Do as I say, not as I... OOOPS!

Zaphod Beeblebrox: Haha. How delicious would it be if the crane was putting up the banner when this happened?

(Thanks to Thomas Keeble for the photo!)

Interestingly, just yesterday, Snopes had a story on a similar 2008 accident in Sydney, Australia: www.snopes.com/photos/accident/cranefall.asp

Narration, Text and Graphics - Best Mix Practices

In a recent LinkedIn discussion, Tom Pendergast asked, "What does research show about the benefits/ drawbacks of having non-redundant onscreen text and narration in e-Learning where graphics/ animations are not the focus?"

An important question, as it seems to be the standard that an "online learning module" will mix narration, text and graphics almost by default. Stephen Schneiter posted some very relevant research links, the gist of which is that distraction is a bad thing, and if the brain is forced to try to comprehend two streams of input, distraction will ensue.

Based on our own experimentation with focus groups as well as feedback from clients, we've "solved" this quandary for ourselves in our courseware development. (I say "solved" carefully because there are always trade-offs with any approach, and no one solution can possibly be perfect for every learner.)

What we needed to accomplish:

• address multiple learning styles/preferences within a single product
• address accessibility issues for learners with visual/auditory/literacy limitations
• address the cognitive load issues mentioned above

Ted Finger wrote a succinct summary of his approach to mixing text with narration. To describe what we came up with, I'll play off some of Ted's points, in italics below:

• Make sure the onscreen text closely summarizes the narration. (Instead, we made sure the onscreen text matches the narration exactly.)

• Synchronize the onscreen text along with the corresponding narration as precisely as possible. (ABSOLUTELY! Also, we made sure the text animation reveals text in meaningful chunks that match how people read - i.e., revealing complete bullet points, sentences, or even short paragraphs, rather than something cute and clever like revealing each word as it's narrated. Some of our early attempts were very creative and cool, but ultimately annoying to learners! ;o)

• Keep the onscreen text as abbreviated as possible; for example, short bullet points. (As I mentioned above, we DON'T abbreviate the text. What we found was that abbreviated text increases the cognitive load. As Stephen pointed out, if the learners see something different from what they're hearing simultaneously, it's confusing and distracting.)

• If possible, offer an audio transcript in the interface. (CRUCIAL! We wanted to keep the screen real estate uncluttered - no overwhelming sea of text, and plenty of room for supporting graphics. So while the first piece of text may go away to make room for the next piece as narration progresses, full text is always available via a slide-out box at the bottom of the screen for those who prefer to read the whole thing at once or just want to review a particular part that may have left the screen.)

Learn more about research and decisions that guide our instructional design approach on our website.

Most Significant E-learning Tool? Strategy, Not Technology

In a recent discussion on LinkedIn's E-Learning 2.0 group, Curt Z asks, "What will be the most significant and relevant e-learning tools and technologies as we continue to move forward into the 21st century?"

He posits the following four: virtual environments, mobile access, advances in infrastructure hardware/software, and social networks.

Gerry Marcus responded with a statement which I think nails it: "As e-learning professionals, I believe our job is to get people productively using the tools we've already got."

It's true! We're running around like a boy scout with a 90-blade Swiss Army knife. There's an overflowing toolbox of technologies at all of our fingertips that we could, and possibly should, and probably will be using. That toolbox most certainly includes the four items Curt cited.

But for me, the "most significant and relevant" tool we need to be utilizing as we progress is a strategy, not a technology. A strategy for zeroing in on, defining, and communicating the value of a chosen tool or set of tools, matched to each of our respective learner audiences and the learning objectives they need to master. That's what puts the productive in "productively using the tools"

Brian D. McCarthy reinforces this, saying that "The biggest factor is the ability or desire for corporations to allow and adopt the changes from these advances." We as learning professionals have the opportunity to evoke and nurture that desire on the parts of our companies.

With that opportunity comes the responsibility of choosing the right tools for the right people and the right training/learning tasks.

