GlobalTrainingPeople.com First Anniversary!

It's another milestone for Global Collaboration Partners! This week marks the first anniversary of our GlobalTrainingPeople site, where we offer a free training program as outreach to anyone, anywhere who wants to work more safely but might not have access to the training that will help accomplish that worthy goal.

We've had a free training program for the past several years, which we hosted at acrosspublishing.com. It has always been a big hit - we've provided training at no cost to way more than 12,000 registered users in over 100 countries around the world. At first our thinking was that people in other countries (who would never be our clients) ought to have access to safety (and other) training, and it costs us very little to put some important courses up on our website and let those folks at it.

What we discovered was that this was an even better idea than we'd imagined. Word spread, links sprouted, and you saw the resulting numbers above. Without doing any marketing of this site whatsoever, it's become known globally as a place to go for free training that isn't just a demo or throwaway stuff - it's actually courses that will send you home from your job with all ten fingers and both eyes intact, or will send you to a performance review armed for getting a promotion.

And not just overseas, as we'd imagined. We get people from US companies registering and taking our free training as well. We discovered a few months ago that a large construction company in the South has a direct link to our free training from their training portal. (You know who you are... and we maintain hope that you'll become a client and get access to more of our courses as well as all the perks of owning your training content, tracking your employees' training, etc.! ;o) Meanwhile, as I said above, the important thing is that people who need this training - who might not have another source for it - are getting it.

One of the cool things about the old acrosspublishing site was that we got letters of thanks and some very helpful feedback from grateful trainees worldwide. What we should have recognized from the start was that we ought to have been giving these people access to each other rather than just corresponding with us - we had the seeds for a worldwide training and environmental health and safety community, and we weren't doing anything with it.

Thus: www.GlobalTrainingPeople.com. A year ago, we redesigned the site, gave it a new name that actually has something to do with what the site is, and built in several networking and community tools. There's a Story Wall where people can post feedback on the courses, a Photo Wall where people can personalize the site a bit, and a discussion forum where we have finally planted the seeds of that professional community we should have been building for the past couple years.

We're very interested to see what happens with one other aspect we built into the site. All our training (except for a 30-title library of safety training in Spanish) is in English. What if we gave people an opportunity to localize the training so that it would be more useful in Uganda, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and all the corners of India where our learners come from? What if we set up a way for entrepreneurs around the world to start a business spreading this training around so more people work more safely and productively? We are already getting some interesting emails from folks exploring the possibilities of partnering with us to expand this thing out into the world in a big way. I can't begin to tell you how exciting this is for us!

Please drop by! Take some training, post a photo, give some feedback, join the community, and spread the word!

Year-end E-learning Opportunity from GCP

If our extremely effective e-learning offerings can't get a Cyber Monday treatment, I don't know; the world's gone topsy turvy and no one Cced me on the memo! It's the perfect storm of opportunity. Everything comes together RIGHT NOW for all sorts of greatness for your training program!

• It's the opening week of the Holiday Season.
• We just celebrated GCP's 5th anniversary.
• The economy is showing signs of improving.
• It's time to utilize end-of-year money to get training you need now, and next year, and beyond.

To help you get the EHS/HR e-learning courses you need, we have created three special offers that are instantly helpful to you and your training program. Everything we do will add depth, stability and value to your organization! It's the perfect year-end opportunity to add distinction to your program.

We couldn't settle on just one great deal, so we are giving you all three.

Choose one or mix-and-match a couple of them. Remember, all these offers expire at the end of 2010!

Free Tablet Computers

Buy $2,500 worth of courses, and get a new Dell touch-sensitive, Flash-capable Inspiron™ Duo convertible tablet, shipped to any address you like.

Buy $5,000 worth, get two free Dell tablet computers. And yes, $7,500 = three free Dells. Want more? Keep going - NO LIMIT. A free Dell Inspiron Duo with each $2,500 you spend. Purchase a library of excellent training, and outfit a learning center at the same time and no additional cost!

Buy 3 courses, get 2 free

Simple enough math. Get five courses for the price of three. Ten for the price of six. Etc.

Ultimate Edition courses for Business Edition price

Buy Ultimate Edition courses for Business Edition prices.

That's about a 30% savings and a 90% increase in value. Pay for just the course itself, get all source files – everything you need to customize your course any way you want, and a perpetual license – you'll never have to pay for this training again, no matter how many people you train with it!

It's time to make some choices. So we're giving you some great ones!

