Ditch the Firehose – Follow Up

Hello,

Thank you to all who have been keeping in contact with me – it’s always terrific to keep in touch with you all and to continue to work together to help make GREAT elearning.  We need to keep at this to make things better.

In addition, several of you contacted me at the Articulate Live / eLearning Guild conference in March.  Once again, great to see you.

Several of you have asked me to post a couple images to help you “visually explain” what my course looked like to your co-workers (managers?).  As promised, I’ve attached below a couple of screen captures of two of the slides that many of you were requesting – the “Main Menu” and the Benefits menu.  Moving foward, I’ll be posting an abbreviated version of the final “recorded” version (minus the pr0prietary information).

    
Unfortunately, since the conference, I’ve been travelling a great deal and have also been out sick – so bear with me!

Hopefully, these two images can help you to “visually” explain to your teams.  Please let me know if there is any additional information that you’re looking for.

Bill

Ditch the New Employee Firehose

I recently presented at Elliott Masie’s Learning 2008 conference in Orlando.  The topic of my session was Self-directed Onboarding: Ditch the New Employee Firehose.  The goal of my presentation was to show how my organization moved from a one-day orientation “event” to an ongoing onboarding process.  The presentation went well.

Since the conference, I’ve received many requests from those who attended my session to provide additional information about how we created our online site (images, ppts, links, etc).  So, I thought I’d dedicate the next several posts to this topic.  I’ll begin with the entire “concept” of the online site/course.

The main problem with so many new employee orientations is the “firehose” effect – telling your employees everything they need during one event, then expecting them to remember everything.  My idea was to put all the information out on our intranet, in one easy-to-navigate location, then allow them to grasp the information as they need it.  No more firehoses!

But, I didn’t want it to be an e-learning “course”.  Like many of you, I’ve become increasingly frustrated and bored with how online courses are presented to me.  Generally, it’s very linear in structure:

1.  start here
2.  now go here
3.  read this
4.  now follow up with this
5.  take this ten question quiz
6.  finally “congratulations – you passed”

This doesn’t work for me. Personally, when I need to find information online, I’ll go to Google, then start reading through the information until I find what I’m looking for.  I don’t need the information presented in any particular order, but the information DOES need to be relevant to my needs.  Unfortunately, when searching for information on my company’s intranet, it’s very hard to find relevant information.  I was hoping that by creating one area of our intranet that contained all the information that a new employee would need (or find relevant), it wouldn’t matter in what order the information was presented.  As long as they know about the site, then the new employees can find it when they need it.

Keeping this in mind, I set out on designing our New Employee Orientation site.  Notice that I said “site” and not “course”.  This was intentional when working with my team as I wanted them to get out of the linear way of thinking and instead focus on presenting the information clearly with no “start” or “stop” points.  If we didn’t present the information in this manner, it would have remained a firehose, but utilizing a different delivery method.

So, when creating your own orientation course/site, try to avoid requiring your new employees to do anything. Simply put the information out there, then let them know it’s available.

Another large concern for me was how we were going to make the course friendly and welcoming and not just a series of impersonal PowerPoint slides.  I decided on utilizing a lot of pictures and videos.  In my next post, I’ll go over how we included pictures and videos and the struggles that we ran into.

Talk to ya soon!

Bill

Compliance Training – Click, Answer, Repeat!

The first compliance eLearning course that I ever took had 114 pages of content and one 25 question quiz. There were 114 pages of content for me to read, listen to, and memorize, followed by a 25 question quiz. If I passed the quiz, I’m done (yea!). If not, I had to start over (boo!).

After about 12 minutes (which felt like 12 hours), I started skipping through the screens until I got to the quiz. Once there, I wrote down the questions and my responses. I failed and was taken to the beginning.

…click… click… click… 114 clicks later, I did a little better, but still failed.

…click… click… click… hmmmm a little better – I’ll try again.

…click… click… click… PASS!  WooHoo!!

Wow… that’s some effective eLearning!

In school, were you expected to memorize everything for the entire semester, then receive a pass/fail based on one exam?  No.  Then why are the majority of eLearning courses designed in this manner? For me, the goal of a course shouldn’t be to see if you can pass a big quiz – rather it should be about understanding the concepts and having the ability to apply these concepts. With this way of thinking, I began changing the way I utilized quizzes in my courses. Instead of 114 pages of content followed by one all-important final exam, I started requiring my learners to show their understanding of each individual concept in the training as they got to that section.

As an example, I might have one concept that covers 2-3 slides. At the end of these 2-3 slides, I have a short quiz that tests their true “understanding” of this one concept. It might be a scenario, figuring out a desired process (what’s missing, what’s next, etc), or the ol’ standbys – true/false & multiple choice. If the student passes this small quiz, they’ve proven their understanding and can continue to the next concept. If they fail this small quiz, they’re either returned to the beginning of this topic or given additional information to help pass a similar, but different quiz.

This way, at the end of the course, the student has proven their understanding of all of the main concepts in the course and haven’t simply utilized the “click, answer, repeat” method of surviving a course.