Edwin Stonestreet points out that "Social Networking (In the hands of someone who wants to learn) is an exemplar of what good eLearning can be... However, the elephant in the room is that all of this learning reaches out to that small percentile of people who want it, who seek it out and who are driven to pursue it."

I agree. True of every tool. The tool works if it's matched to the target audience: "people who want it, who seek it out and who are driven to pursue it." The tool works if it's matched to the material and the learning objectives at hand.

So my vote for the most significant e-learning tools? Enlightened selection of the right tools (for the specific learners, and for the specific tasks), and educated and effective promotion for their adoption in our organizations.

In terms of that "educated and effective promotion" part, GCP has developed a powerful 36-page workbook that is free for our readers to download: Assess, Plan and Promote Your E-learning Business Case (Create a compelling business case for e-learning to present to the financial decision-makers on your team more accurately, efficiently, and effectively by working through the guided steps in this powerful workbook. Assess, Plan, and Promote provides the tools for assessing training gaps, comparing vendor options, calculating ROI, and preparing and making a powerful presentation.)

What real good has Facebook done? and is it worth it?

Amidst all the hullabaloo surrounding recent changes to Facebook's privacy policies (and practices?), a friend posed a question to friends and family members connected via Facebook: "What real good has FB done? and is it worth it?"

For me, Facebook has been evidence of social networking coming of age. Not to come off as a fogey, but "I was there when it all started." In the past, I made some new friends online whom I've valued for nearly 2 decades, and I was lucky to reconnect with a couple people I'd lost contact with along the way through life. But the thing is, all the people I connected with online in the 90s or even the early 2000s were pretty geeky - a lot of lost old friends remained lost.

The real good that FB has done for me is as the vehicle that *actually works* to reconnect me with some favorite, far less tech-savvy people from every stage in my life. Several things had to shift to change that:

1) The online population had to reach a critical mass. Not just getting email accounts, but also becoming "present" online, which means building a version of themselves via providing information.

2) Tools had to get friendly enough for Grandpa Joe and Auntie Luddite to be able to use them. The tools we used in the 90s were primitive and non-intuitive, and presented a huge barrier for the vast majority of people.

3) Revenue had to be reachable in order to pay for the programmers and other creators required to make those tools. Plenty got built by hobbyists and academics back in the day, but the results were, as mentioned above, only friendly to geeks.

Facebook costs a bunch of money to run and evolve, but it is "free" for us to use. The cost to all of us users is the information we trade for access to all the tools and toys and people that we get to play with on Facebook.

As a businessman, I recognize the value of that information in a visceral way - if I can't get people to give me some information about themselves, I can't reach them to tell them about the products I create and sell.

Here's the thing I think it all boils down to for me: I am responsible for what information I put on Facebook.

They don't - and won't - have my social security number nor my credit cards.

They don't have any info I don't consciously give them, including in my status updates, the groups I join, the names of the albums of photos I post, and the people I connect with.

I don't post evidence that I went out and got hammered on Friday night. I don't "friend" old aquaintances who are too stupid to be discreet about youthful indiscretions that may or may not have allegedly occurred when I was an allegedly indiscreet youth. I don't post strong political opinions, or spout about things I wouldn't say in front of my mother. I give enough public info that old friends searching for me can find me, and shut down the rest of it to "friends only."

Through some clever algorithm, the ads I see on the edge of the page as I surf FB are relevant to me. I see more ads for snowboards and training conferences and mountain vacations and bands I like than I do for diapers or dating services or motorsports or whatever ads YOU see. I see that as a benefit! (and again as a businessman, hooray for effective targeting of ads!)

I'm not a pollyanna about all this. Someone I grew up with no doubt has a photo or two that would embarrass the hell out of me if they posted it. Some stranger might learn a little more about me than I would share with them in the physical world.

And I'm HUGELY RELIEVED that my kids think FB is stupid - I shudder to think of the things I see some of my friends' kids post and how it all may come back to haunt them! And the drama of teenage relationships just gets magnified in all sorts of horrible ways on FB.

