learnforever blog

The Immortal Memory

2012-01-25T07:04:00.004Z

Robert Burns (1759-1796) was one of the most learned low-born Scots of his day, and naturally a champion of the benefits of learning. One of his better known quotes,

Gi’e me a spark o’ Nature’s fire,
That’s a’ the learning I desire

bears testament more to his love of nature than any downgrading of learning.

I could further claim Burns as a champion of evaluation. He was, after all, an exciseman, and working for customs and excise would have sharpened his sense of measurement and learning as, again, better known quotes bear testament:

What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted

and

The best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley.

All of which demonstrates that Scotland’s best-loved son may be cited in almost any cause – and frequently is.

This is the 253rd anniversary of his birth, and tonight I attend the Anniversary Dinner of the Hamilton Burns Club, one of the oldest Burns clubs in the world, dating back to the 19th century and tracing annual dinners back continuously to 1877 (apart from during the two world wars). My good friend David Ogg, as this year’s club president, delivers the Immortal Memory tonight, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, and I wish him well.

More on Burns at http://www.robertburns.org/ and the audio archive at http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/.

Digital evaluation

2012-01-23T12:31:00.003Z

I once attempted a joke about e-learning, following Don Morrison’s suggestion that a measure of an industry, profession or sector’s maturity is the emergence of jokes about it.

In that spirit, the prospects for learning evaluation are discouraging. This is a field that dates back at least 60 years, and the only humorous observation I’ve heard is more a witticism than a joke, that the return on investment (ROI) of ROI isn’t worth calculating.

...yes, I didn’t think it was very funny either.

The thing is, it’s not even true. The advent of digital technology has made learning evaluation more affordable, efficient and effective.

I observed in my book Delivering E-Learning that applications of digital technology to learning have concentred on learning delivery, and not much on the other phases of the classic learning cycle (needs analysis, planning and evaluation). While this remains so, there are increasing attempts to make better use of technology for evaluation. In a few weeks (1 March 2012), Airthrey will publish a paper on this topic, highlighting the use of technology for evaluation planning, data collection, storage and analysis, and reporting.

More to follow, and meantime, contributions to the debate welcome.

learnforever

2012-01-15T14:12:00.003Z

I’ve been making some changes to the learnforever sites.

www.learnforever.co.uk has a new article added, and now includes a books page, featuring my books and links to buy them on amazon.co.uk. I’m also considering adding advertising to that site, but before I do, I’d appreciate any feedback on the changes to this blog.

I’ve added the Amazon Associate links to my books to this blog, but more significantly, I’ve also added Google Adsense advertising, which should be showing to the right of this blog post and directly underneath it. I guess purists may feel it detracts from the aesthetic of the site, but that apart, I’d be interested in any comments on whether it adversely affects your reading of the blog.

My writing work is essentially a sideline to my professional activities, so monetising these sites, as long as that’s relatively unobtrusive, is a way of ensuring I can maintain them. I’d welcome any further suggestions on other ways to monetise.

What do you think?

Strategy

2012-01-13T11:19:00.004Z

My direct experience of developing and implementing business strategy has been rather limited. In the past ten years I have set up and run four companies, three of which are still in business (the eLearning Alliance, eXcellence in eLearning and Airthrey), but these were/are very small – at their peak, none reached a turnover of £½ million or as many as ten employees.

Perhaps more significant was my involvement at senior management level in the Scottish Foundation, where I was Director of Training, and the Open College (UK) Ltd, where I was part of the senior management team. In both these roles I influenced and carried out business strategy, but these experiences are now at least one to two decades old.

My interest in strategy has been sparked mainly by the connections between learning strategy and business strategy. My specialist subjects in the final year of my MBA were Marketing Strategy and HR Strategy. And the original title of my second book, eventually published as Delivering E-Learning (see sidebar), was E-learning Strategy.

