Learning from Google

I suspect that, should humanity survive the next few hundred years, we’ll look back at the early decades of 21st Century and think of that time as the learning revolution, much as we now think of the turning decades of the 19th century as the industrial revolution.

We’ll see the sacred cows of educational dogma being put out to pasture, and the previously ingrained best practices of adult learning sneaking out of town under cover of darkness. And while university professors will probably be with us forever, training departments may be decimated and their inhabitants diasporised into all the far-flung operational units of organisations.

Like most significant revolutions, it takes time. And those most affected by it are unaware of the significance of what is happening. The harnessing of fire, the invention of the wheel, the concept of zero, the discovery of penicillin, all had irreversible impacts on the nature and pace of change in the societies that reluctantly embraced them.

The evolution of learning has been stunted for many centuries, simply because until recently the volume of knowledge did not grow significantly, the pace of change was pedestrian, and the nature of change was linear and predictable. Our approach to learning was adequate for those circumstances. Not any more.

A “Renaissance man” of the 1600s may have been more comfortable with languages and the classical arts than your average high school student today, but had a great deal less knowledge. Even 60 years ago it was possible to put all of the significant knowledge in all fields of endeavour into a few bookshelves. In 1943 the Chairman of IBM estimated the total world demand for computers at five. Today the world generates more new data in a day than our grandparents were exposed to in a lifetime. Five years from now, the information base of the world is expectedto double every eleven hours. You can no longer cram everything there is to know about a particular subject, let alone all the knowledge of the world, into a single head. And if you could, you’d never be able to find what you needed in time to be effective.

Small wonder that, at $71 billion, Google now has the world’s largest market capitalisation, just ahead of Yahoo, while industrial-age giants like Ford and General Motors have been downgraded to junk bond status. We now place a lot more value on those who can instantly find information than we do on those who merely manufacture “stuff”.

You won’t see a training company in the Fortune 100. Neither education nor training has ever been an investors’ industry. In looking for funding for e-learning and online simulations businesses over the past 15 years, I have done the rounds of venture capitalists in Europe and the US. More times than I care to remember I have eaten club sandwiches on the terrace of Sand Hill Road’s Sundeck restaurant, pitching ideas to the luminaries of the Silicon Valley VC community, and the general perception of training is that there is no exciting return to be made. A VC once told me that, to investors, the benefit of corporate training is a mirage – everyone sees it differently, everyone wants to believe in it, but when you try to pin it down it vanishes. Another asserted that, if improving corporate performance is really important, there are usually more productive solutions than training.

Training, as we have known it, is not driven by consumer demand, has uninteresting ROI, provides really fuzzy benefits, and cannot be easily differentiated. But that can change. Education focuses on helping people know more; training focuses on helping people do more; Google focuses on helping people find out more – when they most need it.

Corporate learning has to follow the Google “search & connect” model instead of the General Motors “produce & sell” model. Training purists sneer at “just-in-time” help systems, insisting that people need to know how to do things themselves. They undervalue collaborative learning networks, regarding them as somehow cheating. They fervently believe that adult learners must be led, child-like, through pre-determined learning paths mapped out and controlled by a central authority. They gauge the worth of an employee by his or her ability to survive on a corporate desert island, bereft of books, colleagues, mentors, databases, systems, or communication.

Get real! We no longer need to rub two mental sticks together to make intellectual fire. We no longer need to see ourselves as slaves tasked with caring for children. Pedagogy is a framework for understanding mental processes, not a job description. And andragogy is often abused, its “science” used to justify perpetuation of training processes that are simply no longer relevant or appropriate. I’d suggest the concept of “googlegogy” were it not for the fact that Google itself may not be top dog for long.

Twenty years ago the internet triggered a "Big Bang" in knowledge and personal communication. E-businesses have made rapid progress in exploiting the opportunities as they emerge, building real-time e-commerce systems, personalised services, and ubiquitous access to information. Trainers and instructional designers, however, are still building courses. We need to start thinking about new ways to foster learning that accommodate the real needs of learners and leverage all the data, systems, economies, and connectivity that “digital natives” now take for granted.

The needs of learners should be defined in marketing terms – instead of focusing only on learning content, learning objectives, and the outdated and inadequate concepts of learning “styles”, we should regard learners as customers and craft our learning processes to match the processes by which they want to learn. Instructional designers need to adopt some marketing thinking, so they have a better chance of being able to understand learners according to criteria that learners consider important. And they need to see the end product of their endeavours to be delighted customers instead of polished courses.

Maybe then trainers will have a better chance of surviving, or even guiding, the learning revolution.

Competency based learning management

For some years now, the notion of competency-based learning management (CBLM) has been viewed by training departments as the Holy Grail. But, like many things that make a lot of sense in theory, the practice is somehow unconvincing. In fact, the pursuit of CBLM, like the pursuit of e-learning, can cause us to lose sight of what is really important. Worse, it might do real damage to a company’s viability.

Here, in a nutshell, is the argument for CBLM: You can break the strategic plan of a business down into resource requirements, and within the human resources you can identify what competencies are required to fulfill the plan. You can drill down into that plan and create ever more detailed lists of competency requirements, by department, by project, by team, and by individual. Then, by surveying in depth the existing competencies of your employees, you can map out the gaps between what we have and what we need, and define a training plan to fill those gaps. No individual needs to be trained in anything that is not directly relevant to his or her personal competency growth path. You save time and money by surgically targeting all of your learning interventions, and doing away with the training smorgasbords of old. And you know that your training plans are intimately linked to your business objectives.

In a word, efficiency: which is management-speak for saving money. (True efficiency is about optimizing outputs and inputs, not simply seeing how far we can cut costs before the house of cards collapses). CBLM is an industrial-economy concept, where specialization and division of labor are considered to be good things, and where no resources should be wasted on helping any individual to learn anything that is not specific to the performance of his or her particular task.

Of course, all training has always been competency based, only it was typically bottom-up, not top-down. I am not performing well as a salesman, it is deemed that I am less than competent, and sales training is in order. But the bottom-up approach, however pragmatic and situation-responsive it may be, does not collectively amount to a clean, efficient fit with corporate top-down approach. And it makes planning and cost-justification difficult. Hence CBLM. (As an aside, competency-based HR management, where skill gaps are looked at as resource requirements rather than training needs, has contributed to much of the outsourcing pandemic in Western corporations. Why spend time and money training people with the hope of a 10% improvement in performance, when you can fire the lot and hire offshore resources with greater competency at a third of the cost?)

Here, in a nutshell, is my argument against CBLM: We are no longer operating in an industrial age economy, so competency-based learning management doesn’t really work.

And, in the rare instances where it can be made to sort of work, it handicaps the organization’s ability to rapidly innovate and adapt. Development of employees is now as important as their training. Collaborative workflows require employees to have a broader, not narrower, vision of their work. Industrial economy thinking seeks to eliminate overlaps in competencies; knowledge economy thinking acknowledges that without overlap there can be no synergy, and that competency overlaps foster the capacity for continual innovation. It is the opposite of specialization. Today, the more co-workers there are that know what I know, the more valuable that knowledge becomes. The same is true of skill. The future prosperity of organizations emerges from the white spaces between the org-chart boxes – sanitize those spaces by scrubbing regularly with CBLM, and nothing of value will ever grow there. Once you have instilled a regime of rigorous CBLM, don’t ever dare to tell an employee to think outside the box.

Informal learning is largely instigated and managed by individual employees, and the inherent contradiction between fostering informal learning and trying to centralize efficiency-driven competency-based learning management may not be in the best interests of corporate performance.

Another significant flaw in CBLM is the belief that we can adequately measure existing competencies, and can manage the ongoing maintenance of the resulting databases. Apart from the thin-ice of actually defining and measuring each competency in a way that is ethnically/culturally neutral and legally defensible, the effort inherent in keeping records up to date leaves most companies flailing. With e-learning, the real savings are not in course costs but in the business process costs associated with learning. With competency-based learning management, the business process costs may dramatically outweigh the course cost savings.