STEP 1: Select your Courses

STEP 2: Select your Edition

STEP 3: Contact us today at either of our Support Centers.

Eastern US

Phone: (646) 415-8002

Fax: (646) 216-8021

Email: info@GCPworld.com

Western US

Phone: (303) 325-5889

Fax: (303) 325-5241

Email: info@GCPworld.com

Top Ten Insights on Top Ten Lists

Leo Casey posted a thoughtful list of his Top Ten Insights on Learning in the

Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group on LinkedIn this past weekend, as a summary of his recent blog posting.

Leo's list:

1. Learning is constructed
2. People are curious
3. We learn best in social settings
4. Much adult learning is child's play
5. We have a Learning Identity
6. Meet the Digital World
7. Adults learn what they want to learn
8. Learning can be additive or transformative
9. We learn throughout life
10. We strive to be all that we can be

After 8 years teaching at the university level in a VERY multicultural setting, and the subsequent 10 years developing online learning experiences in collaboration with adult learners and the training professionals responsible for their programs, I must admit I always worry that lists like this pretty much automatically reflect the listmaker's learning preferences or specific training environment/subject matter/audience.

I know I catch myself declaring that "learners want [insert preference here]" when in fact, I may want that thing, but others may not!

And that training "thing" that *I* am sure learners want or need might be the best way to impart safe work practices in a manufacturing environment, but at the same time be a terrible way to hone customer service skills in a retail setting, for example.

So item #3: "We learn best in social settings." I have to ask, who are "we?" Learning what? In what kind of social setting? Group work with motivated teammates on project-based learning is fantastic, but there are certain learning objectives best mastered in quiet solitude. My replacement insight: "Training modalities must be selected with both the audience and the learning objective in mind."

I also find that lists like this tend to idealize the learners. There's a big difference in attitude between happy lifelong learners who decide it would be fun to learn a new language, and employees who are required by law to receive training on how to choose the right protective gloves or eyewear for this or that workplace task. So I would revise a couple of the insights above.

For example, #2: "People are curious." I myself don't choose to spend more time than I have to in the company of non-curious people, but really, have you never met a person who was devoid of curiosity? Never had a conversation that consisted of you trying to get more than a grunt out of your interlocutor? The non-curious do indeed exist, and they are not exempt from compliance training. My replacement insight? "Training needs to engage even those who are not curious."

Likewise, item #10: "We strive to be all that we can be." But guess what! Homer Simpson is not a completely fictional character - you and I might strive for excellence, but my friends, there are slackers out there who feel as Homer does that "Trying is the first step towards failure." They don't have a mission of doing their best or being their best. Self-improvement is not among their core values. My replacement insight? "Training must sell its own importance to those who don't care."

My overall point is, lists like these can help us focus on important points and provide an excellent starting point for deeper reflection, but we have to be careful not to flavor them with our own biases.

Training You Can be Thankful For

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you're reading this at home, or somewhere over the river and through the woods, though I don't know any companies giving employees a week off for Thanksgiving (or any holiday, for that matter!) these days. Either way, I bet there's turkey in your very near future. And that's a safety issue, and thus a training issue, which is right up my alley for this blog, isn't it!

It's a safety issue because turkey is fraught with opportunities for foodborne illness from salmonella, campylobacter, and other bacterial contamination. There's danger when you buy your bird, when you store it, prep it, cook it, put the leftovers away, and get them back out for tomorrow's sandwiches and the next day's tetrazzini. It's a wonder we survive this gauntlet of doom!

OK, it's not all that bad. We can be thankful that safe practices can mitigate those risks. And we can be thankful that training can beget safe practices!

E-learning takes a lot of different forms, and this week's topic gives me a chance to expound on a quick chunk of philosophy. "Make it interactive" is Commandment #1 in the e-learning bible. At least, it is a key buzzword for sales departments in e-learning vendor teams. But like many lofty pronouncements, here's one whose vagueness leaves it open to a great deal of interpretation.

What's "interactive" mean? If there's a button to click, and something happens as a result of that button, well, that's interactive, right? (answer: yes. But interactivity is a continuum, and at the other end would be a highly detailed, visual simulation with multiple branches allowing a learner to make choices that steer down various wrong paths to learn from mistakes.)

The importance of interactivity - and the application of its highest levels - isn't a blanket thing. It's dependent on what the learning objective is. And in the case of turkey safety, give me a clear, accessible job performance aid, and save the expensively-produced, 3D animated simulation for something like learning to land an airplane.

