Can We Formalize Informal Learning?

An interesting discussion has been initiated by Steve Case on the eCube LinkedIn group about formalizing informal learning. What struck a chord with me was Bill Bruck’s response. He says:

This may seem a little off the subject, but it seems like a lot of the learning pundits are making a critical category error. (Not the first time. 10 years ago they confused content with learning and we wound up with SCORM and LMS's that totally lose the learning experience in the Quest for Content.)

A lot of folks are confusing informal learning with social learning, or with the use of social media by equating them.

Bottom line: A lot of (online) informal learning uses social media. Some doesn't. Using Google or an EPSS is learning informally but not socially.

A lot of (online) social learning is informal. Some isn't. Structured coaching programs, incorporating required participation in a webinar or discussion forum into a blended learning program - these are certainly social, but not informal.

When we talk about formalizing informal learning, I think a lot of time we're asking about whether we can incorporate SOCIAL (not necessarily informal) learning into our structured, formal learning programs, and whether this will improve them.

eCube LinkedIn group now has close to 1100 members. Join the group to view the complete discussion.

What is Good Quality elearning?

This post is written by Taruna Goel.

How many times do you wonder if the elearning course you are making is of good quality? All the time? Most of the time? Atleast sometime?

I am sure there are enough matrices and checkpoints with the Reviewing/Quality Assurance/Testing teams that also give you the quality figures - defects/hour is the norm. The general belief is Zero Defects = Good quality. More the number of defects, poorer is the quality.

But what is a defect? Is it those grammatical mistakes? Is it the text-graphic mismatch? Is it the two-pixel shift? Or is it something more? Are we focusing on what really matters?

Here's an interesting article around what is quality and a list of guidelines on how to evaluate it.

"We tend to judge quality only from the perspective of our own domain. Consider the views of all the stakeholders: the training manager; the designer/developer; the system administrator/IT manager that will host the application; and, of course, the end users. In some cases quality measures are of no concern to one stakeholder while of considerable importance to another. Learner-centered design would propose that you make all decisions exclusively for the learners' benefit. Yet, all stakeholders must be partners if success is to be achieved. Since development and delivery are a team effort, one must weigh all viewpoints on what constitutes quality. "

The article/site provides a list of factors (quality measures) that you can use to evaluate elearning. Since it’s a list of 22 (guidelines), you can assign weightage and create a scorecard of the most important quality measures that matter to you!

For each factor, you enter a score (scale of 1-5), multiply it with the weightage, and obtain an adjusted score. Add up the adjusted scores for all factors to obtain a total score. Use this total score to compare one elearning course to another or better still, develop a target score for your team and evaluate it against your goal!

This is a fresh perspective on quality - it still may have the much-dreaded 'rejections' - but this time, you reject - because YOU evaluate the quality of your course before the Reviewing/Quality Assurance/Testing/Customer teams do!

Response to Manish’s blog on Can eLearning Help Change Behavior?

This post is written by Taruna Goel.

This is in response to Manish’s blog on Can eLearning Help Change Behavior?

I realized I had much to share and a comment box would not do justice to it.

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All learning/training is meant to change behavior. That said there are various media available to deliver the required training.

While most content may be a good candidate for either elearning or facilitated instruction, I think a case in point is psychomotor skills. To learn how to ride a bike, you need to ride it! No amount of elearning can prepare you for the ditches, puddles, and the falls!

A few years ago, I would have said, yes, 'sensitive' issues such as harassment are best facilitated. But maybe not today. There are enough opportunities to build collaboration, question and answer, and discussion forums to support people in learning about such areas through elearning too.

There is a bit of research that I did and here is what I found:

1) http://www.learningcircuits.org/2002/jan2002/anderson.html - By Terri Anderson

A very good article about what makes a better candidate for elearning and some of the key questions to ask before we decide to use this medium.

In summary:

• …..there are still some instructional content areas that may not be suitable for e-learning.


• Attitudinal skills and psychomotor skills are content areas in which e-learning may support but not entirely replace traditional instructional programs. Attitudinal skills typically require expert modeling and reinforcement that increases the interactivity requirement and the cost of e-learning programs. Psychomotor skills, in particular, require hands-on practice and interactive demonstrations for learners to achieve mastery.


• E-learning programs are especially effective at teaching cognitive skills in well-structured domains where conveying information is a critical part of the instructional process. Examples include teaching employees how to use software programs, having employees discriminate between two set choices, or providing instructions for completing a benefits enrollment form. Each of those skills requires understanding and applying a procedure or information with clear right and wrong choices.