Is all CBLM a waste of time? Of course not. But blindly pursuing it because that’s what everyone else is doing, or because that’s what all the software vendors are hyping, can lead to the same frustration, expense, and lost opportunities as did the blind pursuit of e-learning. Like e-learning, which ironically has given enterprise-wide CBLM the semblance of being achievable, CBLM is only a good idea where it is appropriate, and where it is interpreted and applied intelligently and pragmatically. And like e-learning, which many companies wrongly feel they can fire up and leave running “as is” for eons, all CBLM initiatives are in a state of perpetual rapid decay, like a snowball rolling down a warm hill. A CBLM system, in a company competing in rapidly-changing dynamic markets, has a half-life of mere months.

Factor that into your efficiency calculations, and weep.

Original in TrainingZONE Parkin Space column of 22 April 2005

The LMS selection process in a nutshell

In working on learning strategies, I am sometimes asked to help a company decide which Learning Management System they should use. Here's the general approach that I recommend.

This is to be read in conjunction with my frequent admonitions to not allow the LMS to define your learning processes, nor to make its selection the starting point of your strategy development, nor to assume that any LMS is adequate to manage the totality of the learning that might take place. With that said, here’s an approach to selecting an LMS.

Form an LMS selection team that includes representatives of all those who will be involved in implementing and using it. Get someone from your IT department involved early, but ensure that they do not take ownership of the selection process. If you can afford it, get an objective outsider involved as well.

Agree on the strategic and operational processes by which you want to manage learning. These will follow from having already defined your strategic and operational learning objectives, which in turn will have been derived from the business goals of your various learning customers. Do not think in terms of LMS functionality, but in terms of process: what do you want to do, who is going to do it, how is it going to work.

Then look at this broad strategy, and list the requirements that a system supporting it must satisfy. Create a list of critical success factors for your e-learning systems. For example, if your strategy calls for you to implement competency-based learning, you may need to integrate with your Human Resource Management System (HRMS) data or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. If you have operations around the world, you may have a need for multi-lingual or multi-byte character capability. Your list of requirements will probably have 12-24 items on it.

Some other factors that you should consider at this stage are:

• Will you need local support in multiple countries?
• What is your budget?
• Do you want to host internally or have the vendor host for you?
• How diverse is your target learner platform and your IT infrastructure?
• Do you want to manage classroom activity (scheduling, evaluations)?
• Will you be integrating third-party content?
• Will you need a system that integrates with CD-ROM content or allows offline work to take place?
• Do you need e-commerce or departmental charge-back capabilities?
• How granular are your tracking and reporting needs?
• Do you have to track compliance or certification training?
• Do you have special requirements for data security?
• Do you plan to integrate collaborative activities such as e-mail, chat, or communities in your learning?
• Will you be managing synchronous virtual classroom activities?

Survey the market and come up with a short-list of systems that meet your critical needs. The survey can be done by issuing a request for information to all of the known vendors in the market (there are only 50 or 60 of any substance), by buying an off-the-shelf study, or by contracting someone to do the data collection work for you.

It is at this point where your LMS quest might lead you away from the straightforward purchase path: if your requirements don’t fit well what is available, you might explore the option of building rather than buying.

Reduce the list to less than half a dozen, using criteria that are important but did not make it to the critical list.

Next, develop a framework for evaluation of alternative systems. This is an important step, because it allows you to take control of the “demo process” and provides you with the right questions to ask. Without such a framework, you become a passive audience to the vendor’s presentation. The most helpful approach to defining an evaluation framework is to map out “a day in the life of a user” and then have the vendors talk about how their solution fits to that picture. You can break down a day in the life of an LMS administrator, a learner, an instructor, an instructional designer, an HRMS bureaucrat, and a learner tech-support person into a set of specific action steps, processes, or mini case-studies. Those steps, and the complexity of them, then become challenges to the vendor: Show me how your system supports these necessary processes.

Craft your RFP around your needs as already defined, don't use a template that you found on the web. Using someone else's idea of what is important is not only lazy, it can mislead the vendors and cause you to make decisions based on irrelevant criteria.Send out your RFP to your final short-list of vendors.

Once you have received responses to your request for proposal, cut the list to three. At this stage, you have enough information to differentiate the top candidates from the rest. All of your other criteria, the less important issues, the subjective feelings, the qualitative factors and so on can come into play.

Ask your final vendor list to set up demo sites that you can explore. Get learners, instructors, administrators and so on to go in and play, then provide you with feedback. Ask for references in companies that have installed the systems, and be sure to talk to as many of them as you can.

Once you have had the chance to try out the systems, have had the vendor presentations, and have seen how they address the day-in-the-life requirements, you should be comfortable about making a selection. Each party in the LMS selection team may have a different view, and should have a different perspective, but you will have enough structured data to come to a reasonably comfortable conclusion. Pick an LMS.

Then, because vendor terms are rarely cast in concrete, negotiate!

Original in TrainingZONE Parkin Space column of 15 April 2005

Simulations in Learning

One of the so-far unfulfilled promises of e-learning is the proliferation of easily-created inexpensive simulations that help bring the application of learned skills into a realistic context.

While there are plenty of low-end simulations in the field of software tools training, we are not seeing the same in soft skills training. Simulating the behaviour of a software application is relatively trivial – buy an inexpensive tool such as Camtasia or Captivate, and away you go. Simulating the behaviour of real people is another thing altogether. Trainers are put off creating such environments because they think they need to build complex computer models of reality. Not true.

Often the most effective (and cost-effective) simulation is reality. That's why people learn so much more "on the job" than they do "in training". It's why online massively-multiplayer role-play games have always been so popular and so compelling. It's (sadly) why reality TV is such a large part of our entertainment landscape.

You don't necessarily need to script a scenario or code an engine for a simulation if you allow reality to be its driver. Need to sharpen your abilities in marketing strategy? Work on a real project. Need to get beyond the theory in motivating staff? Work on a real issue. Need to become more fluent in your new foreign language? Spend some time in the real foreign country.

Where simulations make a whole lot of sense is where the downside of a failure in reality is so expensive that the cost of developing the simulation is acceptable (as in learning to fly a 747). Or where the cost of the simulation can be amortised over extensive use (as in computer games). Or where it costs very little to build something effective.

Simulations are not always hi-tech or expensive. For decades, sales trainers and other soft-skills trainers have worked with simulations, more often referred to as role-plays. Transferring those to an e-learning mode does not have to cost a lot of money if you accept that reality is a better driver than a computerised engine.

If you need to have people role-play online, hook them up with fellow learners instead of with some clunky machine logic. The responses of real people are always more interesting, unpredictable, and valuable than anything you could program into a computer.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, e-learning should be about people learning from (and with) other people, via facilitated online communication. E-learning should not be exclusively about people learning from machines.

E-learning developers should focus on how networked learning can support, facilitate, and guide learning as it takes place in the workplace. In the future, we won’t have a mentor physically watching every skill being applied by every employee, but maybe we will have a computer system helping with some of that work. I'm not talking about having Big Brother watching your every move, or being constantly second-guessed by that annoying animated Microsoft paperclip. But something subtler, less intrusive, and more nurturing might work.

Until that happens, designing blended processes to make much of the learning take place as part of the learner’s day-to-day workflow is a good step forward. Instead of merely blending online coursework with classroom coursework, we should blend workplace application with both modes of learning. Have people learn on the job, using their actual work tasks as the simulation. You might want to avoid doing this if there are lives or major clients at stake, but most people will be doing their jobs anyway. We just need to help them apply their new skills to the work so that the work can help them learn.

As our abilities progress, applications will become available that allow us to create more and more sophisticated replications of reality at lower and lower costs. But we are a long way from that state right now – fortunately, because I suspect that once simulations are really quick and easy to create, we'll be consistently abusing the technology in the same way that we abuse PowerPoint.

Original in TrainingZONE Parkin Space column of 1 April 2005

Saba acquires THINQ without a ripple in the market

Saba has acquired THINQ. Time was when an acquisition at this level -- two major players in the LMS market -- would have tongues wagging for months. But this has happened with hardly anyone appearing to care. Sure, THINQ's customers are not going to be happy about being told to migrate to Saba's technology over time. But neither the training press nor the usual industry commentators seem to think the acquisition is worthy of much attention.