But my friend asked - is it worth it? The way I'm using it, most definitely.

Some minor marketing we do for GCP has exposed a broader audience to our products and people.

It's a blast getting surprised by old friends from around the world and seeing what my cousins are up to while we all remain too lazy to write letters to each other.

It's great to be able to see where my friends are skiing next weekend so we can get together.

And it's very satisfying to see friends who don't know each other getting the opportunity to benefit from the mutual connections that "networking" means by definition.

g-LMS Pre-Press Release

We've got a big announcement that will probably take place next week, but I'm so excited about it I find I need to use this blog as a rough draft of whatever press release we end up issuing.

We've been sitting on some technology we had in our back pocket for quite some time as we concentrated on growing and improving our e-learning content catalog and getting it the heck out in the marketplace.

In the process of talking to the marketplace, though, we found we were hearing over and over again: content alone is often not enough (compliance training by definition needs to be tracked), but commercial Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are often way too much tech for small and medium-sized companies. The "enterprise solution" is made for really large enterprises!

Here's what our clients and prospects have been telling us they need to be able to do in order to efficiently manage training:

1. Add learners to courses (or assign courses to learners)
2. Manage passwords/logins
3. Quickly and clearly see who has completed the training
4. Quickly and clearly see who needs a fire lit under them
5. Download reports in a form that can be further manipulated, imported into other company record-keeping systems, etc.

Here are some of the features of standard commercial LMSs that our clients and prospects specifically did NOT want or need:

1. Elaborate succession planning tools
2. Automated gap analysis tools
3. A bunch of different reports on all the possible minutiae of learners' activities
4. Months of study and specialized training just to have a clue how to run the damn thing

Slap to the forehead - we realized we already had the roots of just what these people have been telling us in some coding for tools we'd created in the past, and all we needed to do was pull it all together with the features we're hearing this demand for, and voila, the GCP's g-LMS - Global Learner Management System - will most likely launch at the end of the week!

It's a super thin application - tiny on the server, very obvious and intuitive interface for both learners and training managers (and our administrators who will run it in the background). It's elegant without being fancy at all.

For now we'll be hosting it, as that's what the market's been telling us to do. But down the road, we'll be able to license it to clients who want to run it on their own servers - we built the basics into the tool to do just that and will only have to tweak a few things to be able to deliver on that capability.

Also... nope, I'm getting ahead of myself; let's just get this thing launched this week! Stay tuned for a real live press release, and a demo site where you can try it for yourself. Can't wait to hear what you think!

DIY Custom Training, Facilitated

Interesting article by Agatha Gilmore in Chief Learning Officer Magazine: The New Workplace Mantra: 'Do It Yourself'. That DIY theme is exactly what we had in mind when we put together Ultimate and Developer's Editions of our courseware.

In her article, Agatha says:

"According to new research from Novita, a talent recruiting and development services firm, 71 percent of organizations surveyed are now doing more tasks in-house than before the economic recession. The main reason? A smaller budget, according to 85 percent of respondents."

The predominant mode of purchasing e-learning content has long been handled via the tired and painful "learner-seat" model, in which a company basically rents access to courses they need from the content vendor who owns the courses. I've said it before: Whoever came up with the learner seat subscription model was a sadist, a masochist, or both. It's beyond onerous to try to predict how many employees need these seven courses, which subset of employees need these other two courses, etc.

And when you rent courses, you are sometimes offered the option of customizing the courses, but they don't belong to you, so the time, effort, and money you spend customizing is in the toilet as soon as you stop renting from that vendor. It's a terrible model, and I really do not understand how it's hung around as long as it has.

We've always had our ears open to the needs of those Do It Yourselfers, whom Agatha Gilmore says are growing in number.

Here's what we think: If you've got a person or a small team of people in your company who are charged with producing training content, wouldn't they be a lot more productive, effective, and profitable if they had a giant head start on the courses they need to develop? If the hardest part of the development were already done for them and available in a "kit" format that enabled them to tweak and refine rather than building from scratch?