• Poorly structured problems require high-level cognitive skills, such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of unclear or conflicting data. Learners are required to recall, understand, and apply information to unique situations or problems for which there's no clearly defined right or wrong outcome. Examples of ill-structured problems include evaluating the merits of outsourcing work, developing a comprehensive marketing strategy that incorporates diverse data, or evaluating the merits of a strategic business acquisition. Although e-learning may support part of those learning needs, it works best when combined with additional collaborative strategies.


• Determining whether content is suitable for e-learning requires close inspection of the learning objectives. For example, cognitive skills appropriate for stand alone e-learning programs ask learners to state, understand, identify, and select between two clearly defined alternatives; read information and answer questions about a specific topic; or complete an assignment with clearly defined parameters. However, e-learning programs will need support from additional learning activities if employees are required to analyze, design, predict, evaluate, synthesize, construct, formulate, or develop a procedure or plan.


• Key questions to consider when evaluating e-learning programs for a specific content area include:
  
  
  
  • What are the learning objectives that the company is trying to achieve?
  
  
  • What are the skills the company is trying to teach?
  
  
  • Are the skills cognitive, attitudinal, or motor skills?
  
  
  • Is the problem well-defined?
  
  
  • What instructional methods are required to deliver the content?
  
  
  • What type of follow-up, practice, or support is required to achieve mastery?
  
  
  • What degree of learning interactivity or collaboration is required?
  
  
  • What resources are available or required to achieve the instructional goals?
  
  
  • What is the best or most cost-effective venue the company has to deliver this content to the learner?
  
  
  • What are the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating e-learning strategies?
  
  
  
  

2) http://faculty.mercer.edu/codone_s/elearningprimer.PDF - By Susan Codone

A well-organized article about the benefits and limitations of elearning. The key highlight is a table listing the criteria that should be used to identify whether a particular content is suitable for elearning. The table is based on criterion provided by Brandon Hall and the federal Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative. Another point highlights that instructional outcomes highlight the choice of instructional strategy (and therefore medium). David Merrill states that the following instructional strategies are suitable for multimedia development:

• instruction that provides information about a system or object


• instruction that provides information on the parts of a system or object


• instruction that provides conceptual or categorical information


• procedural knowledge


• process, principle, or information on how a system works

On another note, this article also has some dope on development timelines for elearning.

Guess, these are enough points to ponder for instructional designers like us!

The Value of Instructional Design

This post is written by Taruna Goel.

I was learning my usual way - through blogs - when I reached this video. Amazing!

Watch the video and then read what Tom has to say about it on his blog!

Design- Human Centered Design vs Activity Centered Design?

As a design professional, our entire success and failure rests on -DESIGN. What is design? What are the basic types of design? When I tried to explore, I got very interesting insight from Don Normans website*.The same is my understanding and inspiration behind this article. He has discussed designs at a good length. To start with, there are two categories of design:

• Human Centered Design (HCD)
• Activity Centered Design (ACD)

HCD -The most crucial principle of HCD is to “know your user.” It is utmost important for any design to be created with a detailed deep knowledge of the users. Such design helps to overcome the poor design. By emphasizing the needs and abilities of those who were to use, usability and understandability of products can be improved.

One basic philosophy of HCD is to listen to users, to take their requirements and understanding seriously. Yes, listening to customers is always wise, but acceding to their requests, wishes and desires may lead to overly complex designs. Several major software companies, proud of their human-centered philosophy, suffer from this problem. Their design gets more complex and less understandable with each revision.

And what happens when a product is designed to be used by varied people or anyone in the world?

ACD -Activity-Centered philosophy tends to guard against this aspect as the focus is upon the Activity, not the Human. As a result, there is a cohesive, well-articulated design model. If a user suggestion fails to fit within this design model, it should be discarded. Alas, all too many companies, proud of listening to their users, would put it in.

ACDs are developed with a deep understanding of the activities that were to be learned or in other words skills required to be learned and later performed successfully. They are created by design teams. Difference lies as these designers used their own understanding of the activities to be learned and performed to determine how the design would be operating.