Is this a sign of market maturity at last? Or is it because there has been so much blood shed in the industry recently that we are just numbed to the reality: this market is just not big enough for more than a few players. If the e-learning-only vendors have any hope of making a stand against the giant ERP vendors, they have to get bigger through merging. But we were talking David and Goliath before Oracle acquired PeopleSoft. Now it's more like David and Godzilla. Even before getting PeopleSoft, Oracle's revenues could absorb those of all the independent vendors put together three times over.

A couple of years ago I was fond of annoying LMS vendors by saying that it would be game over for the pure-play guys once the ERP firms turned their attention to e-learning. Looks like the sun might be setting sooner than anyone expected.

Work Skills are the Tip of the Iceberg

I have many hidden talents that rarely get sold to my clients. I am a photographer, a cook, a writer, and a web coder. I can fell a tree, survive in the wilderness, speak German, and some Dutch and Swedish, and a little American. I am a persuasive salesman, and an effective diplomat. I can put together business plans and brand plans, raise venture capital, re-build a computer, interpret complex data, and play a mean air guitar. I have other talents that I’d rather not go into here. So what? If they are of no direct relevance to the job I am doing, they get put on ice, and effectively cease to exist. Or do they?

In any company, each employee has a rich set of talents that never makes it to the surface in the work environment. Frequently, we “inherit” a team that we had no hand in hiring in the first place, and about whom we know little. We might, at annual review time, look at the employee file to get a better insight. But that file may only tell us about the person’s education, skills, certifications, and work experience. It tells us nothing about the employee’s alter ego, the “real” person who appears after leaving the office. It tells us nothing about their fuzzy competencies.

These days the recruitment process, which is supposed to be getting more and more rigorous, tends to ignore anything but the most salient facts about applicants. When I applied for my first job decades ago, there was a whole page of questions about my outside interests, hobbies, and sports. Today, those questions are considered either invasive of privacy or quite irrelevant to the evaluation of job suitability. In the US, most resumes should be only one page long – two at the outside – if they are to be accepted at all. Companies used to recruit the person, now they hire a finite skill set. The incidental skills and talents rarely get noticed or catalogued, so the total capacity of our workforce stays hidden.

I am not talking about Joan in Accounts, who speaks some Russian, so gets seconded to the sales team for the annual Moscow Trade Show. I am more concerned with the fundamental motivational, creative, and intellectual drivers that allow people to become linguists, musicians, programmers, amateur dramatists, community mentors, orchid-breeders, or moonlighting e-commerce entrepreneurs. It’s their learning skills that we may be under-exploiting, though their learned skills may clearly have some benefit.

We are populating our companies with tips of icebergs, without knowing what resources lie below the surface. That may have been acceptable in the 1980s and '90s, but in the knowledge-economy Naughties it’s a mistake. This is a decade of increasingly perishable overt competencies. The most valuable skills that an employee can have today are the ability and curiosity to peer over the horizon and the ability to learn, and unlearn, rapidly and efficiently.

As globalization is thrust upon us, and as networked communication becomes the norm, the ability of an organisation to rapidly evolve in new and creative ways becomes vital. The routine hierarchical “division of labour” approach to getting things done seems less relevant than the “organic flux” approach in which project teams coalesce then dissolve as needed. A key to the success of this is people who are capable of changing their focus, role, and operational skill-set as they move from one project to the next, or as they work on multiple projects simultaneously.

In the US, the digital generation is rising rapidly through the ranks, because they see ways to operate that those with an industrial-economy mindset cannot conceive. Those people older than their late twenties are struggling to change their own concepts of how organizations work.

For trainers, this raises a few complications, and many opportunities. First, an annual skill-gap analysis is of little value, but a tactical project skill-gap analysis might be handy. Second, the idea of scheduling the training of groups of people seems less sensible than creating individualized ad-hoc learning opportunities. Third, there may be a whole slew of new “learning” skills to be defined and taught. Fourth, there’s an evolving project management – and project participation – field, with its own skill-sets, to be defined and taught (the PMI's pretentiously named Project Management Body of Knowledge is considered by many to be hopelessly old-fashioned). Finally there is the growing need to train people in the skills of managing an organization that is in permanent flux.

As organizational barriers and processes start to flex and the crystalline nature of an employee’s contract with the company becomes more plastic, perhaps the idea of work-life balance changes to one of work-life integration. Instead of superficially segregating one’s skills into work skills and private skills, perhaps companies will start to look a little deeper at what fuzzy competencies people have. Identifying “root skills” that can be cultivated in multiple directions may spawn a better recruitment/promotion model than merely looking at the certificates stapled to a resume.

Original in TrainingZONE Parkin Space column of 18 March 2005

New Paradigms for Learning

In recent posts I have talked about the power of informal learning, and wondered why learning professionals conspicuously ignore the potential for performance improvement that it offers. Now that the kind of human interactions that make informal learning so effective are being facilitated by the Internet, the relevance and impact of formal training may diminish even further. Do we as learning professionals stand by and watch our empires get sidelined, or do we try to take a leading role in defining and refining emerging learning paradigms?

Naturally, there will always be a need for formal training and diligent learning management, especially where compliance or certification are concerned. But according to various recent studies, corporate employees, particularly knowledge workers, learn three times more from informal experiences than they do in formal courses. Those informal learning experiences include interacting with co-workers, modelling peer behaviour, trial and error, self-directed learning, social support structures, networking, ad-hoc mentoring, and so on. If so little that is valued by employees comes from structured activities, either we are not teaching what people need to know or the way we teach is inadequate. Or the world can get by just fine without us.

Anthropologists and particle physicists agree that there are things in this world that we cannot observe without changing them in the process. Can those whose frame of reference is formality understand how informal learning takes place in their own organisations, and engage that process without breaking it? Can training departments, with all of their post-industrial-revolution baggage, rise to the challenge and affect the kind of post-knowledge-revolution changes that are both necessary and inevitable?

The challenge is to facilitate, not dictate, and to nurture and focus those aspects of an informal learning environment that can leverage what people do naturally. We need to start teaching employees how to learn. We need to create the culture that encourages innovation, experimentation, socialising, and networking. We need to make time for talking, and for dissecting failure without punishing it. And we need to start a movement, top-down, to dissolve organisational silos and the myopic tunnel-vision they produce, and to provide the facilities that make it easier for employees to engage with each other. And, for those who fear that the growing competencies of individual employees might not get recorded as they do in a formal training environment, perhaps we need to foster a renaissance in testing or measurement.

What about control, and planning, budgeting and evaluation? What about ROI? What about structure in our own jobs as trainers? - That’s the reaction that holds us back.

As the Internet barrelled its way into our corporate lives a decade ago, I hoped it would have a liberating effect on how we go about our work of performance improvement. For the most part, it has not.

Instead of cultivating and liberating corporate knowledge, we use the Internet to reinforce our ivory towers; instead of opening people’s eyes, we put them to sleep; instead of personalising learning, we deliver generic packaged courses. Instead of teaching people to catch fish, we force-feed them on Spam till their expectation of anything better fades away.

But that’s OK, because the canned-learning supply chain is easy to manage and control, which is more important than any ultimate impact on business performance. After all, we are judged on measurable results, so we shoot for measurable goals. And that learning supply chain, with which we are now all so comfortable, is just loaded with measurability – especially now that we have an LMS to automate the work for us.

Perhaps we are afraid to embark on any initiatives where the ROI cannot be readily measured or guesstimated. Or perhaps we live in a business world where projects that stray too far from conventional thinking will not be funded. Exploring and experimentation are frowned upon in the world of corporate learning, because it is not only financially risky, it threatens to rock the boat if successful. Rock the boat? Christopher Columbus found the cash to take three small boats over the edge of the world, and you can bet that his PowerPoint presentation to the Queen of Spain had really fuzzy ROI calculations in it.

Three and a half centuries later, change is so ubiquitous it has become a cliché. Yet corporate trainers don’t want to go there. To us, “innovation” is about boldly trying to get more Socratic methods into some of our classes, or converting our clickable links into animated 3D icons.

The recording industry discovered the power of informal networked collaboration when music consumers did things a radically new and – to them – eminently sensible and efficient way, using peer-to-peer file sharing. But it was not simply music files that got shared – the web facilitated a boom in knowledge sharing, with discussion forums, gossip boards, fan blogs, newsgroups, and specialised communities of interest that are doing more to promote the musicians than the marketing budgets of the record companies could ever have accomplished.

