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.

Using 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!

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.”

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.

Thanks to our experience in school, when we’re put in a “teaching” role, we make these assumptions:

Learners know nothing. Our job is to insert knowledge into their brains without considering any knowledge that might already be there.

Learners can’t be trusted. They can’t be allowed to skip what they already know, and they must be told explicitly what’s right and wrong because they can’t draw conclusions from experience or stories.

These assumptions deny the adulthood of our learners. When these assumptions shape instruction, we create boring materials that sound like a patronizing parent.

Under the weight of such disrespect, any motivation the learners might have had squirms briefly and dies.

What to do

Remind stakeholders that learners are adults: Send them to the excellent rebuttals that Geeta Bose provides in IDiot: “I’m not an idiot!”

Get everyone on your team to agree that you’re designing an experience, not information. Visit the linked page to find posts that will help you design so your learners learn from experience.

Let learners place out. Start with simulations or scenarios that require learners to make the kinds of decisions they need to make in real life. If a learner proves that they can consistently make the right decisions, let them go.

Show, don’t tell. When a learner makes a poor decision, use the feedback to show them the results of their decision so they can conclude on their own that what they did was sub-optimal. Then, if necessary, show them what they need to know — or, better, put them in an easier scenario with more help and ratchet up the difficulty more slowly.

What has worked for you? Let us know in the comments!

February elearning design certificate

I’ll be presenting a two-day workshop on elearning design at the Training conference in Atlanta on February 11-12. Use discount code CATMN to save $150 on your registration.

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.

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.

The feedback describes the results of the learner’s choice, letting the learner conclude that they were wrong. It also includes a snippet of the safety poster, pointing out where the learner should have looked. The learner sees for themselves that they not only skipped a step, they also used the wrong washing method.

Why did we do this?

Even though the safety poster appears in every room, we suspect that people aren’t looking at it, because they’re making basic mistakes with needles. So our course not only corrects the common mistakes but repeatedly reminds learners of the job aids they should be using.

And, importantly, this approach lets us surprise learners with their own mistakes. If we first listed a bunch of rules, including “Wash needlestick injuries with soap and water,” the learner might be mildly surprised, thinking, “What, not Betadine?” But by letting the learner give Magda Hepatitis C, we’ve surprised them more vividly and, ideally, will help them remember their mistake the next time they accidentally jab themselves.

This is a very simple demonstration of how we can have learners practice using job aids. For more complex procedures, we could have learners refer to the job aid as they carry out each step, showing the results of each decision in a realistic way.

Upcoming webinar for Australasia

I’ll talk more about scenarios in a one-hour online presentation for the Elearning Network of Australasia. The event happens Tuesday, Oct. 18, at 10 AM Sydney time (convert to your local time). Join us in this Blackboard Collaborate room.

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.

To 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:

• 2800 meters is officially “high altitude”
• You need to modify widgets for high altitudes
• The necessary modification is called “transmogrification”

Of course, if these bits of information are crucial or frequently misunderstood, we’ll want to have more questions or activities to reinforce them. Also, our feedback goes beyond “correct” or “incorrect” to show the consequences of the learner’s choice and reinforce stuff some more.

If you write strong “use” activities, you don’t need to write “know” fact checks at all.

More examples

There’s more discussion about this and lots of know-vs.-use examples starting on this page in the Elearning Blueprint. The pages will be public for the next couple of weeks, so feel free to check them out.

Have I been too brutal to Bloom? Our focus here is on corporate training, where the goal is usually immediate application in complex situations. I’m not convinced that we need to minutely examine whether our activity requires “analyzing” or “evaluating.” By simulating complex, real-world situations, we can’t help but cover several Bloom categories.

I’ve also seen Bloom interpreted as “Write learning objectives using terms like ‘define,’ ‘identify,’ and ‘compare,’” which tends to inspire abstract thought-juggling activities and not real-world applications. For a rant about objectives, see Why you want to focus on actions, not learning objectives.

Photo by SOGKnives

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,

To what extent do we need to understand a system’s complexity? And to what degree are we liable should we suggest the removal of a stage or step in a process which may lead to unanticipated complications?

This is where subject matter experts come in handy. Require them to approve everything, including any improvements to processes or job aids. They’re the experts on the system, not you, and they’re the ones who need to assume responsibility for it.

