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.

EITHER Agility OR Agility!

Last week I wrote about making a dilemma or controversy out of something where both sides were right, and I have more to rant about this week.

Tom Dupont posted a discussion topic in the LinkedIn Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group. He posted a question that's gotten lots of response: The live PowerPoint presentation is a powerful paradyme! We have learned over the years to minimize the words on each slide, and then just talk to the bullet points. Good for a PowerPoint presentation, but a bad design for an eLearning course?

Folks weighed in with their own strong opinions about the burning controversy. Someone even questioned why there would be text in an e-learning course at all. (Hmmm...)

But again I find myself asking, why the "either-or" here? Wouldn't the training you create be more agile if you made both available to your learners? Modern multimedia tools (in the case of GCPLearning, mostly Adobe Flash) give us the ability to be extremely flexible. We can very conveniently show and hide any feature and offer alternative means of access as a set of options in a multimedia course delivered online, so why in the world wouldn't we make BOTH forms of text presentation available to learners? ("make both available... make both available... make both available..." Repeating myself is sure sign of a passionate rant!)

We've been evolving our design along these lines ever since our self-proclaimed "3G Design Revolution" of 2002. Maybe we should have bragged about it more in the intervening seven years!

Here's our thinking on the topic. Adult learners come to training with a wide range of educational levels, life experiences, and reading and language abilities. They also bring the usual variety of learning styles to the table. So being able to choose the learning style - the form of access to information - that works best for them makes a big difference in their success.

In the e-learning courses we develop, we started calling it "user-controlled narration," though now I'm thinking perhaps we should call it "user-controlled access." In a nutshell, our learners can see and/or hear the course in whatever way works best for them.

Full text display is an option; the default is on-screen text synced with audio. This leaves more screen real estate - room in the frame - for instructive graphics and interactivity.

Similarly, since the learners can also control the audio narration, they can turn it up, turn it down, or turn it off to best suit their learning styles and personal preference.

These key features also make our courses accessible to sight- and hearing-impaired learners and those who don't have or want to use audio capabilities on their computers.

Built-in flexibility seems so basic, such a given to us, that we made "agile" part of our tagline and a big part of our e-learning entire vision. Agility is the cornerstone of our content, our delivery system, and our business model. It's beyond me why anyone gets so set on one way being right when the world demands us to be flexible.

A Whole Lot of Either/Or Noise

Two discussions inspired my posting this week, both about being all diametrical-like in approaches to facets of e-learning. Why is there an instinct to ricochet between the horns of a dilemma rather than just riding comfortably on the dang thing's head? (Look at that head: doesn't it look all soft and comfy? What in the world is your attraction to those horns!?) Does everything have to be a controversy; is everything either/or? or can we teach ourselves to make looking for the utility of two different approaches our default way of thinking?

Let's focus on the first one, a well-posed question by Bob Little on eLearn: Rapid e-Learning Polarizes Opinion. Bob says:

Much to the disgruntlement of instructional designers and other e-learning specialists, rapid e-learning tools are offering in-house subject matter experts excellent opportunities to produce e-learning materials relatively quickly and cost-effectively...The e-learning experts complain that rapid development tools are helping e-learning amateurs to turn out low-quality and poorly-designed materials that merely pay lip service to the ideals of instructional design.

The same issue is being discussed in different flavors in a couple different LinkedIn forums. I'll cut to the chase and tell you my opinion on the matter: SMEs with no ID experience can create one kind of excellent instruction, and PhD-level Instructional Designers can make another kind of excellent instruction. And we should look for perfect applications for both types of training, and be proud of ourselves for making efficient use of the resources at our disposal.

How about an example: my dad taught me to ski by being a great skier, and my mom taught me to fold fitted sheets because she knew a really cool trick for it. (OK, not a fair example - they were both teachers! But your parents taught you things too, without having ever heard of Don Kirkpatrick or Benjamin Bloom or Robert Gagne.) Point is, our parents were subject matter experts, and they didn't take a research-based approach to designing a learning event for us; they just showed us how to do it, watched us try, corrected our errors, and made sure we knew how to do it. Voila, learning.

Another example: Bill Preston was one of my high school English teachers, and because he was a thoughtful and deliberate designer of instruction, using a diligently planned approach, he managed to enable all manner of 16-year-old idiots to not just wade through McBeth, but to savor the intricacies of Shakespeare's games with language and actually get that play. Voila, learning!

SMEs with a will to teach can create richly applicable training materials. And expert learning designers with a will to learn the subject matter can create elegant and efficient training materials. Smart people (like GCPLearning, of course!) will utilize both approaches.

What's the controversy?

E-learning and Telecommuting - Inequally Evil?

Telecommuters will invariably end up ripping someone off - someone ALWAYS gets shortchanged.

Either their company, or the teleworkers themselves and their families.