Record companies are left looking silly and marginalised, having to resort to legal actions in the courts to maintain their business model. Let’s not allow the recording industry to be a model of what is to become of training, which has typically been positioned as the “middleman” between SMEs and learners. We need to maintain some influence over the evolution of learning, because what crystallises from the informal bottom-up flux, while it will be “right” for the personal objectives of individual employees, may not be “right” for the business objectives of the corporation.


Original in TrainingZONE Parkin Space column of 11 March 2005

Jeek market gets Adidas cybersneakers

What's a Jeek? They inhabit the space at the intersection of the Jock and Geek markets. (OK, I just made that up). Once a thinly-populated niche, it has been growing rapidly as sporty types acquire camera-phones and iPods, and nerdy types start seeking a little more fresh air and fitness.

It's a trans-age-group niche that buys a lot of stuff just because it's cool. And "cool" is often enhanced by premium prices.

Today, into this discerning market, Adidas launches the Adidas 1. It's a running shoe that adjusts itself to it's wearer's pace, terrain, and fatigue level.

The shoe contains a battery-powered motor-and-pully system that changes the cushioning of the sole between the time the shoe leaves the ground and the time it next impacts the running terrain. A sensor in the heel measures compression, and computes from that whether the shoe is too soft or too firm. The computer brain sends the necessary instructions to the micro-mechanics, and the next time the runner's foot hits the ground the shoe will be more appropritely tuned.

All of this technology weighs in at under 40 grams. The rechargable batteries last for 100 hours of running. To save powewr, after ten minutes of walking the system shuts itself down. Of course, you can hit the "off" switch at any time.

Price tag? $250 per pair. Outrageous compared with regular running shoe prices, but not for hard-core runners, status seekers, or those consumed with techno-lust. The Adidas 1 could well be the iPod of America's $16+ billion dollar sneaker market.

Garbage in, landfill out

Judging by the e-mails I received, my recent post about smile sheets clearly struck a chord -- and a few raw nerves. Most reactions seemed to agree with my basic contention that end-of-class happy-sheets are abused almost universally. They are often interpreted to mean what they could never have measured, and are at best useful for scoring the food and the venue – and as a resource for promotional quotes. They have little to do with the quality of learning.

At the same time, nobody can contest that we need to formalise a feedback and review process in some way. I’d like to look at this in a little more detail, wearing my market researcher’s hat.

To be useful, any survey has to have clear objectives that are measurable, actionable, and meaningful. It has to be structured so as to maximise respondent engagement, minimise ambiguity and confusion, and allow for un-heroic interpretation of results. So the environment in which you conduct the survey has to be conducive to the kind of thinking you are asking respondents to do; and the questions, their wording, sequencing, and scoring mechanisms must be designed to minimise bias. Leading questions should always be avoided.

Here are some thoughts:

Objectives: What do you really want to measure, and why? Work backwards from the decisions you need to make, to the information you need to support those decisions, to the questions you need to ask to get that information. If you need to make decisions about future caterers or menus, then do a meaningful study that will help you make the right decisions – don’t just ask a generic question like: “Rate the food from one to five.”

If you want to evaluate how well the course met learner expectations, in order to fine-tune either course content or marketing positioning, do an appropriate study that gets inside the issue enough to be useful. Don’t just ask learners: “How well did the course meet your expectations” and expect an aggregate score on a Likert scale to tell you anything actionable. Above all, avoid gratuitous nice-to-know but not actionable questions.

Structure: In any research, you have to respect respondents’ time. A blank questionnaire may contain more accurate responses than one filled out in haste! So make sure learners have the time to do the job you are asking of them. And make sure your questions are structured and sequenced to minimise confusion.

Don’t jump from a ten-point numeric scale to a five-stage semantic differential if you can help it. Ask questions that learners will understand and will see the purpose of. Always test any questionnaire on a sub-sample of people who have not been involved in its design, because your own insight into what you are looking for can blind you to weaknesses in your wording and structure.

Interpretation: The area where most nonsense creeps into a study is in the interpretation of the data. If you have structured the study well, interpretation should be easy and obvious. If not, huge conceptual leaps are invoked to get to the conclusion you are looking for, and those leaps are loaded with bias and wishful thinking. To go back to the earlier example, you have asked learners to rate the trainer’s presentation skills and everyone gives a low score. What are they talking about? Vocal projection? PowerPoint design? Body language or eye contact? Content or structure? Pace? Audience involvement or lack of it? Attitude? Since you have no idea what it means, you will interpret it according to your own beliefs, prejudices, or defence mechanisms.

Another example: you have asked learners to rate how well the course met their expectations, and you get a good score. Does this mean it is a great course? Or does it mean they had low expectations? It is possible that their expectations were quite different from what the course objectives assumed they were.

Environment: If you start with the objectives of your study, you will probably find that one single questionnaire administered at the end of a course is quite inadequate. The environment at course close is simply not conducive to the kind of reflection or honesty that you may need. Relevance and effectiveness maybe better tested a few weeks later, when learners have had to apply what they learned on the job. An all-learners survey may similarly not be necessary – you can get really good information by pulling a sample of learners from multiple sessions of the same course into a focus group for an hour or two a month or so after their learning experience. If nothing else, such a session might reveal to you some issues that you never thought of asking about.

Some aspects of learning effectiveness may be best tested in real-time at the moment of learning, during a session where learners are trying to grasp what is being taught. As trainers, we should have the sensitivity and curiosity to be continually taking the pulse of our trainees and adjusting accordingly. Within the constraints of our schedule, good trainers do try to be wired into learner feelings and to react where possible and appropriate. But many courses are not designed for flexibility and are often conducted under such time pressure that “nurturing” is out of the question.

Perhaps we need to add another level to Kirkpatrick - level 0, measured at the point of interaction. But what tools would we use?

Original in TrainingZONE Parkin Space column of 4 Feb 2005

The self-delusion of smile-sheets

There is an unhealthy tradition in training that every course must end with participants filling in a questionnaire in which they express their feelings about their learning experience. We ask people scurrying for the door to take time to check boxes on multiple Likert scales and to scribble a few comments. Then we gather up the questionnaires and flip through them hoping desperately for a few feel-good moments of positive feedback, and finding good rationalizations for any negative scores.

Then, if the training organisation is vaguely professional, the questionnaire results get incorporated into a database where they are manipulated to produce trends and averages. Attention gets paid to those aspects that learners are clearly less happy with, and trainers with consistently good average scores acquire a sort of heroic status. Oh dear.

I can’t think of too many other fields of activity where we try to measure customer satisfaction immediately after the event each and every time. Does the waiter refuse to let you leave the restaurant till you have filled in the form? Do you get accosted by questionnaire-wielding cinema managers during the closing titles of a movie? Does your dentist insist that you check a few boxes before you are allowed to escape the chair?

I used to work with a training company that evaluated the competence of its trainers based on their smile-sheet score averaged across all questions and all participants in a particular session. Trainers would come in beaming with the news that they'd just run a 4.7, as if the number actually meant something (though of course it did -- their daily rate was pegged to their perceived ability to make learners happy, not to the impact that they had on the effectiveness of those learners once back on the job).

My background is in market research, so I know a thing or two about questionnaires and survey design. Smile-sheet questionnaires are often really badly designed, with ambiguous questions or counter-intuitive formats. The process is far from ideal, with tired respondents working in haste. And the environment is inherently invalid, with respondent-trainer relationships interfering with objective perceptions or honest responses. The data that comes in is badly flawed, and those flaws are magnified with every manipulation and interpretation. Garbage in, landfill out. Evaluating training quality by smile-sheets and then taking action based on that evaluation is naive and delusional.

Technical validity issues aside, we all know that smile-sheet scores are not a meaningful measure of training effectiveness. Nor do they provide any real insight into what, if anything, a participant has learned, or the impact that it might have on that person’s real-world work performance. They are at best a blurred snapshot of customer satisfaction at the time, nothing more. But we continue to use and revere them.

As trainers, we should have the sensitivity and curiosity to be continually taking the pulse of our trainees and adjusting accordingly. So why do we perpetuate the smile-sheet ritual? Is it because “management” wants some easy means of monitoring trainer performance? Or is it because learners have come to expect some kind of formal feedback process beyond the ability to speak up in class?