If you use a collaborative approach like action mapping and include SMEs from the beginning, they (ideally) should buy into the idea of performance improvement and offer their own ideas for improving the process. You can also try steering your client away from an information dump.

Have you been able to persuade a client to consider streamlining a difficult process? What has worked for you? Let us know in the comments.

Upcoming interview

Allen Partridge and I will discuss how to save the world from boring elearning on Wednesday, Sept. 7 at 8 AM US Pacific time. Register for free and please share your questions and ideas in the chat.

Get a random instructional design idea

My Twitter series of #IDideas has morphed into a widget on my blog. In the sidebar of the site, you’ll see a random idea intended to inspire you. Not inspired? Click “Next idea” to see a new one!

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

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):

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)

Since Twine produces a standard web page, you could conceivably embed a Twine story in any elearning tool that lets you embed web pages and that doesn’t interfere with Javascript. It might also be mobile-friendly — at least, the sample scenario works on my iPhone.

Here’s the editing window for a scene. The “bookmark” tag means that this scene will appear as an option when users click the “Rewind” link to the left of the story.

Visual design

The default publishing styles might not work well for corporate audiences. For example, the default version of the sample scenario had white text on a black background. However, you can quickly change the style by creating a special passage in the story that contains CSS. You can then copy that passage into future stories.

With four lines of CSS, I changed the background, text, and link colors. Here’s how one much more customized Twine story looks:

A few drawbacks

I was very happy with how easy it was to write in Twine, especially compared to my usual approach involving a separate flowchart and script. There were just a few things that didn’t work super well:

• I put a few bookmarks in so you could see how the “rewind” function works. However, the feature displays the first few words of a scene instead of its (guaranteed unique) link text. In the sample story, the first few words are usually Ludo confirming or correcting your previous choice, so the feature doesn’t exactly shine this time.
• Your browser’s back button should take you to the previous scene, but in my tests it occasionally went back one scene further.
• The flowchart layout got bizarrely spread out about halfway through the story, and I had to manually drag scenes closer together. This might be related to the fact that Twine requires a more recent version of the Mac operating system than I have installed.
• If you want to track learners’ performance in the scenario, you could use variables, but I’m not sure how that would interface with an LMS.

Development time

I didn’t track my development time because it wouldn’t have been realistic — I was learning to use Twine while I wrote the scenario and was writing this blog post at the same time. I can say that the “production” phase takes literally 2 seconds: you click “Build Story” and an HTML file immediately appears.

So you might assume that producing a scenario in Twine takes this long:

• However long it takes you to write the story in text
• + Some time for creating any images and sound files and embedding them using HTML
• + Some time for tweaking the CSS to avoid the white-on-black theme (took me 20 minutes because I’m not fluent in CSS)
• + About 2 seconds to click “Build story”
• + Some time for quality checks (this goes quickly because it’s easy to find a particular scene in Twine’s flowchart view)

Teaching through a story

The sample activity is an attempt to show that we don’t have to front-load learners’ brains with vocabulary or other facts before the “practice activity.” Instead, we can plunge them, clueless, directly into an activity that exposes them to the new information in a way that helps them figure it out.

A traditional approach to this type of language activity would be to first tell learners how to say “left,” “right,” and similar words in Zeko. We might have a little drill or game to get them to recognize the words quickly, with “correct” and “incorrect” feedback. Then we’d use the journalist’s story as a practice activity.

What I’m suggesting instead is to skip the information and go straight to the story. Design the story so the learners can discover meanings on their own. Then provide a natural pause to review what they’ve learned and make sure they got it right.

But you can’t teach everything through a story!

Of course, it would be tedious to teach all the vocabulary of a language through branching scenarios.

In the Zeko sample, I’d pause the action where the story currently stops and include an optional game to reinforce the new words.

I’d then finish the story, probably including a scene in which you win an exclusive interview with the Minister of Science by correctly using Zeko to warn her away from some sort of danger.

Then I’d revert to “normal” instruction to more efficiently cover additional vocabulary and grammar for awhile. Another branching story would appear later, to both reinforce what has been covered so far and to introduce a handful of new terms or concepts. Maybe it would require learners to recognize the grammatical pattern of a phrase and build new phrases using the same pattern.