Here, what is needed is a strong, authoritative designer who can examine the requirements, and suggestions; and evaluate them in terms of skill to be imparted as end objective. When necessary, it is essential to be able to ignore the requests. This is the goal to cohesion and understandability. Sometimes what is needed is a design dictator who says, “Ignore what users say: I know what’s best for them.” The case of Apple Computer is illustrative. Apple’s products have long been admired for ease of use. Nonetheless, Apple replaced its well known, well-respected human interface design team with a single, authoritative (dictatorial) leader. Did usability suffer? On the contrary: its new products are considered prototypes of great design*.

The “listen to your users” produces incoherent designs. The “ignore your users” can produce horror stories, unless the person in charge has a clear vision or Conceptual Model for the product. The person in charge must follow that vision and not be afraid to ignore findings. Yes, listen to customers, but don’t always do what they say*.

Human-Centered Design guarantees good outcome as well as it leads to improvements of bad ones. Good Human-Centered Design will generally leads to lesser failures. It also ensures that products work as per expectations of the users. Are we aiming at good design only? We (most of us)dream and aspire for great design.We aspire for customer/ user's delight. I don't think, it can be achieved with just a Good Design. We need Great Design. For sure Great design can only be created through breaking the rules,Thinking beyound what is generally accepted and practiced,by pushing forward with a clear concept and conviction of the end result. In such case,we shall be ready for both great successes and great failures. If we want great rather than good, this is what we must do.

Note*-Column written for Interactions. © CACM, 2005.The definitive version was published in Interactions, 12. 4, (July + August, 2005). Pp. 14-19. There are excerpts of the same article used here for purely non- commercial use.

Quest for Excellence

A gentleman was once visiting a temple under construction. In the temple premises, he saw a sculptor making an idol of God. Suddenly he saw, just a few meters away, another identical idol was lying

Surprised he asked the sculptor, do you need two statutes of the same idol. No said the sculptor. We need only one, but the first one got damaged at the last stage.

The gentleman examined the statue. No apparent damage was visible

Where is the damage? asked the gentleman.

There is a scratch on the nose of the idol.

Where are you going to keep the idol?

The sculptor replied that it will be installed on a pillar 20 feet high

When the idol will be 20 feet away from the eyes of the beholder, who is going to know that there is scratch on the nose? The gentleman asked

The sculptor looked at the gentleman, smiled and said, "The God knows it and I know it."

The desire to excel should be exclusive of the fact whether someone appreciates it or not Excellence is a drive from Inside not Outside.

Thinking...website design

I have very often heard this statement… “The Customer is Always Right”. This statement has been interpreted in different ways by different people. But I must say that this statement has always triggered me to provide the most suitable solution to the customer in the given circumstances.

I recall one such instance where we were working on designing a website for a leading humanitarian organization that is dedicated to fighting poverty and social injustice. The goal of designing this website was to offer newly-hired staff with a more streamlined and consistent on-boarding experience.

Through this blog, I want to share how the design-related challenges that we, as a team, faced and the way we came up with an appropriate solution. The final solution not only delighted the clients but also gave us repeat business.

One of the first challenges was to design and develop this website in-house without vendor support within a limited budget. Second challenge was that this organization had been supporting more than 1,000 poverty-fighting projects in 71 countries to reach more than 65 million people. Most staff members (who were also the SMEs) were very keen to share their valuable experiences with the new employees through this website. So NIIT was instructed to accommodate all these experiences, thoughts and ideas into this website.

The team got together to understand and explore how best to accommodate all essential information into the website. The points listed below provide a quick recap of the design elements we integrated into the Web site. I am sure all of us are quite familiar with most of these elements. However, they will help you evaluate how these design elements were accommodated into the end product (once you actually look at the end product shared as a link at the end).

1. Easy Navigation: This website was designed in such a way that the main links were placed at the top of the page, drop down menus were created along with “bread crumbs” to ensure smooth navigation. This way the end user would not have to click on one page in order to find a link to navigator to another page. The layout used was very similar to the New York University website.

2. Quick Downloads: We know the end users do not want to wait to get to the right information. Use of high quality graphics and rich interactive media makes the site look attractive but slows the load time of web pages. So the graphics were constructed only for those instances where they added maximum value to the website's information. This way we achieved faster loading time for the web pages.

3. Attractive Color Scheme: This is an important and underrated area in web design. Use of bright backgrounds like red, yellow and green draws much attention from the users but also distracts them from what is important on the website. The users want to feel comfortable and relaxed while going through this website. Thus, the team used warm, attractive, earth colors that complimented well with each other.