I've developed a ton of courses. I've been involved in every step of course production, from needs analysis to determining learning objectives to creating a storyboard to gathering media elements to creating the multimedia, and through all the steps of testing, revising, and updating them.

The hardest part in all those steps is putting the content into words. Writing the storyboard takes the most time, requires the most smarts, is the most painstaking. It's the key to the course. It contains everything that everyone else involved in course development needs - the words and ideas to be conveyed, and the instructions that will turn the words into a living, functioning, effective course.

How much time, effort, and cost would it save your team to start the course development process with a completed storyboard? A well-crafted storyboard, with clearly stated learning objectives, elegantly-written instruction, and assessments tied to the objectives, in Word format for ready customization?

How much less time would it take to modify an existing course than to write it from scratch? How many more courses could your team put in front of learners each year - heck, each month? Would you save more money on development than you spent on the development kits? Only one way to find out...

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.

In a haze of happy post-Christmas cheer and relaxation, I'm hoping you've had a wonderful holiday. In fact, I hope you're still on holiday and won't read this for another week. I'm so filled with hope, I hope that you love this blog so much, you checked in to see if there was a new one today even though you don't have to return to work for another week!

I hope the roads and airways are safe for all those traveling over this holiday. I hope that it snows a lot before I go snowboarding again next week. I hope that my family loves the Christmas gifts they received, and I hope my son who's away at college didn't suffer too badly spending his first Christmas alone. I hope my 16-year-old new driver uses good sense and doesn't drive too much like a 16-year-old new driver.

I hope that you kept your job this past year or found a new one quickly, and that 2010 is a good year from your company. I hope that your workplace is safe and that your company nurtures and values a positive training culture. I hope that your boss treats training as an investment, not a cost center.

I hope GCP has a successful year: I hope we sell lots of online training at GCPLearning.com, and I hope we continue to give it away for free to those who need it at GlobalTrainingPeople.com! I hope lots of our free training members post their stories and photos there, and that our GTP professional community blossoms, grows, and serves its members well.

I read Hope is Not a Strategy by Rick Page a couple years ago. An extended quote from the introduction still resonates with me. It's about sales and selling, but I think it relates to home, health, and work hopes as well:

I believe that hope, along with faith and love, are essential to life. Hope is what you do when you have no control. But a strategy is made up of actions and tactics that convert visions to results for those who can make things happen. The title of this book was chosen to accentuate the differences between positive attitudes and positive actions and the flaw of counting on on without the other.

I bet you have a lot of the same hopes I've written about here. And I hope you have taken time to make a strategy to achieve all your hopes!

Here's to a happy end of 2009, and a 2010 filled with hope.

Merry Christmas!

Happy Holidays to all! Be safe, be smart, enjoy!

Why Not Video?

People hear "training" and often assume "video." At GCPLearning, we've never included video in our online courses. It's not a mindless choice; we've considered our options thoroughly. There are technological, logistical, and pedagogical reasons for that choice.

Historically, trying to deliver video online to the typical e-learning client was just a bad idea. Existing bandwidth simply wouldn't support it. In the early 2000s, when we thought that most client companies would have at least a T-1 connection, we designed for 56kbps dial-up speeds, as we still had a significant number of clients stuck in the dial-up era. We even had a client in 2002 who still used a 28.8kbps modem in a shed to access our training when it was too rainy outside to work. (I believe they also walked barefoot in the snow to work and back home, uphill both ways, and they liked it like that!) Although high-speed connections are now entirely the norm, there are plenty of demands on a company's internet bandwidth without adding to that a lot of users pulling down video.

I mentioned logistical reasons for not using video. Regular readers of this blog know that I do tend to go on and on about AGILITY. Video is not an inherently agile medium (though it can be if you go lo-tech... topic for another day!). The content of our courses is necessarily dynamic - regulations change, best practices evolve, and the equipment pictured in the illustrations goes out of date. Besides, we provide source code with our content so that our clients can freely customize the courses they purchase from us. Video production is costly in both time and money; revising courses becomes a much more convenient, economical, and doable proposition when it amounts to rewriting sections of the storyboard, recording fresh narration, and swapping photos in the flash content files. Of course, in keeping with our key principle of agility, our Global Content Player is equally adept at wrapping Flash videos as it is our standard Flash screens, so the option to include video remains open. We are more agile without video, and so are our clients.