At the company I work for, we use 80% as our pass/fail standard. If you fail 20% of the questions, congratulations – you pass! With compliance courses, this won’t work. If we get audited, we have to prove that our employees understand EVERYTHING in the training course, otherwise if a policy is broken, the employee can’t claim ignorance.

I didn’t understand that concept.  That must’ve been one of the sections that I failed.

Compliance courses truly need a 100% passing score. 114 pages + one final exam doesn’t seem fair – or effective – does it?

In addition, unless your students are required to attend a certain number of hours in a course, why force them to take the course in its entirety? Instead, give them an opportunity to prove their knowledge by passing a quiz first.  If they fail, then they need to go through the course.

Let’s face it.  No matter how well designed a compliance course is, it’s still a compliance course. Nobody is excited about taking it, so let’s get to the point (proving knowledge) quickly, then get out of the way.

Compliance Training, Part II (Working in Reverse)

One of the first compliance policy courses that I worked on was for my company’s Information Security department.  During the first meeting with my two SMEs, they showed up with several copies of their 116-page policy document (printed entirely in an 8-point font).  At the beginning of this first meeting, they stated,

“This is the content that we need to include in the course.  Let’s begin by thinking about what theme it’s going to have.  We envision a ‘large city’ with an animated narrator, a court jester – you know, to make it fun”.

Ummm… yeah… this should be fun.  116 pages of 8-point text, with a small, ½ inch margin.  That’s a LOT of content.  That’s a lot of DRY content.  A lot of dry content that my new SMEs said cannot be modified or it might lose its legal clarity.

“We also want to make sure that we don’t miss covering anything important, so it should all be included.”

At the time, I considered jumping out the window.  But, we were only on the first floor and that would have looked silly.  So instead, I sat down and started trying to figure out how I was going to weed through this much content.  More importantly, how was I going to get my two new customers to understand what’s involved in putting together an eLearning course?

Working in Reverse

When developing eLearning courses, I’ve learned to “work in reverse” – start from the back (the quiz), then work backwards (toward the front).  This way, I can utilize the quiz questions as a way of focusing on what’s really important – what do the students HAVE to know – then building my course around supporting those questions.

This helps my design in two ways:

1. First, it ensures that I never ask a quiz question that wasn’t covered in the course.
2. Second, it forces me to focus on the goals of the course – the objectives. 

• What’s important for my students to know?
• Why are we requiring them to complete this course? 
• What habit are we trying to change or implement?

This way, instead of working through pages and pages of policies, we can focus on the specific actions that we want our students to perform.  Then, build the course content around explaining this.

Working in “reverse” is also a good way to keep my customers on track.  In this particular case, my customers were information security experts, not training experts.  They were doing their best to provide me with the information that they thought I needed.  As security people, they started with policy.  As a training designer, I needed to start with objectives.

After several meetings, my SMEs were able to focus on six different main topics with 2-3 key concepts within each topic.  I now realized that, although this will be a large project, the content itself will be much more manageable than the heavy printout that we started with.  In addition, the customers are great to work with and are excited about training.  They truly see the value in what we’re providing and I began looking forward to working with them.

We divided the topics among the team and I had each person create several questions for each key concept.  Once again, this kept all involved focused on the goals of course and not so blinded by the policy document.  However, it became obvious that writing effective questions that were focused on the course objectives became a bit difficult.  I’ll touch on writing effective questions in another post.

Working in reverse has always worked for me – especially when trying to keep my SMEs focused on the goals/objectives of the course.  I’d like to hear your thoughts and opinions on other ways to focus SMEs on the proper content.

Compliance Training, Part 1

For a few years now, I’ve been charged with leading the design, implementation, and maintenance of mandatory/compliance training courses at work.  Over this time, I’ve learned plenty of things about how designing this type of training is different than for other types of training.  It’s also made me a much better eLearning designer.  So, over my next several posts, I’m going to describe what some of the obstacles are and what I’ve done to try and overcome them.

In this first post, I’ll talk about how designing for compliance training is different.

For most of the training that we all create and facilitate, we have an audience that is there because they want to be there.  Either they’re interested in the topic or they feel as if what they learn in the class can be applied to their current or future role.  Either way, they have some sort of positive reason for being there.

But… when it comes to compliance training, it’s a completely different audience with a completely different attitude.  In compliance training, the audience does NOT want to be there.  In fact, they’ve probably done everything in their power to avoid being there, but because of some nasty email or order, they’ve been told to complete the training “or else”.  Good times.

So, how do you overcome this while still satisfying the attorney SME that you’re working with?  Let’s go over some options that might go through your head.  See if you can guess which option will work best.

1.  Be cute.  Play games.  Entertain your audience.

WRONG.  That’s the last thing that you want to be doing.  For compliance training, your audience just wants to “get through it”.  Give the details, then get out of the way.  If you send out Dr Seuss’ “Oh the Places You’ll Go” book or try to get your audience to dive into some overly complex game, your course will be perceived as a colossal waste of time.  It’s better to play it straight.