One of the big sources of turkey danger has to do with the size of a turkey - it's one of the biggest pieces of meat you'll ever thaw or cook. What this means is that both thawing and cooking take place from the outside in. By the time the inside of the bird has thawed at room temperature, the outside has already reached unsafe temperatures where bacteria can thrive. And when the outside of the bird has cooked long enough to kill those bacteria, the inside still has a ways to go. So timing - for both thawing and cooking - is key. And timing depends on the weight of the bird.

What's the best instructional design to put this information into my brain and affect my behavior in the kitchen? I need to know this stuff for a few minutes each year, and the rest of the year, it doesn't really matter to me. I don't need to practice and drill until I've memorized the cooking time for a 13-pound vs. a 16-pound bird at 325º vs. 350º.

The design needs to take into account that different people learn best in different ways. I need a chart, dangit. That I can check while I'm cooking on Thanksgiving afternoon. Maybe some explanatory prose. And a meat thermometer. (I really need to set up an Amazon associates account so I can make bank off product placement like this!)

You might learn better from a video. And your neighbor might not speak English. There are free streaming videos on King County, Washington's website in English, Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

Someone else might not be as experienced as you and I, and need recipes to go along with the temperature/time charts. All that information has been made available by the USDA on their website at the aptly-named holidayfoodsafety.org.

Another learner might be a rank beginner who needs to know about everything from shopping to serving, from farm to table.

Not interactive enough? At least the USDA fakes some interactivity with a searchable FAQ: "'Ask Karen' is a knowledge base with information for consumers about preventing foodborne illness, safe food handling and storage, and safe preparation of meat, poultry, and egg products."

I didn't find any free training on cleaning up after dinner, so... let's just watch the game. Go Broncos!

Turkey photo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/banky177/ / CC BY 2.0

Adaptable Workers with Adaptable Tools

"Senior executives and managers say the people they work with are more adaptable today than a few years ago." CLO Magazine summarizes a study by NFI Research in a recent article entitled Recession's Silver Lining? Increased Adaptability. The article credits economic need and a new sense of frugality. According to the study's author, Chuck Martin, "Many in business today have had no choice but to become more adaptable considering the impact of economic conditions on business."

One participant in the study mentioned that "employees have become more adaptable since realizing the benefits and efficiencies that technology has brought to their work."

The relevance to training and the efficiencies technology brings to it should be obvious. The economic necessity for agility and the flexibility offered by e-learning create what should be a perfect storm for adoption of of web-based training.

E-learning is at its core flexible. The mantra has always been "anytime, anywhere." E-learning unbinds learners from the limitations of time (we don't have to shut down operations to get everyone into a class at the same time) and space (we don't have to all be in the same classroom to learn).

That's flexibility at its most basic. So why do so many consumers of e-learning speak of feeling trapped?

I talk to plenty of training and HR leaders who are feeling stuck, in three main ways. They're compromising on training quality with disputably relevant off-the-shelf content, they're forced to access courseware living on a server somewhere, and they're shackled into a subscription contract that requires them to predict how many seats in this course, how many in that course, and whoops, we're out of seats and have to buy more to get all our training done, and whoops, we hate this training but we're contracted through 2011 with this provider. (take a breath, Greg!) (OK! but how is any of that flexible??)

So what needs to happen to put training back into the realm of agility to match this newly increased adaptability of the workforce?

1) A number of e-learning content providers market their courseware as "customizable," but what that means is that clients can log into the provider's proprietary system, make minor changes to the existing course, and abandon their "custom" course when their contract with the provider ends. The only way to provide truly adaptable, agile course content is to provide source code and ownership of derivative works.

2) Via an internet connected computer is one way to access a multimedia course, but what happens when you need to train workers on site in the Congo or the depths of Siberia? What happens when your business has nothing to do with information technology, and your learning lab consists of a couple laptops in a trailer at the jobsite? What if you have 35 employees and no LMS? Courseware locked away on someone else's server isn't adaptable or agile - you need to be able to provide the same training via an LMS, company intranet, and CD-ROM or other portable media.

3) Whoever came up with the learner seat subscription model was a sadist, a masochist, or both. It's torture for clients - predicting how many employees need these seven courses, which subset need these other two courses, which population needs those five other courses... and in times of high turnover, those predictions go out the window, don't they. It's also no walk in the park for the hosting vendor - they've got to service all those changing needs, and assist in juggling someone else's learner seats. Painful all around! For max adaptability, a perpetual license for unlimited access to training content (especially when it's source code in the client's hands) is the only truly agile option.