Whatever the motivation, we are simply not measuring the things that we are reporting on. There are a series of large conceptual leaps between what is actually measured (vague momentary happiness) and what we interpret as being measured (training effectiveness). The endless discussions that go on about whether a 5-point scale is better than a 7-point scale, whether checking boxes is better than circling numbers, whether semantic differentials (marvelous - - - awful) are better than numeric intervals (5 - - - 1), are all irrelevant if the core concept is inherently invalid.

If we really care about the quality of the learning service we are providing, we should put a little more effort into measuring and monitoring that quality. Quality is all about the extent to which we achieved the learning objectives, and that cannot be measured at the point of training. It has to be measured after the event, where the training is applied on the job.

We should at least care enough to acknowledge that the smile-sheet is only a token gesture at quality control, and devise and implement systems or processes that are more incisive and significant. We pay lip service to Kirkpatrick’s four levels and wistfully wish it were easy to measure beyond level one. But that is rarely part of our brief, so we let it slide. How much easier would it be to do all of those ROI projections if we had at least some valid data to work with beyond the fact that we scored a smile-sheet 4.7 average in the courses we ran last year?


Original in TrainingZONE Parkin Space column of Jan 21 2005

PowerPoint in perspective

PowerPoint is audience-abusive, presenter-addictive, and information-transfer sclerotic. But with a little determination, it is possible to stop it from calling the shots and take back control of your communication.

There is no end to the supercilious put-downs of the tool that roll of the tongues of those who know better. “Death by PowerPoint” is no longer funny, but we all use it to show how much smarter we as audience members are than those making an effort to communicate their message from the front of the room. Yet the same people who sit in meeting rooms and sigh inwardly as another bullet point whizzes in from stage right, will themselves inflict similar discomfort when called upon to present.

Not all trainers are detractors. There are many PowerPoint apologists who will tell you that it is a perfectly good tool, and that the fault lies with the way people use it. Not true. It is a tool that is often quite inappropriate for the task, yet our norms and expectations dictate that we use it anyway.

PowerPoint leads you to communicate in a slide-show or lecture mode. It imposes a sage on stage relationship between the audience and the presenter, and it makes the content as manifested way too central in the process. Content is of course important, but PowerPoint forces an abstracted sequentialism on content that often makes it incoherent. The presentation typically becomes the communication, instead of merely supporting it. Dressing it up with animated transitions and pointless clip-art will not stop the haemorrhaging of audience attention. The worst offence of PowerPoint is that it often serves as the velvet curtain behind which the Wizard of Oz presenter hides his/her own lack of substance.

If you have to use PowerPoint, what can you do to make the best of it? Assuming that basic legibility issues and presentation skills are already in hand, here are ten tips in, er, bullet point format:
1. Understand your strategic objective and structure your communication so that it gets you there. If you are trying to teach, use appropriate communication processes and don’t let “your presentation” become a substitute for a proper learning experience.

2. Only use PowerPoint slides for those parts where it makes the communication clearer or more efficient. If you can’t communicate your message verbally without a PowerPoint prop, perhaps you have nothing worthwhile to say. Don’t feel compelled to have a slide for everything you are going to say, and use blank slides liberally as spacers that bring focus back to you or to your audience.

3. Don’t use PowerPoint as a pacemaker. If your presentation design interferes with the right pace of communication, rethink it.

4. Design to express ideas, not merely to summarize. A bullet list is often the last refuge of the poorly prepared.

5. The time and attention of your audience is a scarce commodity – respect it. Self-indulgence seems to be encouraged by PowerPoint, and results in tedium and time pressure.

6. Choose the visual media that bring most clarity to any item. Numbers are often more effective than text or graphics, still images can sometimes do more than busy animations. For a real-time electronic whiteboard, plug in a cheap graphics tablet and write on your PowerPoint slides.

7. Don’t be afraid to crowd a slide where appropriate. An individual item often needs the context of other items to be meaningful, and a linear revelation may not be the most effective way to go.

8. Keep it simple and elegant. Your slides should support what and how you are communicating, not dominate it.

9. Stay flexible. For important events such as conferences, I usually have two versions of my presentation (one high-res full-color, one lower-res 16 color) because you never know what limitations the projector may have. If I am presenting as part of a panel, I prepare the full presentation and a stripped-down version in case someone steals all my time. And I make sure I can talk comfortably without any aids at all if necessary.

10. Respect your audience’s need for a record of the presentation, but don’t take that need literally. Even the most text-heavy PowerPoint slideshow is usually an incoherent representation of what you actually had to say. Instead, take the time to write a paper, including any relevant illustrations from your presentation.

In skilled hands PowerPoint can be quite effective even when it forces a sub-optimal mode on the communication. But “presenting” is rarely what we should be doing. Training, selling, persuading, inspiring, or informing all require different communication modes, processes, and media. Why do presenters and audiences have an unquestioning expectation that they will meet their objectives with a slideshow? Sometimes technology becomes an end in itself, and PowerPoint has achieved that status. The medium has become more important than the message.

You are often better off simply turning off the projector and talking with your audience. If you need to illustrate your talk, try using a less linear tool, such as HTML or Flash. But there is not a lot you cannot do, very effectively, with a whiteboard or a flipchart.


Originally in TrainingZONE's Parkin Space column of Jan 14 2005.

An eventful year for training technologies?

In 2004 technology appeared to be coming out of the post-bubble-burst doldrums and into our lives as never before. The technology infrastructure that was laid down, and the tool chest that the training industry can now play with, is impressive.

VoIP companies like Skype and Vonage started a quiet revolution in the telecom industry, making free (or absurdly cheap) phone calls easily available to anyone with a web connection, and prompting pundits to forecast that 40% of all business calls will be web-based within three years. Microsoft came under pressure from all directions. Oracle acquired PeopleSoft for $10.3 billion, a move that surely made LMS vendors nervous.

Google bought Keyhole Corp, a digital mapping business, amid rumours that Google was developing its own browser to compete with Internet Explorer. IE lost double digit market share to the open-source Firefox browser (actually Netscape reincarnated) within weeks of its launch, a classic example of how fragile the status quo can be these days, and of how vulnerable even the most dominant are to innovative competitors. And open-source Linux went from strength to strength, landing a major endorsement when IBM ditched Microsoft and adopted Linux as its operating system of choice. That was before IBM sold its personal computer business to a company in China.

After Google’s massive IPO, Yahoo, Amazon.com and Microsoft all got the search engine bug, and lots of start-ups joined the search for better search systems. And the proliferation of spam and viruses made internet security a very good business to be in. Symantec acquired Veritas for $13.5 billion.

Apple, HP and Dell all rolled out desirable little devices that make the old data-focused grey-box notion of a personal computer redundant. The cell phone became a multimedia mobile computer that serves up music, movies, and images as well as the occasional phone call or text message. The iPod phenomenon made Apple the fastest growing stock of the year. In the US, broadband users outstripped dial-up users for the first time, making web-based multimedia more viable than ever. And wide-area WiFi hot-zones sprang up like mushrooms, with the city of Philadelphia announcing a plan to provide free broadband wireless access to everyone within the city limits.

There was less dramatic progress in social computing. True, new services kept popping up to provide “connections” for those seeking collaboration or just company. Friendster became phenomenally popular overnight, acting as a peer-to-peer social network for (mainly) adolescent gossip sharing. More mature versions have yet to take hold, though Spoke and the repositioned Lycos have promise. Free photo sharing services like Hello and Flickr have blossomed. And blogs and RSS finally made it to centre court, after years of being cult phenomena, suggesting that the emphasis in the application of computing has moved from the personal to the intimate. Perhaps training needs to start following the same path.

So what does it all mean for learning? Very little, if you choose to ignore it. Rather a lot, if you are looking to exploit it. Strangely enough, academic institutions are often more advanced in their incorporation of web technologies than business organisations. Perhaps it is because their primary market is the digital generation. It is hard to ignore the way your students prefer to do things, particularly if they make sense.

Universities are using social networks, WiFi, podcasting, online forums, and virtual collaboration almost as a matter of course these days. They are still semester-bound, which is odd given the inefficiencies of date-based curricula, but for the most part there is a buzz of innovation and experimentation on campuses around the world. Sadly, a similar innovative buzz is hard to find in the training centres of major corporations.