This led me to the work of John Kay, whom I cannot recommend highly enough, and most recently to the fascinating Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. I love the way Richard Rumelt debunks the linguistic conceit that equates “strategy” with “important” (a similar misuse is “executive”). Following Rumelt’s advice, my latest strategy priority is to pinpoint obstacles to business growth, and work out how to overcome them. Further advice welcome!

Dinosaurs

2012-01-05T13:11:00.003Z

I don't know how accurate today's Daily Telegraph story is, re the HR manager sacked because he ticked the box on LinkedIn saying he was interested in career opportunities (the article reports a 2007 stat that 50% of LinkedIn users tick that box - I'd be surprised if it's not much higher). And, of course, I won't comment on the specifics of a case that is still to be heard...

But if there are any employers who think they can prevent their staff using online professional networking tools like LinkedIn, prevent them publishing their CV online*, stop them publishing information about their experience, skills and accomplishments while in that employment (past or present), legally bind them not to tick the LinkedIn "interested in career opportunities" box, or otherwise constrain them from promoting their employability on the Internet (or elsewhere), then they really do have tiny brains and are doomed to extinction.

* I was bemused, then gratified, to receive last month an email advising me that Visual CV was being wound up, then another email, saying that the service will continue after all. I must update mine.

Bad Science - and Learning

2011-12-31T14:12:00.003Z

One of the best books I read in 2011 was Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science, which should be read by everyone interested in evaluating learning and development (there’s also a useful website at www.badscience.net). I especially recommend the chapters on ‘Bad Stats’ - among other things, learn the differences between relative risk increase, absolute risk increase and natural frequency - and the hilariously-titled ‘Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things’.

The latter chapter spells out five reasons why we are poor at measuring findings:

1. We see patterns where there is only random noise.
2. We see causal relationships where there are none (just correlations).
3. We overvalue confirmatory information for any given hypothesis.
4. We seek out confirmatory information for any given hypothesis.
5. Our assessment of the quality of new evidence is biased by our previous beliefs (and the beliefs of others).

There’s more too: some of the things that make human beings good thinkers are the same reasons why we don’t naturally measure evidence well, and conversely, why computers are good at dealing with quantitative evidence but rubbish at intuitive thinking. A crucial lesson we need to learn is when to use our judgement and intuition, when instead to obtain and analyse detailed information, and how to distinguish these situations.

Another book I read in 2011 was Paul Kearns’ Evaluating the ROI From Learning, in which I was dismayed to discover the author completely dismissing management competences, corporate universities and e-learning – well, not quite “completely”, but that’s how he leads, and how he designs his three box model; (slight) qualifications come later. My dismay was because these have been three of my main interests, and career preoccupations, of the last two decades. But it wasn’t just self interest – I was also dismayed because I fundamentally believe learning is A Good Thing, and worthwhile for its own sake. We should all do more of it. By all means, we should evaluate it, and learn to focus more on the more valuable stuff – to my mind, at least, leadership and management development, e-learning and blended learning, corporate universities and academies, are some of the best vehicles to accomplish that.

I’d like to wish all my followers and readers a healthy, happy and prosperous New Year.

Being an Amazon Associate

2011-12-15T11:02:00.003Z

I've just signed up to be an Amazon Associate - twice!

I have been meaning for some time to include Amazon links on this blog, and on my writing website, mainly to encourage sales of my books, and as a spin-off draw a small income as a percentage of those sales. Having just signed up the learnforever sites to do this (but I haven’t found time to create the links yet), I’ve realised that I’ve been looking at this all wrong – I’ve been thinking in terms of increasing sales of my books, rather than monetising my websites.

The second way I signed up was for my new business, Airthrey. My partner and I have spent the last few months conducted an extensive literature review of the field of learning/training evaluation, and our plan, now realised, has been to review the best-known and most useful books, as a resource for our clients. The Amazon Associate program allows us to take a small percentage of sales of all books (not just our own) that arise from us directing our clients/readers to Amazon, but the best part is, once they’ve clicked through from our site, we get a cut of everything they buy on Amazon for the next 24 hours!