So that's technology and logistics, but most important of all is obviously the pedagogical principles. If it's not good instruction, it doesn't matter how easy it is to download it or edit it. Ultimately, video COULD be an engaging element in some of our courses, but the feedback we've received from countless clients and a few focus groups we've organized support our contention that a series of photographs is just as effective - or even more effective - than video. Photos capture decisive moments in time. (Henri Cartier-Bresson said about photography, "The decisive moment, it is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.") The photos zero in on decision points or the most important steps in processes, without the distraction of intervening frames that would be present in video. They allow us to meet our learning objectives through that focus.

When we balance the three reasons - technological, logistical, and pedagogical - photo series wins out over video in our media selection for our courses.

"global" and "collaboration" and "partners"

I was asked to participate in a research survey recently that included some questions about brand awareness in the area of e-learning content providers. I hadn't heard of several of the companies named in the survey, but I did come away with a sense that if we'd hired branding gurus to help us name our company, we probably wouldn't have ended up calling ourselves "Global Collaboration Partners." We'd have certainly had "learning" or "training" or "E-something" in our name. But the survey caused me to reflect that when we started GCP with stars in our eyes, the name seemed perfect, and more importantly, as we've matured as a company, it's crystallized into a mission and a set of guiding principles.

GLOBAL

GLOBAL works for us in multiple directions. I blogged last week about GlobalTrainingPeople.com, our site where we give away 20 courses for 20 days for free, with a worldwide reach. It hasn't mattered a lick that the US regulations our courses are based upon have no authority in Ghana or Uzbekistan - the best practices that those regulations espouse help our training make people around the smarter, more efficient, and most importantly, safer in their work. GLOBAL also means that we have made our own operations more agile by tapping talents wherever they may come from. We've been fortunate to be able to flexibly enhance our team with talented programmers, media specialists, voiceover artists, and more, from across the US, Singapore, India, Argentina, Mexico, Sweden, France, Brazil, and on and on. Global network!

COLLABORATION

The quip was only half-joking when one of our senior partners opined that any member of our team would likely be unemployable solo; that only our combined talents, skills, and personal quirks added up to make one highly capable human being. That was a little extreme, and when I reread the words, doesn't paint us in the absolute most positive light, I guess. But even though it's an exaggeration, the fact is that our team collaborates exceedingly well. Using technology and a deep personal and working relationship to meld us, our team is able to develop accurate and superbly designed courseware, write insightful articles, navigate the business world and marketplace we play in, and provide value to the world around us. That's just internal workings; our clients also tell us again and again that collaborating with us to produce their custom training is easy and even fun, as we do it so well!

PARTNERS

We've collectively been in the e-learning business long enough that we knew what part of that field we wanted to play in, and most importantly, what roles we did NOT want to play. We rock at designing and creating excellent and effective training materials. And we like that work, a lot. So that's exactly what we've narrowed our focus to. We've been involved in the other aspects of e-learning: creating software tools, hosting a learning management system and providing the associated services, nurturing a stable of programmers... adding those tasks and responsibilities distracts us from that part we are most passionate about. So globally, and collaboratively, we PARTNER with folks whose passion and talents lead them to focus on those aspects of the business.

Global Collaboration Partners: not such a bad name for our company!

The Will to Train and the Will to Learn

An interesting paradox is seen in two surveys reported by Madbury, N.H.-based NFI Research.

According to Chuck Martin, NFI CEO, fully 87% of 2000 senior executives and managers surveyed responded that the top characteristic they look for in new hires is "willingness to learn." (Only half of the respondents went on to say that most of their current executives, managers and employees were willing to learn, however. )

Interestingly, two thirds of respondents to a subsequent NFI survey complained that employees are not actively participating in learning opportunities that are provided to them. "Although the level of learning provided is high in many organizations, the number of individuals taking advantage of these opportunities is lacking," Martin notes.