At least, that was the declaration of a former boss when I proposed working from home at least a few days a week. When teleworkers slack off, with no one to supervise them, he said, they're stealing from their employer. Conversely, when they have a strong work ethic, they feel compelled to prove (to themselves as well as their boss and colleagues) that they're not slacking off, and end up spending more hours at their desk than they should.

Of course, you're a better teleworker than that - I know I am! Right? You and I are always responsible and mature in our use of the gift of flexibility that our telecommuting situation provides, right?

Well... knowledge work - for the chronically curious, the compulsive reader, the ADD-inflicted - is like a distillery job for an alcoholic. The web is a million constant temptations, and each one links to a zillion more. I admit that I sometimes have to "work" 16 hours in a day in order to get 8 hours of tasks completed.

But in general, I am indeed a better teleworker than that. It's incredibly productive to walk downstairs rather than having to drive for an hour and a half, to set my own schedule, to work in the comfort of my home office dressed comfortably, to not be around an officeful of interesting people interrupting me (and I them) all day long. I get a LOT done, and more happily and healthily than when I drove to work.

John McDermott posted an interesting question on LinkedIn's Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group: "Remote learning is great, but no remote workers, please!" Why are employers willing to allow e-learning but not e-work? Is this a fear of employees slacking off, or a devaluation of the training/learning function?

Most likely both, I say. The lack of trust employers have for telecommuting demonstrates a strong acknowledgment of the value of teamwork but lack of recognition of the utility of online collaboration tools to facilitate that teamwork despite lack of physical proximity.

And the apparently contradictory acceptance of e-learning acknowledges the ability of trainees to take responsibility for their own learning tasks, while failing to recognize the social aspects of learning.

A crucial aspect of all of this is the fact that some of both our work and our learning tasks are best tackled in quiet solitude with singular attention, while others are enhanced (or even made possible at all) by nature of interaction with one or more teammates. None of us at GCPLearning ever tell an HR, training, or environmental health and safety manager that our training was designed to replace trainers, the classroom, or any other tool they're currently using.

E-learning - like teleworking - is one arrow in the employer's quiver, to be applied thoughtfully and deliberately where it will do the most good. Employers would do well to recognize - no, embrace - this key fact and make business decisions, related to both task and training functions, accordingly.

Photo courtesy of slworking

Training Tools in the Untrained Hands of Non-trainers?

I may have steered an important discussion off topic this past week. Ramasamy Subash started the thread in LinkedIn's (E-)learning network with an important question: What attributes to look for in selecting an E-learning content development tool?

Some very thoughtful answers were provided; especially thorough was Sven Ove Sjølyst's reply. He listed a number of well-stated attributes of the ideal content development tool, but what caught my eye most was his first item: "easily used by novice users (typically internal resources like subject matter experts) but flexible and powerful enough to also allow for development of professional quality interactive solutions."

That one struck my eye, because in my experience "easy for novices" and "flexible and powerful" are mutually exclusive attributes. "Easy enough for novices to use" generally means wizard-driven. That is, there are built-in tools that allow you to click a button or select from a few menus to configure preset bits of functionality (or cosmetics). Key word: preset. Your instructional creativity is only limited by... the limitations of the designers of the tool you've chosen (or been saddled with).

"Flexible and powerful," on the other hand, hints at something highly programmable. Novices aren't programmers. Non-programmers, for that matter, aren't programmers.

Here's where I think I steered the thread off-topic: I commented that I wondered whether in most companies, subject matter experts and other "non-media people" have the time - and the inclination - to use development tools to make training content? Or are their time and talents more efficiently used in collaboration with media developers?

Thomas Garrod then chimed in with an even stronger statement: do employees whose expertise is not in training and training development have any business developing training media at all? A short quote: "I restrict design and development to those with demonstrated understanding of the rudiments of efficient presentation, information mapping, expression, and learning strategy."

That's one to tackle in another post. I know of companies where circumstances force subject matter experts who (gasp!) don't have their PhD in instructional design to dive in and design, develop, and deliver training anyway. Not ideal, but real.

My experience says that SMEs tend to barely have time in their busy schedules to even collaborate with media developers, let alone jump into the development tasks themselves. The folks I've talked to who did attempt a complete DIY scenario found that they could produce no more than one or two courses in a year's time. Hardly efficient! (shameless plug: this scenario has led to several purchases of our Ultimate Edition license - ask me about it.)

I'm hoping for some good discussion here - comments and replies to this thread are most welcome! Are you a SME who ends up doing training development? How do you handle it?

GCPLearning Website Review Needed

Hello!

Someone's getting another brand new iPod nano for in exchange for a chunk of thoughtful feedback! It worked so well the first time, we're doing it again.

Kent Pennybaker of River City Engineering was the happy recipient of a sweet 8GB iPod in our last drawing. (We'd share a picture of him, but he's keeping the big win on the hush-hush so his kids don't confiscate it from him - seriously.)