So we’ve accidentally stumbled upon a new income stream – a good example of obliquity – and I’d like to encourage all my readers to click on Airthrey before doing their Amazon shopping this Xmas .

In search of excellence

2011-11-27T09:31:00.004Z

The latest issue of the CMI magazine, Professional Manager, carries this amazing quote: "no single thing in the last 15 years professionally has been more important to my life than blogging". That's from Tom Peters, internationally-renowned management guru, best-selling author, and (I imagine) multi-millionaire.

Peters, of course, was co-author of 1982's In Search of Excellence, arguably one of the most discredited success manuals, as many of the "excellent" companies cited in the book nose-dived shortly afterwards. But history has been kinder to Peters, as evidence shows his excellent companies outperforming the Dow Jones index.

Nevertheless, it's sobering to see how highly he rates blogging, and without having read his blog(s), I'm guessing he's had more success than I've had. I've been blogging here for nearly five years, and can't claim to have established much of a following. This was brought home to me when a colleague and I recently started a Twitter account, @AirthreyLtd, and within a couple of weeks have already attracted twice as many followers as this blog.

So what am I doing wrong? I've consulted all the usual online sources, such as the 101 tips here, and I either do these already, or have considered and rejected them for rational reasons. Is my niche really of so little interest? I'd welcome feedback (asking for feedback is one of top tips, naturally!) - what can I do to make this blog more attractive to followers?

...and congratulations to my erstwhile colleague, Colin Millar, who has won CMI's inaugural Ambassador blogging competition.

Kirkpatrick's evaluation model - animated!

2011-11-23T13:57:00.007Z

This short video clip offers a simple exposition of Kirkpatrick's four level learning evaluation model.

Now on Twitter!

2011-11-07T10:48:00.003Z

I've blogged before about being one of the last refuseniks re Twitter, so it may surprise some that I've belatedly joined the Twitterati. Sort of. In collaboration rather than as myself. My fellow director of Airthrey Ltd (learning evaluation solutions) and I have set up a corporate Twitter account. Find us under Airthrey directors, @AirthreyLtd, Stirling.

So why the change of heart? We're trying it out for a number of reasons.

1. We want to maximise our firm's exposure through as many channels as possible. This gives prospective clients and partners yet another way to find us, and helps boost our search engine ratings.

2. We want access to wider debates on learning evaluation, and Twitter helps us find other information signposted there, such as the Training Journal article we retweeted on 4 November.

3. We hope this may be another means of building a comunity of like-minded people with whom to exchange ideas and experiences.

But I'm still very much a Twitter tyro, and would appreciate any suggestions on how to make the most of this medium.

# Should we aim to follow everyone who follows us? In other words, does following work best as a reciprocal activity?
# How do we grow the network? Is it just a question of tweeting as much potentially interesting stuff as possible? This sounds a bit to me like "if we build it, they will come", the classic mistake of the dot com boom and bust era, but is Twitter different?
# I've been advised that retweeting as much as possible is a good idea. Is this right? How does it help contribute to our goals listed above?

Any other ideas? All help and advice appreciated.

It's nice to be nice

2011-10-13T09:05:00.002+01:00

A while ago I was in the office of a client, a learning and development manager, and he had a sign prominently displayed: “do the necessary – ignore the nice”. It was his rule of thumb for prioritising learning interventions.

I felt uncomfortable with that formula, but it’s taken me some time to work out why. I tried reversing the formula, and clearly it makes no sense to ignore the necessary, but I’m equally convinced you can’t just ignore the “nice”.

I suppose it depends why you feel it’s nice. If it’s nice because it’s the kind of work you want to do for personal/career reasons, but it doesn’t fit your organisation’s agenda, then that’s clearly not a corporate priority, and may justifiably be ignored. But it may be nice for all sorts of other reasons, not least because it’s important but never urgent, or because it yields qualitative benefits but doesn’t lend itself to quantitative measurement. In either of these scenarios, you ignore the nice at your peril.

