larger solution that also includes a classroom or online course, mentoring, more extensive social networking, and any other combination of approaches.

The video uses the Elearning Blueprint as an example and references this survey by Chapman Associates.

Upcoming presentations

You an also see recordings of past presentations in the new workshop calendar, and you can get a daily instructional design idea if you follow me on Twitter.

Filed Under: Featured instructional design, Instructional design Tagged With:
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