4. Page Layout: Layout of web pages was consistent ensuring navigation took place from the same location. All important information was prioritized and located in different headings and sub headings in a manner that was easy to find. These pages had a common theme throughout the site.

5. Avoid Sideways Scrolling: We know that websites with horizontal scrolling is not user friendly. It is very likely that the users will not scroll and may miss valuable information. So all vital information like the important contact IDs, site addresses, information of their Country Offices, talks about the successful projects/achievements, etc were included as a separate link.
The biggest constraint was to accommodate 16 pages of content received from SMEs all over the world. We could neither disappoint the SMEs nor single out any one of them. They were all very enthusiastic to share their thoughts and ideas with the new joinees.

That is when the team’s creativity and “out of the box” thinking came to work. We introduced the Perspectives column in the Home page of all main links, included the photographs of the SMEs and wrote their ideas in form of two links- “ What I wish…” and "One tip to help you…” This was a major breakthrough. We not only delighted the SMEs by adding their photos (that gave a personal touch) but also included most of the contents provided by then. In fact NIIT team received a special appreciation in the Credit link of this website.

I have added the Perspectives column in the beginning of this post to help you visualize its layout and functionality. Please feel free to access the link below to visit the website:

http://www.careacademy.org/navigatingcare

Working/Learning Blog Carnival - April 2008

Dave Ferguson kicked off the first Working/Learning blog carnival (a collection of posts around one topic) on his blog. Blog carnivals are a kind of anthology-on-the-fly, a collection of posts from several blogs. For each issue of a carnival, participants post on their own blogs, and a host posts links to all the participating posts.The theme of the blog carnival is "Work at Learning/Learning at Work" primarily aimed at people who work in the training/learning area (that is, non-academics) e.g., how training/learning professionals go about their own learning, or how learning happens in the workplace. In the first carnival, there were contributions from Michele Martin, Cathy Moore, Harold Jarche, Janet Clarey, and Dave Ferguson.

The response to the second carnival edition has been, well overwhelming. A special thanks to all the contributors.

Here’s the second edition of the Blog Carnival:

1. Rupa Rajagoplan in her post talks about how different learners learn and provides her suggestions on what companies can do to encourage learning at work
2. Viplav Baxi explores the challenges that we face in moving our organizations to the new 2.0 world.
3. Dave Ferguson in his post takes one of John Medina's brain rules, "remember to repeat," and talks about how we move information into long-term memory, how we get it out again, and what impact those things can have on how we manage learning at work.
4. Harold Jarche shares his post on Skills 2.0 for learning professionals who may want to know why it’s important to understand the Web for training and development.
5. Geetha Krishnan talks about three informal ways in which he learns at the workplace.
6. How often do you ask yourself the basic question “What Have I Learned at Work?” And if and when you do ask it, how satisfied are you with the answers? In this post, Jeff Cobb considers how we might get more out of workplace learning and issues a simple challenge.
7. Sonali Malik shares her learning sources in her post on the eCube team blog.
8. Ken Carroll in his post Constructionism works looks at learning in social networks and online communities and feel Sociology can provide insights in the way the web is creating new social structures that pertain to learning and their dynamics.
9. Clive Shepherd in his post shares we may learn to do something, whether that's proactively, because we want to develop our knowledge and skills to meet future commitments, or reactively, because we need new knowledge and skills to carry out a current task. But a great deal of learning, probably the majority, is incidental.
10. Cathy Moore resurrects an old post where she points out that elearning is more efficient and powerful if we focus on what learners need to do, not what they need to know.
11. Michele Martin provides an interesting primer on Pecha Kucha presentation style for learning.
12. Dr. Karl Kapp talks in his post about the mistake that most people make in thinking that learning should be easy, simple and straightforward when to the contrary it hard and a continuous process.
13. Janet Clarey talks about how social learning technologies are changing the way we learn at work.
14. And my own contribution talks about leadership impact on workplace learning.
15. A last minute contribution by Cammy Bean just came in. It is something I really can related to and I couldn't resist updating this blog even after it's been published. She talks about how she builds learning into work -- when you just don't feel like you have the time?

The first carnival was organized via email. For the second carnival, in addition to email, I experimented with using Facebook for organizing the event hosted on the eCube Facebook group. The group is open and is my experiment to create a collaborative learning environment, a forum to Engage people by Encouraging them to Explore new Environments and Experiment with the them.