But it’s just text!

Yeah, it’s just text. I wanted to show you Twine’s default behavior. The sample scenario is an example of the quickest and cheapest way to generate scenarios with Twine. I added a sound clip and image just to see how easy it was (it was very easy).

While some designers shun text because they (incorrectly, in my view) think it’s boring, I think its greatest weakness in the sample scenario is that it teaches people to read Zeko, not to speak it or understand it when it’s spoken.

If I were serious about teaching language this way, I’d produce the dialog in audio only. It would probably be simplest to produce the narrative as audio as well and make each scene’s audio file play automatically when you land on the scene. Instead of displaying redundant text, I’d need to come up with visuals that support the story. That’s way more work than I wanted to do for a quick sample.

Soft skills might work better

I wrote a fake language story because that was the only way I could guarantee that none of you knew the answers and you would therefore experience being clueless in a scenario.

However, scenarios might be more suitable for teaching soft skills, such as having difficult conversations, overcoming buyers’ objections, and leading a team through change. Soft-skill materials don’t have as much information that requires memorization, and they have more grey areas to give the stories depth.

For a much deeper, more polished scenario that also plunges learners directly into a situation, see the Haji Kamal piece for soldiers in Afghanistan.

Possible advantages of this approach

By skipping the formal teaching and going straight to the story, we:

• Let learners who already know some Zeko skip explanations that they don’t need
• Encourage learners to build meaning from (somewhat) realistic experience and mistakes, mirroring how we learn in the real world
• Give learners a more challenging puzzle to solve than rote memorization
• Possibly improve recall by connecting facts to a story

Basically, we avoid making the material too easy and therefore forgettable.

But it’s not fair!

Some people argue against this approach because it increases the likelihood that learners will make an incorrect choice: “You’re setting them up for failure!”

But we’re not just throwing learners into the deep end. We’ve given them a life preserver by designing the story in a way that introduces new information a bit at a time.

The harshest choice in the story is the first choice between “left” and “right.” You have a 50% chance of getting it right. If you get it wrong, you learn “no” and you immediately get back on track. It isn’t likely to be a catastrophic experience.

Story characteristics

The sample story is just a lightweight tale that I outlined in five minutes. But it does include the characteristics that I recommend be included in real scenarios:

• A big goal with emotionally compelling consequences: you have to be first on site because you screwed up your previous assignment
• Minimal setup: four sentences establish the back story and the challenge
• Suffering: your guide doesn’t speak English; your competitor might be close behind
• Time pressure
• An increase in tension partway through the story: is that the Agence France-Presse car behind you?

What do you think? Have you had success with this “let them figure it out” approach to instruction? Are you eager to try out Twine? If you do try it, please consider sharing the stories you build so we can get ideas from each other.

P.S. I have nothing against Agence France-Presse.

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.

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!

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.

I agree that the disconnect was clear. However, in defense of vendors, many of the ideas offered by speakers at conferences don’t lead naturally to new products. Instead, they suggest new ways of using existing tools.

Also, if the “deliver engaging content” message sells products, is it entirely the vendors’ fault? Who’s buying that message?

Summaries and discussion

Several people at the conference have shared their ideas and takeaways. Here are a few of them.

David Kelly pulls together links to resources and recaps from the conference.

Karyn Romeis offers some initial reactions about the major themes she saw.

Steve Wheeler summarizes his view of the speaker-vendor divide and several others respond in the comments.

Clark Quinn wraps up his impressions of the conference.

Video

By the time you read this, you might be able to see a video of my presentation here (I think they’re still working out the kinks). I was in track 4. Also be sure to check out the many other presentations and Roger Schank’s keynote.

You can see recordings of my other presentations by following the links on my workshop calendar page.

Next: Learning Solutions in March

On March 24, I’ll give a talk (more like a workshop) on how to replace information dumps with realistic scenarios, no matter what tools you have. It’s based on this presentation, which I gave in several places in Australia but which is new to the US.

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

• Jan. 26: Action mapping for great elearning. London: Learning Technologies conference.
• March 23-25: How to create decision-making scenarios on any budget. Orlando, FL: Learning Solutions conference.

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.