In our last round, you gave us feedback almost exclusively on our GCPWorld website - most of you didn't review GCPLearning. We can't tell you what a difference your feedback made on our GCPWorld website - we learned several key things that were missing or easily misunderstood. Check it out again - www.GCPWorld.com - and see the revisions we made.

But we'd love to get that level of feedback on GCPLearning.com, which is our most important site for selling our products. So once again, we're contacting people whose opinions we trust - friends, family, clients, partners, and some folks we've talked with in the past and would like to get to know better - to tell us straight out about the impressions our new website makes. We're asking you to look through our revamped www.GCPLearning.com and answer some questions that will let us know if we have succeeded in telling the GCP story.

Your thoughts and impressions will have a big impact for us moving forward. So to show our appreciation, everyone who sends us a review will have their name in the hat for another lovely new 8GB iPod nano.

Here's how to play:

- Visit GCPLearning.com

- Answer the questions below - thoughtfully and helpfully.

- And with brutal honesty - we're counting on your insights.

- No, really, we can take it! If something bugs you - we want to know about it!

- Send us your review to info@GCPWorld.com no later than October 16.

- Forward this page to as many friends as you like, the more, the merrier

- Names in the hat the evening of the 16th - iPod in the mail on the 20th!

Here's what we want to know:

1) What's the impact of the GCPLearning homepage - does it clearly answer the who, what, when, where, why and how of GCP?

2) Does the "flow" of the website work - do you feel a logic to the movement from category to category and detail to detail in the site's design?

3) What's your impression of the video testimonials? How do they make you feel about GCP?

4) Imagine you're shopping for workplace training - does the website answer all the questions you'd need to answer to decide to talk with us further?

5) Are the calls to action clear and enticing? Is it easy to know what GCP wants you as a visitor to *do* as a result of coming to the site?

6) And do you feel enticed to make that next step?

7) What's confusing? What important information did we NOT provide?

8) What's too much? What parts did we drone on and on unnecessarily about?

9) Any other thoughts or advice for us?

10) Bonus question (your name goes in the hat TWICE for taking time to answer this one) Check out our "follow us" links. What do these links add to the effect of our site? Do you feel that our blog, our twitter, our Facebook and LinkedIn pages add something of value to your understanding of GCP?

Please send us your review to info@GCPWorld.com no later than October 16.

The AGILE in Agile, Accurate Training

Our Holy Grail in this e-learning business is to have an extensive library of agile, accurate training content. That's why we chose those adjectives as a tagline for GCPLearning's marketing purposes.

"Accurate" is pretty obvious and easy to understand - we develop courses that are based on regulations and focused on keeping people safe and companies within the law, so they'd better be right - correct and up-to-date in terms of the regulations, realistic in terms of the world in which our learners work.

But we get a few questions about the "agile" part. Isn't agile like nimble, the characteristic of Jack that allowed him to jump over a candlestick?

Yup, that's pretty much what the dictionary says:

1. quick and easy of movement; deft and active
2. keen and lively

We strive for agility on a number of fronts: in our business practices, in our effect on our customers' businesses, and as reflected in our tagline, in our product itself.

As for business agility, Google points to 4,290,000 instances of the phrase agile business - the general theme being the ability to react quickly and flexibly as situations arise.

Product agility - wind me up and watch me talk! I love this aspect of what we've created. We measure the agility of our courses five main ways:

• Are they portable? Can you easily move them from LMS to LMS (Learning Management System)?
• Are they flexible for training administrators? Can you play them in an LMS, straight off the web or desktop, off a CD-ROM?
• Are they customizable? Can you add and subtract elements like pre-tests, post-tests, certificates, etc.?
• Are they flexible for learners? Can you choose a path through the content, learn at your own pace, preview what's to come and review what you already looked at?
• Are they editable? Can you make changes to the content without throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

Videos are a hallmark of training media - done right, videos are entertaining, portable, reproducible, and instructive. But they're far from agile when it comes time to revise or update them. Generally speaking, when a regulation or industry best practice changes, you throw away your videos and buy a new set.

That's not agile. That's ponderous. That makes staying accurate a slow and expensive proposition.

Drill down to the finest detail of our course design, and you'll find agility as the defining principle. The courses are highly modular, made up of chapters, chapters made up of screens. Each screen is a short, discrete chunk of learning content. How short? Under 80 words - about 30 seconds of narration. That gives the learner agility - reviewing a 30-second screen is easy and quick.

And when a regulation changes, it's usually some small detail that shifts. So 90% or more of the course is still completely accurate and needs no changes. Bringing the course up-to-date entails rewriting the text, re-recording the narration, and updating the Flash content - but only for the 1-3 screens affected by the change. Drop the revised files back into the content folder of the course, and it's an accurate, up-to-date offering.

That's agile!