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!

Online

April 19: Patrick Dunn and I will take a fresh look at instructional design with Clive Shepherd at 12 noon UK time (convert to your time). “Both Cathy and Patrick are outspoken critics of mainstream e-learning content design and are leading champions in the movement for more creative and engaging solutions.” Join the revolution! Sponsored by the UK eLearning Network and ALT.

On site

London, May 14: Value for money elearning solutions, Holborn Bars. My message: It’s the design, not the technology. Appropriately, I’ll be participating online. Organized by the UK eLearning Network.

More to come

In the next few months, I’ll be giving Action Mapping virtual workshops for some ASTD chapters. I’ll post details as they’re available. And if you want a hands-on workshop of your own, consider setting up a custom seminar.

Want to make a difference outside your company? The United Nations connects online volunteers with non-governmental organizations around the world. All you need is some time and an internet connection.

A quick search of the opportunities at the UNV Online Volunteering site turned up several projects that might need you. Here’s a sampling:

Create a short online cartoon: The Child Rehabilitation Centre of Sri Lanka needs a short cartoon to communicate what they do and attract donors and volunteers.

Train teachers online: Gwalior Children’s Hospital helps the poor and disabled of the Gwalior and Chambal regions in India. They have a school and hospice for children with profound learning disabilities; they need teachers to help train their staff online. (more…)

A blog carnival gathers several bloggers together in one spot to discuss one idea. Dave Ferguson has organized the first Working/Learning carnival here. Here’s how Dave describes the posts:

• Michele Martin at The Bamboo Project shares strategies for supporting personal learning environments, nicely tying together the “work at learning” (you have to hone your craft) with “learning at work.”
• Cathy Moore at Making Change explains how to fit the entire world into a multiple choice question. How can you require the learner to think more deeply about on-the-job implications of the information at hand?
• Harold Jarche writes at his eponymous blog about learning at work, offering three easy steps to making sense out of the information that floods past you — as he says, moving from “this is an interesting idea” to “this is what I know.”
• Janet Clarey writes on her blog about working at learning. And she does mean working.
• …and my own contribution, SME? Not for Me, in which I ever so gently nudge people who design training, hoping to move them from subject-matter to practice.

Thanks for organizing this, Dave!

Include social media in your learning: In his short, lively ebook on Learning 2.0, Jeff Cobb explains why we’re moving away from the teacher-centric approach and includes several examples showing how organizations are using social medial like podcasts.

Have your staff create and share mini job aids, says Michele Martin in this blog post. She recommends the use of Jing and similar easy, free screencasting services to create quick, casual aids.

Get inspired by learners’ Post-it® notes: Tom Kuhlmann points out that the job aids learners create for themselves can help you focus your elearning materials. A healthy discussion ensues in the comments.

Photo ©iStockphoto/peepo

“We have a two-day workshop and need you to turn it into a 30-minute online course,” your client says. “Here are 227 PowerPoint slides and 16 conflicting Word documents. Can you have it done by Thursday?”

What do you do?

Sign up for the eLearning Guild’s next online forum, “Converting Existing Course Content to e-Learning.” Ten sessions on Feb. 7 and 8 will offer useful ideas about tools and design.

On Friday morning, I’ll lead a hands-on workshop in which we’ll use a 4-step process that quickly chops through the jungle of existing content to find the online course within. We’re calling it “reverse instructional design.” Here’s a snippet of the session description: (more…)