I think we need better formulae for determining priorities. In many cases, a simple but effective guide could be the use of an urgency/importance grid (just a 2x2 matrix). And a well thought through Balanced Scorecard can help bring to the top of the agenda issues other than the most pressing operational priorities.

What do others think?

Making Learning Better

2011-10-07T09:42:00.011+01:00

A key theme of my career has been making learning better.

In the 1990s, I concentrated on open, flexible and distance learning – or what I would now call resource-based learning. This aimed to offer more choice to learners, respond better to differing learning styles, widen access and make training more learner-centred.

In the 2000s, I concentrated on e-learning and blended learning, which empowers learners with digital technology to accomplish all that resource-based learning offered, and more.

Now I’m concentrating on learning evaluation, and firmly believe that it is pointless to undertake any sort of learning without setting clear targets and measuring improvement against them. I’m pleased to find I’m not alone.

I opened the article “making training better”, in the online edition of Management Today, fully expecting evaluation to be omitted, but I was pleasantly surprised. One of its six highlights is “track and measure success”.

Just throwing money at the problem isn’t the answer either. Companies need to be practical and precise in their execution of training programmes. This includes an on-going assessment that tracks and measures effectiveness of the courses, and whether staff are incorporating what they learnt into their daily roles. If no one is absorbing and using the information, then both time and money are being wasted.

I couldn’t agree more.

Introducing Airthrey Ltd

2011-10-04T12:48:00.004+01:00

My new business is now up and running.

Airthrey Ltd, based at Stirling University Innovation Park, is an independent firm, specialising in learning and development evaluation.

My co-founder, Alasdair Rutherford (see previous blog post), and I believe that organisations need independent, expert help to objectively evaluate their investments in learning and development, and that's where we come in. We offer fresh insights into what organisations should be measuring from their learning and development, and how this relates to their business outcomes. We make recommendations on the most effective evaluation approaches in each situation, and can help implement these approaches.

For further information, see www.airthrey.com. Comments welcome, and especially invitations to discuss work together.

My new business partner

2011-09-29T16:59:00.003+01:00

Dr Alasdair Rutherford is a research economist I first met two years ago, when we were both working for Volunteer Development Scotland; I was Learning & Development Manager, and Alasdair was Research & Development Manager. We collaborated on a number of learning evaluation projects, such as for the NHS in Scotland.

Alasdair has a string of impressive academic qualifications, including two first degrees (if that’s not an oxymoron), a study exchange in Germany, a Masters and a PhD, not to mention a sheaf of published papers. He is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Stirling.

We calculate that our respective knowledge and skill sets, one in learning and development, the other in research and development, complement each other perfectly for a business specialising in the evaluation of learning and development.

Alasdair’s interests and skills include econometrics, statistics, formative and summative evaluation, economic and social research, quantitative and qualitative research, data analysis, and database design and administration. I commend Alasdair to you, and I look forward to working with him in applying his extensive range of skills and methods to the learning activities of our corporate clients.

Three theses on learning evaluation

2011-09-20T16:34:00.008+01:00

Not enough is happening. Not enough learning and development (L&D) is being evaluated, and when it is being done, it is not being done robustly, systematically, or effectively. As a rule of thumb, organisations should spend 10-15% of their L&D budget on evaluation, but how many do that? Evaluation is insufficiently understood and applied.

There is too much dogma. There are a great many models and tools for L&D evaluation, and just as many petty disagreements about what works and what doesn’t. ROI doesn’t negate Kirkpatrick, any more than ROE negates ROI, and yet many L&D professionals take a partisan view supporting a particular tool, when the truth is that every model and tool has its place – the trick is to be able to select the right one for the right situation.

It’s not just about costs, but value. Many organisations are cost aware, but hardly any are value aware. To appreciate the full impact of L&D, we need to recognise all the different kinds of value it adds, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Organisations need to become more conscious of value, and strive for total value add.

Learning evaluation solutions

2011-09-16T11:17:00.004+01:00

Keen readers of this blog may have noticed a shift of emphasis in recent posts. I've apparently become much more interested in the evaluation of learning and development. In fact, this has been a career-long interest, and has always formed a part of my professional work. However, I have let the cat out of the bag with my latest LinkedIn update - "planning a new venture!"