Work at Learning/Learning at Work

We have all heard this quote “The growth of an organization is the derivative of growth of each individual”. So, how do you think individuals grow in an organization? Individuals grow when they learn on the job; get trained on new aspects of their work. In this process, they gain experience that helps them grow.

In that sense, there is some amount of learning that comes naturally to everyone in working in an organization. This learning comes out of working day-in and day-out on various projects, dealing with difficult work situations, working under pressure, communicating with peers and other teams and so on. However, do you think individuals require more than this to learn?

The answer is obviously, yes! Individuals get into an organization and start working; however, over a period of time, it is essential that they hone their skills further, know newer and better ways of how they work, learn newer things, improve their productivity, and so on.

The question is how do individuals go about this kind of learning?

Part answer to this question is “Training” – Training is something that is a part of most organizations employee development path. There is a ‘Training Calendar’ that the organization rolls out based on its employee’s needs and requirement for the training. The employees who attend such trainings learn something new in the process. Whether or not the training brings in the desired impact remains a question most of the time. Organizations struggle to find the ROI for a lot of trainings that they conduct. In addition, there is a limit to which an organization will invest in training. In this ever changing world, there are still things newer things to know, to learn, and understand better.

So, how does one learn?

There are a few questions that come to my mind when I think of learning: Do organizations promote learning? Are the individuals themselves inclined to learn apart from the training they get? Do they get sufficient time from their work schedules to learn new things?

I would try and answer what I know from my experience in the industry so far.

I don’t think that any organization discourages the environment for learning. Yes, there may not be a formal way that the organization has introduced to encourage learning, but most of us find out ways to learn because as individuals we all want to learn and grow – that’s our innate desire. If we talk about time and work pressure, I would say, however busy we may remain, we still get a percent of time we really can invest on our own learning rather than idling away our time.

There is so much around the environment we stay in, that there is a bleak chance that we miss out on the learning sources that inherently exist around us. Some of these that I use or think can be used include:

1. The Internet: Yes, the Internet could serve as a wonderful source of information and learning if used correctly.
2. Peer-to-Peer Connection: Talking to peers really does help – sharing project experiences, finding out solutions to the common problems most people face, discussing about new things members of a team may have come across - there could be much more than this.
3. Organization’s Knowledgebase: I think this is one of the least used and underrated source of learning. But, if you look at an organization’s knowledgebase (in our case – Tecknowpark) you would find there is ample of things to learn from – be it white papers, work related documents, presentations – there is umpteen material there that an individual can learn from.
4. Repository of Existing Courses/Products: This is yet another way to learn from what people in other projects have done - what are the different ways in which courses have been designed, what new instructional strategies have been used, etc. It is always a delight to see and learn from – the courses that the other project teams in your own organization have created.
5. Online Trainings: So, if want to learn some specific skill such as communicating better within teams or learning a new skill, for which an online course exist (in our case – eseed), why don’t you simply register yourself online and get started? Another good source of learning!
6. Blogs: This is the latest entry to my list. Since the time I have started accessing our blog site, ecube, I think I have learnt something new every time I visited it – be it from the blog posts of other people, comments that the people left, suggested reading, or the blog roles of other colleagues – all of them made an interesting read and something I could learn from.

I think individuals should exploit such learning sources (and/or others) more and more in order learn and grow!

What would you like to do better as a Learning Professional?

I think the Learning Circuit’s Big Question for this month will make each of us introspect quite a bit! At least, I read the question 2-3 times and tried to really ponder on what are the things I personally want to do better as a learning professional.

There are various entities you come across while in a working environment that you think “constrain” or “limit” you to perform your best or perform the way you want to. Some of these entities include the work deadlines, inability to convince the customer on certain aspects of the project, lack of time to learn or induct a new team in the middle of the project, cost, other technology related constraints, and so on. At such times, you wish if you could have things your way, the overall quality of the product you are creating would be much better than what you are currently doing. So, in a nutshell, you have the potential to do it better but you are limited by one or the other so called constraints.

I personally would want to stretch my potential as far as possible and try to do better - especially in the following areas:

• Understanding my end user better – either by directly talking to them (where possible) or understanding their needs through the customer I am interacting with, so I can add better value in the product I am creating


• Spend time in “designing” the product well (and not just have a “design” phase in the DLC) and having a design walkthrough


• Finding out newer ways (by research or interactions) to make the content more engaging and interactive for the learner


• And most important, to be able to find out (through a feedback survey or similar means) how much impact did the training have on the end user so I can improvise in subsequent work