2.  Recite the policy verbatim, then have a quiz at the end to test their knowledge.

WRONG.   Sure, that’ll please the attorneys, but isn’t the point of a course to teach something?  Listing policy isn’t going to help anyone. Chances are that people will only pass your quiz because they’ve memorized the questions.  Either that or someone within your organization was thoughtful enough to email out the answers to everyone they know.  Congratulations!  Your course has gone viral!

Option #3. (hint: this is the best option):  Put a little effort into it and apply some basic instructional design to the information.  Weed through the facts, find the key concepts, and then build your course around the idea of having your audience learn and apply these concepts.

In the next post, I’ll go over the types of things you can do to make option number three work.  Or… you can always get a bulk rate from Amazon by ordering this or this.  Good Luck!

Leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts on this.

Better than Bullets

Many years ago, I put together a series of courses for a company where I worked that I called “Better than Bullets”.  The goal of the course was for our sales team to differentiate themselves from the competition by putting together presentations that were creative, story-driven, and engaging.  I didn’t want them to focus on data and bullets, but rather on the meaning behind the data and bullets.  In between sessions, they were challenged to put together presentations that were “better than bullets”.

The thought was that, even if we failed at getting the sale, the potential customer would remember us.  We wouldn’t simply blend in with the countless other bullet-driven presentations.  Ours would make an impact.

So years later, while surfing the web, I came across Cliff Atkinson’s “Beyond Bullet Points” blog and discovered that he had a successful book by the same name and was a highly talented and influential designer.  Well… at first, I was a little ticked off.  The title alone made me feel as if I somehow missed my opportunity for fame and fortune.  But, after reading through his material, my eyes were opened to the fact that I’m not alone in trying to better our presentations.  There’s a large number of designers who are all working hard to change what we consider to be effective presentations.  Below are links to some recent books that I’ve read that I STRONGLY recommend to any trainers looking to better engage their audience.  

         

As training designers, we need to start paying more attention to “design” books and blogs, instead of focusing so much on “learning” books and blogs.  So much of what they state and show in their books easily transfers over to eLearning courses – and to most delivery methods.  If you’ve been in this industry for a while, you probably have a pretty good handle on instructional design.  Now’s the time to start understanding what makes training enjoyable and what makes it stick.

Who cares about design – it’s just training!

One of the more common statements that I hear at work is “why do you spend so much time working on design – it’s just an eLearning class”. This drives me up the wall.

For many “trainers”, creating an eLearning course is all about “getting it done”.  You know, take the boring PowerPoint slides that have been used in their ILT class, dropping a talk track over it, then publishing it using Articulate.  Voila!  eLearning!

Well, guess what.  Not only is that not “eLearning”, it’s also not training, it’s not communication, and it’s not effective.  But, it is one thing… a waste of your audience’s time.  These types of slides within any type of presentation (marketing, sales, training, etc) given through any type of delivery method (in person, webcast, eLearning) are always ineffective, but the ineffectiveness goes off the charts when plugged into a passive eLearning course.  The only thing worse than a slide like this, is two slides like this (or three, or fourteen, or 87).

Look at the example below.  I’ve taken a few minutes to re-design the previous slide to make it a bit more attractive.

I’ve taken the three steps in the process, named them, and highlighted only the fact that there are steps to the process.  In addition, each of the three items could be clickable to allow the student to learn more about the topic, to start a scenario around the item, or to be faced with a quiz question to test their understanding. Creating this slide took very little time, but the effectiveness of the final version is much stronger.

Note that I’ve also removed the annoying PowerPoint template design elements (the line under the slide title, and the large, overly obvious logo at the bottom).  How can I get away with this while still following our corporate branding guidelines?  Simple – this isn’t a PowerPoint slide, it’s an eLearning course!  I’m still following our standard spacing, colors, fonts, etc.  But, have removed the elements that apply only to “slides”.

As instructional designers/trainers, we have a responsibility to our audience.  They’re investing a great deal of time in our courses and we owe it to them to make the time as effective as we can.  If your course is a series of bullet points and paragraphs, don’t call it course.  Instead, enter the same information into a Word document and email it to them.  It will be just as effective and your students’ expectations will be accurate.  They go into our courses expecting to “learn” something, not to be told something.  Our courses need to stop being recorded presentations and start being engaging, interesting, and more involving learning experiences.  This involves strong instructional design, storytelling, and some basic graphic design.

Over the course of this blog, I’m going to focus on the types of things that we can all be doing to make our presentations and our courses more effective.  This is going to require re-thinking what we call training, tapping into our little-used right brain, and giving serious thought and consideration into what the goals of our courses are.  Is the goal of our courses to teach, to present, or just to “get it done”?

“Chapter One”

So, although I’m not completely thrilled with the name “trainingdesigner” (especially with the capital “T”), I thought I’d try another blog on for size.

This one will mostly focus on … wait for it … training design (or Trainingdesign).

Although mostly focused on design, I will undoubtedly sprinkle in some other non-related items that I am currently fond of.  All will be of my opinion, so don’t slam me for forming one of my own.

I hope you enjoy and find useful.