The oft-heard put-down of “solution looking for a problem” is very easy to use at the end of 2004. There are a lot of inexpensive, easily obtainable tools looking for someone to apply them. Technologies are no longer lagging our ability to use them. The reverse is true: our imagination and willingness to reinvent our processes and ourselves as trainers is the major limiting factor in our evolution to more competent professionals.

Ah, but is there a need to innovate, to continuously improve our effectiveness or efficiency, to provide a better service to our learners, and our employers? As an industry, the answer has to be a resounding “yes” but as individuals we tend to be happy waiting for someone else to make the first move. As Microsoft discovered at so many levels in 2004, playing a waiting game is not necessarily the smartest survival strategy.

New Year's Training Resolutions 2005

TrainingZONE Parkin Space column of 12/29/04:

Last December I made a list of “professional resolutions” that would make me altogether a better person in 2004. Having conveniently misplaced that list, I am not able to tell how I did, though I am sure it was not an admirable performance. Now it’s time to put together a new list. So what do I need to achieve in 2005 to do a better job as both a trainer and a consultant?

My New Year training resolutions:

1. Start learning Mandarin.

2. Do not get comfortable with one way of doing things, keep looking for better ways to achieve the goals, but do not be easily distracted by bright shiny learning objects.

3. Do not give up easily where decision-makers don’t want to be bothered with the complications of innovation. Try harder to justify the intelligent application of emerging technologies in learning designs where it is blindingly obvious (to me) that these will enhance learning. Develop better ways of explaining to non-technical traditionalists the use and impact of such tools as social networks, RSS, and peer-to-peer collaboration.

4. Work on a training evaluation system that actually measures my performance against the specified learning goals, and quantifies the impact that I am having on business objectives.

5. Stop acceding to demands for a training solution to what is really a management problem. I am sure that a large proportion of the training that takes place fits this mode, and it is not easy to turn away this kind of business, but I for one am not doing it any more. If I can’t successfully provide the consulting solution, I am not going to fake a training solution. Not only is it frustratingly inadequate to “train” people then send them back into an environment in which the training will have no effect, it abuses their time and energy, wastes the clients’ budget, and lowers the reputation of training generally.

6. Try to write an objective guide to SCORM and AICC in plain English that even I can understand. Focus on the practical implications for the design of learning experiences and clarify the rather specific niche that such standards and models have in the wider context of learning, and of learning administration.

7. Learn more from learners how best to help them learn. Spend more time with people to understand their evolving preferences and behaviours where learning is concerned. Try to gain better insights into their informal learning processes, and exploit those insights in more formal learning experiences.

8. Always put the needs of individual trainees ahead of my own needs, and the needs of my clients’ business ahead of all else.

9. Spend more time in the classroom and on the conference podium. Reverse my recent trend toward being very virtual, and get back to doing a lot more face-to-face communication. (For years I was a strong advocate of the virtues of virtual-ness, but, while the efficiencies are undeniable, there is a point beyond which your batteries stop recharging).

10. Campaign for free wireless broadband in every classroom, airport, conference venue, and hotel room. It is rapidly becoming as expected a part of the environment as air conditioning or electricity.

11. Design and build a prototype learning system that is delivered exclusively via low-spec mobile phone (I am particularly interested in basic literacy training).

12. Collaboratively engage with more people in the learning profession, with the goal of writing more useful how-to papers. Finish writing my book.

13. Do some pro bono work for a deserving cause.

14. Behave better: Stop using the fuzzy term “e-learning”. Stop rolling my eyes every time someone else uses it without clarifying specifically what they mean. Stop pronouncing it “HellMS” when in the company of LMS vendors.

15. Finally kick the PowerPoint habit.

It looks like 2005 will be another one of those NASA centrifuge-ride years. But I trust it will bring health, wealth, and happiness to all.

LMS Adventures continued..

My LMS adventures piece a few weeks ago produced a torrent of email, most of it agreeing that today’s LMS has way too much say in our training decisions.

The only vaguely defensive reactions were from LMS vendors, who typically said “Yes, but what else can we do?” Short of reinventing your systems completely, you can probably do nothing. Corporate learning used to be controlled and channelled, but is increasingly informal and personal. If training is like an irrigation system, channelling knowledge to achieve preconceived ends, then raw knowledge is like rain – it will bypass an LMS that does not accommodate and focus it, and it will find its own way, carving a new learning landscape as it does.

There is a philosophical argument to the effect that learning cannot and should not be managed at all, but let’s not go there. I believe that formal and informal learning reinforce each other and that the absence of one impoverishes the other. Formal learning, almost by definition, requires “management” – it has to have some kind of strategic context, involve some kind of premeditated processes, and be organized or guided along in some way. So there is clearly a role for an LMS.

For those who thought I was being unduly unfair on the industry that gave us the e-learning supply chain, complete with its various intermediary gatekeepers and control systems, I apologise. I never intended to imply that a system for managing learning is unnecessary, merely that such systems today are inadequate. They are inadequate not because they provide too little control, but because they provide too much of the wrong kind of control, channelling the thinking of trainers away from creative innovation and toward dumb compliance with outmoded learning models. And they are way too precious about their uniqueness within the ERP family.

An LMS should manage access, record-keeping, and reporting on those things that require such administrative control. It should also enable the flawless provision of services to the customers of the learning department. An LMS should not dictate, or constrain, pedagogical architecture or learning strategy. Sadly, most do. How did this happen?

Because a simple adaptation of most ERP systems could accommodate the access and reporting aspects of learning management, LMS vendors needed to differentiate themselves from the big enterprise providers like SAP and PeopleSoft (now Oracle). So they focused on becoming ‘platforms’ for the launching of packaged content, which was outside of the brief of ERP providers. And that became their unique selling proposition and primary function.

Only the most cynical observer would suggest that the collusion between the LMS vendors and ADL in the creation – and aggressive promotion – of SCORM was deliberately geared to creating the kind of barriers to entry that result from getting an industry to adopt a proprietary standard instead of exploiting more open web systems. But that was the net effect. In standardising course interoperability around a content-centric object model, they effectively shut out the wider world of process-centric or distributed web interoperability. In so doing they denied to their customers access to some of the real learning potential of the Internet. Learning experiences facilitated by peer-2-peer systems, social networks, just-in-time mentoring, blogging or RSS? Just because your LMS cannot “manage” these does not mean they should not be experimented with and exploited.

SCORM advocates will of course deny that their reference model paints learning developers into a corner, or stunts their growth. But I challenge anyone to persuade a corporate e-learning decision-maker to try a product, solution, process, or experience that is not SCORM-conformant. If it is not LMS plug-and-playable, it is not taken seriously. And all too often you will be asked to dumb down your learning model till it fits the capabilities of the LMS, no matter how much you lose in learning effectiveness. Just say no.

The best bet for trainers is to accept that their LMS is only one tool, and a limited one at that. Use your LMS, by all means, for tasks for which it is appropriate. Exploit learning objects, in so far as they are relevant. But where your strategy and learning objectives call for an approach that takes you outside the scope of your LMS, do not pull back. Step boldly into that “unmanageable” territory. Be willing to use multiple learning processes and multiple management tools to achieve your learning objectives, even if it means compromising at first on administrative efficiency.

Letting your LMS be the primary determinant of the limits and scope of your learning endeavors is like refusing to eat anything that cannot be nuked in a microwave oven.

Bon appetit!

TrainingZONE Parkin Space column of 22/10/04

Why be a trainer?

Why any of us get into this profession has always intrigued me. It’s certainly not for the money, or the glory. Trainers are appallingly underpaid for the contribution they make, the hours they put in, and the diligence with which they work. And it is not the most obvious route to take if you want to build an empire or change the world. When was the last time you saw a trainer on the cover of Fortune magazine? Yet a career in training has an enduring appeal to some of the best and brightest, an appeal which, bizarrely, seems to have increased with the emergence of e-learning.

I have recruited dozens of people into training roles, and trained and mentored them as their careers evolved. For the most part, they were perfectly innocent people who would have had dramatically different careers had I not pulled them out of a line job into a life of learning. For the most part, years later, they don’t hold it against me. Over the years, I have encountered more training managers, training officers, trainers, VPs of learning and development, and other more exotically titled training people than I care to count. Wherever they are in the world, whatever culture they inhabit, and whatever industry or organisation they call home, they have much in common.