I've written about learning evaluation for CIPD's HR Inform website, and a quarter of my new book, 101 Learning & Development Tools, is about evaluation. Now I'm setting up a new firm, with a partner, in the business incubator at the University of Stirling. We'll be offering learning evaluation solutions to corporate clients from next month, October 2011.

More to follow, and in the meantime, I'd be interested in any questions, comments, or especially invitations to discuss how we may be able to help your business.

Fee, Kenneth: 101 Learning & Development Tools

2011-08-26T09:32:00.002+01:00

My new book, 101 Learning and Development Tools, will be published on 3 September by Kogan Page.

It's available for pre-order on Amazon now, and if you're visiting that site, why not check out my other books, at the Amazon author page for Kenneth Fee? Comments, reviews and 'like!' markers always welcome.

Judging by the release of my last book, if you order now, you'll probably get the book right away. I'm about to go on holiday, so I expect to see it on my return. And if I return to comments about the book on this blog, that would be even more welcome!

I hope you enjoy the book, and find it useful.

Lack of evaluation

2011-08-18T18:53:00.002+01:00

I’m underwhelmed by the response to my last blog post.

I know many followers/readers of this blog are interested in e-learning, and I thought there might have been a lot of examples of attempts to evaluate e-learning, not least to show where it is more efficient than face-to-face learning – although I believe the focus is increasingly, and correctly, shifting from efficiency to effectiveness.

I’m planning a new venture in evaluation of learning and development, and I was hoping for more informal feedback via this route, aside from the more formal market research and business development I’m undertaking. I would still welcome any examples or anecdotes anyone is willing to share.

However, I wonder whether the lack of comments (or any other responses) is indicative of a lack of examples? This is part of my thesis about L&D evaluation: I believe there is too little of it being undertaken at the moment; I believe there is too little understanding of evaluation and its importance; I don’t know of any consultancies or service providers specialising in it; and I know there has been no new book of any significance published on the subject in nearly a decade. I’d be interested to hear any contradiction of this thesis (or any more supporting evidence).

As always, comments would be very welcome!

evaluation examples

2011-07-25T10:25:00.002+01:00

I'm looking for examples of learning evaluation in practice - both good and bad. I'd welcome anything from a bank of case studies to any small anecdote anyone is willing to share. And I'm interested in any context of learning and development implementation.

Can anyone help? Please use the comments option, below, to post links, or email me via the learnforever website.

Thanks.

Reasoned evaluation

2011-07-14T19:24:00.003+01:00

A client asked me today about approaches to evaluation, and this got me thinking about how advocates of different approaches get very dogmatic about what works and what doesn’t work.

Kaliym Islam, in Developing and Measuring Training the Six Sigma Way, says “none of the four levels in the Kirkpatrick model capture business feedback or business reaction to the training product”.

Jack Phillips, the Return on Investment guru, argues Kirkpatrick’s four levels are at best inadequate and need ROI as a fifth level.

Paul Kearns, author of Evaluating the ROI from Learning, goes further and describes Kirkpatrick as just “wrong”, but then he draws the same conclusion about ROI as the fifth level – “wrong again”. (See http://www.evidencebasedhr.com/?p=275)

And in The Value of Learning, Valerie Anderson advocates moving away from ROI to ROE, Return on Expectations.

It seems no sooner is a new approach in use than someone is rubbishing it in print. I don’t wish to join this chorus, and I believe each of the commentators attributed above has something important to offer. But do we have to dismiss the Kirkpatrick levels to embrace ROI? Or abandon ROI for ROE? Is it possible Six Sigma has its place in certain contexts but Kirkpatrick still has lessons to offer?

I think we need to recognise that there’s a lot of useful thinking about learning evaluation, and a variety of approaches, even if some of them are contradictory or even mutually exclusive. Organisations need specialist help to consider their options and identify the best way forward for them.