If we don't capitalize on the adaptability of our people by giving them the most adaptable tools available, we don't win the economic battles we're fighting.

Training That's Good Enough to be Great

I recently read an article that resonated so well with me, on a bunch of different fronts. The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine by Robert Capps appears in the September issue of Wired Magazine.

The basic premise: our tastes and evaluations have evolved; "quality" often no longer means the fastest and shiniest and techiest offering. QUALITY means the thing that is convenient, flexible, and cheap. The article gives a bunch of excellent examples, starting in with the Flip camcorder, and going on to illustrate how "...companies that focus on traditional measures of quality—fidelity, resolution, features—can become myopic and fail to address other, now essential attributes like convenience and shareability." Capps cites the growing adoption of Skype vs. traditional phones, Hulu vs. television, cheap netbooks over fancier computers, and several more. "As the worst recession in 75 years rolls on, it's the light and nimble products that are having all the impact—exactly the type of thing that lean startups and small-scale enterprises are best at."

Our needs themselves have evolved. Or a better way to look at it, I think, is that our recognition of our true needs has evolved. As we shop, we're seeing more clearly what's most important to us in our real lives.

"The attributes that now matter most all fall under the rubric of accessibility. Thanks to the speed and connectivity of the digital age, we've stopped fussing over pixel counts, sample rates, and feature lists. Instead, we're now focused on three things: ease of use, continuous availability, and low price."

An example for me personally is cameras. I love to take photos. I love to look at photos. I can't seem to stop myself from taking photos. (Just ask my annoyed wife and sons!) I've got a beloved old Nikon 35mm I get out once in a... OK, come to think of it, it's been at least 5 years since I had it out. (I wonder what's on the roll of film that's still in there??) And I have dSLR ambitions, but most of the photos I take are with the crappy camera in my phone, or at best, with my waterproof, shockproof, freezeproof pocket camera. Why? Because the quality most important to me is, what camera can I have with me all the time? What's convenient and flexible? (The third quality comes into play too – cheap. My pocket cam was under $300, and in effect, I didn't pay for my phonecam... I bought the phone, and the camera's just an assumed part of it. And hey, in any given month, I don't seem to have a thousand bucks laying around after bills get paid – so no D90 for me, so far.)

Funny thing is, an evolution in taste has occurred - a cause or an effect of this revolution? I don't know. But there are those who actually appreciate this lower-resolution aesthetic in photography. Search Flickr groups for "phonecam" and find 691 different groups devoted to folks who love this or that aspect of the photos they get from their cellies. (example: PhoneCam Expressions is "...for all those who love to use their phone cameras, but with a sense of taste and beauty." And DBOLRL ("DBOLRL: a playground for a Drunken Bunch of Low Res Lovers") has a brutally light-hearted (light-heartedly brutal?) voting game that's been running for nearly 4 years, reveling in the wonder of chunky, noisy photos from cheap cameras.

So anyway... this is supposed to be my e-learning business blog, and I need to show why I'm babbling about all of this.

I propose that there is an elegance possible in a simpler e-learning solution for corporate training. I would like to suggest that there are bells and whistles in the more expensive "end-to-end, enterprise solutions" a lot of vendors push, that most training organizations simply do not need. I assert that if the training content itself is excellent, there are plenty of delivery features that upon examination, you might discover aren't as necessary as you may have thought when they were described to you in the sales process.

So I'm submitting for your discussion, that e-learning consumers need to ask themselves Capps' three questions as part of their evaluation: "Is it simple to get what we want out of the technology? Is it available everywhere, all the time — or as close to that ideal as possible? And is it so cheap that we don't have to think about price?"

If you have a staff of thousands, in multiple locations, by all means, you need to think Cadillac in selecting a tracking and scheduling and reporting system. But if you're training 20 people, or 50, is it really all that difficult to collect printed completion certificates from trainees, and manage your records by hand in a spreadsheet? Does your skill gap analysis really require the use of an elaborate database? Doesn't it make good business sense (especially in cash-tight times like these) to buy only the lean and nimble access to training that you need, rather than paying more for fat that isn’t adding any benefit to your training?

I'd loved to get feedback on these thoughts. For e-learning in your organization, what's good enough?