They all started out wanting to make a difference at a very human level. They cared about individual people and their ability to perform in their chosen roles. And they cared about the performance of their organisation, not as some capitalistic engine, but as a family. For all their initial common ground, though, they end up in very different places.

Many trainers walk a long, hard, bitter path that begins in idealism, winds down through pragmatism, and terminates in cynicism. I am not a trainer by choice or by design. I fell into the role out of a combination of an annoyingly enquiring mind, intolerance for underperformance in my colleagues, and natural teaching aptitude. While there were idealistic underpinnings to most of my earlier activities, they were never my driving force. My buzz came from tuning the performance of an organisation, not from seeing light-bulbs go off over heads in a classroom. So I guess I started out cynical, and am gradually making my way up that hill toward the idealism summit, passing an awful lot of traffic coming the other way.

True, many trainers stay optimistic throughout their careers, but just as many become negative, if not about their role then certainly about the organizations they serve. Some trainers have retreated from reality, existing inside a kind of professorial fog and being sustained by the inherent quality of their work rather than its contribution to organisational goals. In similar vein are those for whom busyness is the business, a frantic life packed with impossible deadlines and superhuman schedules preventing them from having the time to see how futile their lives have become. They gave up trying to “make a difference” to their organizations, but at least they can still make a difference to individual learners.

Others continue to strive to get “management” to subscribe to an organizational vision in which learning is central and leading, not peripheral and reactive. They never stop trying to get strategy defined ahead of operational planning, and resist having training used as a poor substitute for good management. These quiet revolutionaries patiently work at transforming organizations through helping people to transcend themselves. They demonstrate daily the value of learning, and inspire innovative thinking beyond the departmental walls. And they love their work.

In my experience some of the most effective trainers (in terms of impact on learners and impact on organisations) are those with “real-world” experience outside of their training expertise. Seasoned practitioners, subject matter experts, or those who have recently completed their own training, are often very astute, learner-aware, and acutely attuned to the context of their teaching.

Are there inherent personal characteristics that determine whether a trainer will thrive or merely survive? What do you look for when recruiting? I usually look for people who are passionate about their field, have high energy levels, are more interested in learning than in teaching, ask a lot of questions and listen to the answers, and have unusually thick skin. A formal background in learning theory or in instructional design has always been secondary – you can teach people those principles, but if they don’t have “the right stuff” to begin with they will soon be on the slippery slope to cynicism.

TrainingZONE Parkin Space column of 12/3/04

Podcasting for non-geek trainers

Podcasting, despite its geeky name, is simple and practical, and has a wide range of potential uses in education and training. Abbreviated from “broadcasting to an iPod”, podcasting is, at its most basic, the distribution of audio content via the internet to mobile audio players. The name is a red herring, because you don’t have to be a Mac user – you can podcast any audio format and play it back on any compatible player, even if it is not mobile. Rarely does my audio go mobile – I prefer to simply listen at my desk. Podcasting lets you listen to content of your choice at a time and place that is convenient. In that regard, it is not much different from the old idea of listening to books-on-tape on your Walkman.

But that is where the resemblance ends. Podcasting uses the same technology that syndicates the content of blogs and news sites, so subscribing to a site and having its content updates automatically fed to your computer is a matter of a few mouse clicks. The technology used to push the text content of a blog to your computer is RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication). In podcasting, audio files are simply pushed out as attachments to RSS 2.0 feeds, just as documents are sent as attachments to e-mails.

First, you install an RSS feedreader (such as RSSreader or Amphetadesk, both free) on your computer, and nominate the sites whose content you want fed to you. There are tens of thousands of sites that publish their text content in RSS form. A feedreader is a simple tool that automatically finds and downloads content updates from the sites you have chosen to monitor. It will pull down the latest text entries, and can download enclosures embedded in those entries in the form of audio files. This saves you from having to go to each site, dig around to see what is new, and manually download each individual file. (To add my blog to your feed reader, simply drag the orange "XML" chiclet in the column to the right into your feedreader). I scan several dozen favorite sites a couple of times a day in a matter of minutes, a task that would take me hours without a feedreader.

You can be fed audio files by any up-to-date RSS 2.0 feedreader, but it won’t do the work of loading them into your iPod or Rio player. That’s where podcasting aggregators such as iPodder (also free) come in. iPodder will pull down audio files as they are posted to any sites that you have nominated. Further, it will automatically load the files to your mobile audio player, if you have one connected to your computer. Set your system to do a once-a-day scan at midnight, and you simply have to pick up your already-loaded audio player on the way out to your morning jog.

Podcasting allows anyone to record and broadcast anything, to an audience around the world. It’s like DIY global radio with TiVo built in, for a targetable audience. As a trainer, you can distribute content that is current and relevant. Some obvious applications are product or policy updates for your global salesforce, reinforcement for today’s classroom session, or daily micro-reminders from your online computer security course. Less obvious is the potential for capturing and sharing discussions among SMEs on hot issues, or sharing one learning group’s discussion with other groups.

All you need is a website or a blog, and recording software that converts your audio to MP3 format. Audacity (from Sourceforge.net) is good audio software, and it’s completely free. Install it, plug in a microphone, and record. When you are happy with the audio, export it as an MP3 at the push of a button, then upload it to your site as an enclosure to a blog posting. If your blog service does not support enclosures (Blogger, for example), you can still podcast by registering your blog with Feedburner.com’s SmartCast, a service that does all the conversions for you, for free. It is really that simple, though it may take a little practice to get file sizes down to reasonable sizes and audio quality just right.

Of course the downside of the ease of podcasting is that everyone who likes the sound of their own voice will be adding to the already crowded blogosphere. But the gems will stand out, and corporate podcasting should be subject to more stringent quality control.

Creative use of podcasting will accelerate the uptake of the training, marketing, and technical blogging that is becoming more common within corporations. Audio is often easier to create, easier to digest, and more appropriate than text. With a little vision and a willingness to experiment, I suspect that podcasting will rapidly find a valuable place in the already crowded chest of tools available to marketers and trainers.

TrainingZONE Parkin Space column of 19/11/04

Phishing: where training, marketing, and security meet

The phishing phenomenon is at epidemic levels, particularly among financial institutions. I like to think that I am acutely aware of dangers such as these (after all, I authored two e-learning courses on security and privacy), but even so I get agitated when I see an e-mail from my bank.

I get half a dozen such e-mails a day urging me to click a link and update my account details. The problem is that though I know they are scam e-mails, but I have to open them just in case they are not. One look at the e-mail's source code tells me immediately I am dealing with yet another attempt to rip me off, so I naturally do not click the link provided. But by then it is too late: the scammer's server has registered that my e-mail client has requested the image for the html e-mail, and my address is confirmed as a "hot" target for future projects related to that particular bank.

According to this CNET article 7 out of 10 people who go online have received phishing e-mails, and 15 percent of those have successfully been duped into providing personal information.

That is a lot of people in anyone's customer base. The absolute cost of reparations to victimized customers is one thing. The impact on a brand that is repeatedly abused by phishers is another. Credibility is eroded, and consumer confidence in dealing with the company behind the brand dissipates. Technology may help sometime down the line. In the meantime, the best a company can do is to educate its customers.

Who is best placed to provide that education? Marketing, Training, IT, Customer Relations? Surely this is one issue to which all parties should commit their best minds. Marketing people are good at building awareness and stimulating customers to act, but they are not the best at providing a learning experience. Trainers can provide a great learning experience, but need to work with the subject matter expertise of IT people. And customer relations people can do a reasonable job of reactively hand-holding nervous customers, but need marketing to handle the pro-active side of the process.

I have talked with customer relations people at my bank. I have talked with people in the fraud department. I have received mailings from (I assume) the marketing or legal people, on the subject of phishing. None of them do anywhere near a decent job of informing me of what it is I have to look out for, what consequences I have to fear, or what course of action is open to me if I do fall victim.

Get the trainers involved. Educating your customers is something that trainers are doing more and more of in other areas. Shouldn't they get posted to the front lines on this one?