Adventures in Moodle

2011-07-03T10:34:00.002+01:00

Picking up from some of my previous blog posts, it’s now over a year since my organisation established an online learning environment, based on a Moodle platform. It’s been an interesting journey.

Initially I expected to get three things:
1. A learner management system, enabling us to store information about learners and generate reports.
2. A learning content management system, to author, edit and launch courses and other forms of online content.
3. A virtual classroom tool, to enable meetings of learners in multiple locations.

We don’t have the first thing – Moodle seems pretty limited in this capability, and I wonder whether others have found solutions to this? We’ve learned to experiment with plug-ins, trying the Book Module, before settling on Xerte as our default course authoring tool; we’ve plugged in the OU blog, following my amazed discovery that the native Moodle blog tool didn’t allow comments (although Moodle 2.0 apparently allows comments on all features, so we probably just needed to upgrade the whole platform); and we’ve opted for a plug-in for the virtual classroom functionality (hang on a minute – getting ahead of myself). But I’m not convinced any plug-in is going to help us with reporting – unless anyone can tell me different?

We’ve got the second thing, although we didn’t understand at the beginning that Moodle is designed essentially to support tutor-led cohorts of learners following a blended learning model, and any other capability is really just stuck on as an option.

And we don’t have the third thing. We plugged in Dimdim, but since their acquisition, they no longer offer an open source solution (our deal runs out at the end of August) and we need to identify an alternative. WiZiQ looked attractive, but we seem to get more features from Megameeting, with which we’ve already experimented. I’d be interested to hear from others who have plugged in different solutions.

What sort of adventures have you had with Moodle?

Whither CMI?

2011-06-13T13:21:00.005+01:00

Recently I questioned the relevance of the CIPD to learning and development professionals who are not part of a corporate HR department. My conclusion was that, while we have been relatively neglected, the organisation is still well worth membership.

To be consistent, I should comment on the other body of which I am a Fellow, the Chartered Management Institute (CMI).

On the face of it, the critique I offered of the CIPD (robustly defended by a CIPD representative in the comments to that blog post) applies even more so to CMI. And yet it’s all about expectations – I don’t expect the same close attention to my own professional specialism from a body as broad-based as CMI.

Bizarrely, given that it is open to all managers, CMI has a smaller membership than CIPD – about 80,000 members compared to over 120,000. There may be many reasons for this, but perhaps close attention to professional specialisms is part of the explanation.

Under Ruth Spellman’s leadership, CMI has been modernising and improving. There seem to be greater efforts to develop branches, and I can see improvements to publications. Management Today has always been a top class magazine – much more readable and professionally produced than any other business magazine in the UK. Now the other main CMI publication, Professional Manager, has stopped looking so antiquated and is actually worth reading.

But there has to be more to CMI than magazines, and I see little branch or networking activity that’s of benefit to me. I wonder if others have similar experiences? (Sits back and awaits response from CMI staff scanning the web for criticism to combat…)

Commercial break

2011-05-20T12:46:00.012+01:00

There will now be a short commercial break...

I have been impressed by a free booklet from Reed Learning, The Little Book of the Future: a guide to collaborative learning. Use this link to request your own copy.

It’s not really free, of course, as you exchange your contact details and allow Reed to pursue you with other offers, but so far I reckon it’s been worth it. The booklet includes short articles on leading-edge digital tools for learning, along with a bit of future-gazing. Among the latter commentaries, I particularly enjoyed Debbie Carter’s vision of phones printed on wrists and video screens in contact lenses – it chimed with some of my own predictions in the final chapter of my last book, Delivering E-Learning.

I’ve been getting agitated to mention Springest, which describes itself as an independent comparison website for learning and development programmes. Originating in Holland, it offers listings for all sorts of courses, organised in subject categories, along with reviews, links to other social media, and features for learners to store their own favourites. Worth a look, I'd suggest.

OK, Martijn?

While I'm mentioning other people's products I may as well mention my own.

My new book, 101 Learning and Development Tools, is not due for publication for another three months, but it’s available to pre-order on Amazon now.