So... executives desire a trained workforce. The training is available. But in many cases, employees are not getting that training. Where is the disconnect?

According to Rebecca Hefter, Senior Vice President for Training at Boston-based Novations Group Inc., time is an important barrier to getting training done. Corporate trainers are under increasing pressure to limit the time employees spend off the job. "The trend is toward reduced classroom hours, more training done on-the-job and greater reliance on e-learning."

E-learning, however, can be its own "tough sell" in many organizations. Pull people off the job for a classroom session, and there they are in the classroom – a captive audience. But make training available "anytime, anywhere" via online means? Many busy learners will avail themselves of the training "sometime, somewhere" – but probably not here and now, given their overloaded schedules.

Perhaps one of the most important solutions to this problem lies in internal marketing of crucial training programs. The research that goes into an internal marketing plan is the topic for a whole other article, but at the core of the effort is the communication that is critical to getting the word out.

GET THE WORD OUT!

At GCPLearning, we have years of experience with clients who purchase our content and then need help to get their e-learning program going. We've created a 33-page workbook we call Maximize your E-Learning Investment with Change Management that spells out in detail the 10 well-documented critical steps you can implement quickly to maximize effectiveness and eliminate the costly mistakes so many organizations make in launching e-learning. We sell this workbook for $299, but I'm making it available to you, faithful readers, through the end of the year - click HERE to download it for free.

One of the key topics in the workbook is planning for communication to get your e-learning program off the ground. Here, briefly, are some of the key techniques for effective communication to get that training done, not sometime, somewhere, but here and now:

E-mail announcing the e-learning initiative – A clear and concise message showing management’s support and expectations for e-learners

Brochures, posters, payroll inserts, and articles in the company newsletter – Don’t rely exclusively on electronic communication to communicate your training themes and priorities. Also, market both the subject matter and the change in medium to e-learning.

Scrolling message on your learning center homepage – This brief message should be updated periodically.

Publicize new and revised courses – Let people know whenever your library is updated.

Develop a training calendar - Consider developing a training calendar, for example, “January is Safe Driving Month.” This is one of the best ways to maintain the momentum once your e-learning initiative has gotten off the ground.

Buddy system – Peer support is a leading factor in the success of e-learning programs. Buddies can be assigned or self-selected. The buddy system gives e-learners someone to turn to if they encounter uncertainty while becoming accustomed to e-learning. Buddies also encourage and remind each other to complete their training on schedule.

Attend departmental meetings – Speaking at departmental meetings provides an opportunity to obtain valuable feedback, clear up any misconceptions, and recruit new e-learners.

Form a training advisory committee – By assembling an advisory committee, you’ll establish credibility, show that you value the input of all stakeholder groups, and gain perspective on future needs and trends.

Contests – When multiple groups or facilities are involved in your e-learning program, a little friendly competition might spice things up. For example, a competition could focus on course completion rates.

Find new, appealing ways to reward those who complete training on time – By rewarding users for the completion of training, you are reinforcing the value of training and providing motivation to continue.

Keep communication 2-way – Publicize the excitement and accomplishments of your e-learning (e.g., higher-than-expected enrollments, outstanding course evaluations, and student and management testimonials). But also be sure to provide opportunities for your learners to discuss both the pluses and minuses of the program. By having a voice, your employees will feel a vested ownership in the training program and will be more likely to participate actively and even enthusiastically.

*Really* Global Training People. Dot Com.

All right - it's a perfect time to write this proud posting, the week after Thanksgiving... hope you had a good one! (I was on the road and didn't get this posted earlier.)

This is an exciting development at GCP. We've had a free training program for the past several years, which we hosted at acrosspublishing.com. It has been a big hit - we've provided training at no cost to way more than 10,000 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 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 recently discovered 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 site was that we got letters 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. We've 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!

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.

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.