Intellectual property and the internet

A trainer’s life is spent neck-deep in intellectual property. Everything we read, every process we teach, every concept we quote, every idea we apply, every training experience we design, every paper we write oozes with intellectual property. The laws which control what we can do with it have always been simple in concept but complex in the details.

Unless you create the work for your employer on company time, or you are a work-for-hire contractor, you automatically acquire copyright over anything that you write, draw or photograph. You don’t need to register your work (or even assert copyright overtly) to have the legal right to decide how others can use it. In fact the law acts as a lockbox by default: unless you specifically grant someone a defined right to use your material, they may not copy it or make derivatives of it, for any purpose. Beyond that, it gets murky and lawyers have to get involved.

So how do you grant limited rights to your work without abdicating all your rights and without having to engage a lawyer to sign an agreement with each and every person who would like to exploit it? Or, if you want to use someone else’s material, how do you do so legally without having to negotiate a contract?

It’s easy, if the work is published under a Creative Commons (CC) license, using a choice of easily-understood licenses available online for free. Founded by a Stanford law professor, and fueled by the blogging explosion, Creative Commons has been around in the US since 2001. CC licenses are popular among those who write online, create music, or publish their art or photography online, and it has taken hold in the offline world too.

Till recently, the carefully-crafted legalese behind the licenses invoked American law and American legal language. Now, as of November 1, there is a UK version of Creative Commons. Over the coming year, local legal versions will roll out in more than 60 countries.

Everything I write online (with the exception of things I do for other people) is published under a Creative Commons license that gives anyone the right to re-publish the work and/or derivatives of it on condition that I am acknowledged. No need to contact me, no need to ask permission, no need to talk to my lawyer. I could have chosen a CC license with more liberal or more restrictive conditions, simply by clicking the appropriate buttons when I selected it online at the Creative Commons site creativecommons.org.

Anyone finding my independent writing on the internet sees a CC icon and, by clicking on it, can know immediately what use-restrictions exist. Here’s the really clever part: because licensed work links back to Creative Commons, their search engine can find material whose legal status matches your needs. Looking for a game to use as an ice-breaker or a photo of an Olympic champion? Creative Commons might deliver what you need in a way that cuts through the legal red tape.

There is already a lot of Creative Commons licensed content available online, and that pool expands daily as individuals and organizations endorse the concept. One of the latest on board is the BBC, who are building the “Creative Archive” in which substantial amounts of BBC archive material will be made available for downloading and use. That’s going to be a treasure trove of audio, video, and photographic material for educators and trainers.

It’s the philosophy behind Creative Commons that appeals to me most. No, not the notion of making lawyers less necessary (though I am all for that), but the idea of making more and more readily re-usable learning material available online. Not in the restrictive SCORM sense, but in the sense of people’s thoughts, experiences, favourite tools and techniques, published in whatever informal way they see fit. The more generous we are with our own ideas, the more we will ultimately benefit from those of others. To me, this is the still-untapped power of the internet.

E-Learning Adventures Beyond the LMS

To corporate decision-makers, the treasure map of e-learning has an island in the centre, seductively illuminated by those clever marketing folks of the learning software industry, with a big X over the Learning Management System (LMS) right in the middle. Outside of that island is blank space populated only by “here be dragons” warnings.

Given the marketing muscle behind the major LMS developers and their complete dominance of the e-learning space, it’s hardly surprising that many people see an LMS as “the solution” to their future learning needs. But an LMS, as available today, is not a universal solution for a corporation’s e-learning problems. In fact, an LMS is often the albatross around the neck of progress in technology-enhanced learning.

When your concept of learning is LMS-centric, you look for opportunities to implement “a solution” that conforms to that concept, and ignore or marginalize all else. An LMS is, of course, a relevant tool for certain applications. If you want to track learner activities, you need some kind of system. And if you want to make use of much of the available e-course content, you have no choice but to use an LMS – not because the learning requires it, but because the established architecture of the “learning supply chain” requires it.

If the only format in which music is available is on CDs, you have to have a CD player. And because everybody gets a CD player, more music is made available in that format. The industry crystallizes around its dominant technology. But the internet can challenge that. Today, I no longer collect CDs, I collect music. Music does not have to be in store-bought CD format. You can go to live performances or communicate directly with the musicians online; you can download only those tracks that interest you; you can compile and burn your own CDs, or put a thousand songs on an iPod; you can post clips on your blog to share your passion with friends.

IP issues aside, thanks to the internet, you can access and appreciate music in ways that for you, the listener, are so much better than the ways the music industry wants you to access it.

So it should be for learning.

The e-learning industry evolved in a more or less linear fashion from the classroom concept, with some influence from CBT. No imagination went into our application of web technologies, and there was little in the way of challenges to established learning paradigms. That’s perfectly normal in the adoption of new technologies – it takes a while before true innovation can take hold.

Initially, we failed to appreciate that the internet is a vehicle for connecting people with each other, and instead pursued a “learning supply chain” concept that had more in common with the 1970’s music industry than it did with 21st century e-business. We pursued systems that imposed bureaucratic control instead of learner empowerment. In a world hurtling toward distributed internetworking, e-learning was still based on a library-like central-repository concept. The first LMS from Asymetrix (now SumTotal via Click2Learn) was even called Librarian.

Our move from classroom learning to e-learning was less like a move from pony-express to e-mail, than it was from pony-express to bicycle courier.

Learning software vendors still doggedly pursue their vision of reusable learning objects that integrate via a central standards-conformant LMS. Meanwhile, trainers who really want to encourage experience-sharing and dynamic learner-created content are scrambling to understand blogging, RSS, and peer-to-peer networks.

Many LMS vendors don’t “get” learning. Can it really be that they don’t “get” the internet either? Are they so afraid of being non-intermediated that they will fight real progress every step of the way or are they about to help us evolve?

TrainingZONE Parkin Space column of 29/10/04

When Blending Doesn't Mix

I had thought the term “blended learning” would die rapidly, not because the concept is not important, but because the expression itself is a misnomer, and the learning experiences so labelled are often a disgrace to the training profession.

The theory is sound: by getting learners to grasp the basics pre-class, we get more time to have richer human interactions in the classroom. But the reality is often less inspiring. Any learning design that uses both online and classroom activities to achieve its objectives is referred to as blended. There is rarely an attempt to “blend” content, contexts, or learning processes. Many of the designs of blended courses that I have seen are, frankly, disjointed and chaotic - a jigsaw puzzle hastily put together in the dark.

Every training and development department that I talk to is pursuing “blending” as a core component of their learning strategy. They talk about saving costs, reducing learner time in the classroom, and cutting trainer workloads. Most have stopped trying to pretend that what they are doing is more effective; the efficiency argument is more credible.

In business we use technology to improve performance, yet so often in learning, we apply technology to give the illusion of progress while silently accepting that the performance result is a step backward. If we are going to use technology, shouldn’t we make the effort to have it actually enhance the learning experience, rather than merely support the cheapening of it?

Real blended learning offers an opportunity to move training away from its isolated course environment and to merge it with the learner’s real-world work, to allow continuous transfer and reinforcement. And, where feasible, blending should blur the lines between an instructor’s role and the role of the learner’s manager.

None of this is difficult to achieve technologically, but means thinking outside of the normal content-centric mindset of traditional instructional design. It also needs learners, instructors, and managers to embrace a less simplistic view of what their own involvement in learning can be. The result may actually demand more time, not less, from learners, instructors, or managers. But the reduction in time-to-competence and time-to-business-impact are likely to outweigh any increase in personal involvement required by the blend. And because the learning is so intimately merged with each learner’s workflow, the output – the impact on the business – can be easier to observe and measure. This is particularly true if managers have been “blended” into the process of developing learners’ abilities to meaningfully apply the learning in practice.

A blended solution can incorporate self-paced work, online instructor support, supervisor involvement, peer group involvement, classroom sessions building on job-specific pre-work assignments, ongoing application assignments moderated online by mentors and managers, community threads and chat tools, and dynamic libraries of relevant materials. While clearly overkill for basic training, such an approach is ideal for things like core management methodologies and soft skills such as sales and customer service.

If you get the right learning design, expectations, and management systems, you can achieve greater efficiency. And you can do it by increasing the outputs, not simply by cutting the inputs. Ultimately, that variation on blending has to be good for corporate competitiveness.


TrainingZONE Parkin Space column of 8/10/04