Comments, as always, welcome.

Manifesto

2011-05-11T20:12:00.010+01:00

As we have just held elections in Scotland and the UK, it seems apposite to restate what this blog is about. I want to assert some clearer themes, and encourage readers to subscribe to follow, and followers to invite others to follow.

The key themes are my favourite issues in learning and development, including:

e-learning and blended learning
work-based learning (and volunteering-based learning)
talent management and development
corporate universities or academies
resource-based learning and learning centres
leadership and management development
knowledge management

...plus whatever else may be topical in the world of occupational learning.

Please let me know if there are other, related, themes you would like to see addressed.

Are you my friend?

2011-05-01T11:05:00.002+01:00

Driving to work the other day, I heard an item on Radio Scotland about how many online “friends” we can realistically maintain. I’m not sure how this became a topical item for commuter news, as I have investigated further and discovered Robin Dunbar identified the number – it’s 150 – way back in 2008. (See this New Scientist link.)

The point is that those who have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook, or other social networking sites, are kidding themselves, as they simply can’t maintain sufficient contact with so many people to justify describing them as friends.

As one of the dwindling refuseniks who still haven’t joined Facebook or Twitter, I gleaned some foolish comfort from this stat, but of course I have more than 150 people in my LinkedIn network, including many of the followers of this blog, so am I one of the deluded?

I don’t think so. One of the things I like about LinkedIn is that it makes no pretence that your network of contacts are friends. Its clear purpose is networking for work-related reasons, and it holds onto that objectivity.

I’ve just invited all my LinkedIn contacts to follow this blog, as a contribution to my previously posted intention to expand this community and generate more debate. But I won’t be offended by those who don’t sign up to follow, and simply continue to read when it suits them – that’s their choice.

Follow this blog

2011-03-26T09:19:00.003Z

In February, I posted about authenticity, and my posts in March have been attempts to introduce more of this. I’ve also updated my photo. Now for more personal detail.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I’ve been involved in learning and development for rather a long time – to be precise, since 1985, when I started my first job in the profession, as Training Officer of the Glasgow Council for Voluntary Service. It was there that I first designed and delivered training, first subscribed to training magazines (including ‘Training Officer’, still going strong today as Training Journal), first undertook trainer training, obtained my first professional qualification, a City & Guilds Certificate in Direct Training, and joined the Institute of Training and Development.

My ideas and opinions have evolved over a career that has seen me work as a trainer, facilitator, coach, advocate, salesperson, marketer (or should that be marketeer?), consultant, writer, manager and director. I’ve worked on the supply and demand sides of learning and development, in the public, private and voluntary sectors, in organisations varying in size from SME to PLC. My employment and consulting experience covers the industries of publishing, IT, engineering, and economic development, plus central and local government, the NHS, social enterprises and the charitable sector.

I like to think that has given me the capacity to recognise others’ points of view more readily, and to respond better to the needs of different organisational cultures. That doesn’t mean I get it right all the time, although I hope it shows a good range of reference. My main point in contributing this bit of personal history is to reveal some more of myself; they say that helps make a good blog. I’ve also found, more generally, that opening up about yourself encourages others to reciprocate, and that’s something I’m looking for more of in this blog.

I want to move away from this blog being predominantly a monologue, and try to create more of a community, where others come to contribute their ideas and opinions, and to hold debates. I’d welcome comments and responses, and I’d encourage readers to sign up as followers – if nothing else, it helps me confirm I have an audience!

To follow this blog, click on the follow button to the right >>>

Enlightenment

2011-03-12T09:38:00.002Z

My Chief Executive, who is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA), recently introduced me to an impressive series of animated talks on YouTube (thanks, George!). The presentation below, by Matthew Taylor of the RSA, is a good example, and YouTube hosts many more 'RSA Animate' clips. (See also Matthew Taylor's blog.) This seems to me a particularly apposite way of promoting a 21st century enlightenment.

As a Scot, I feel duty bound to help encourage new enlightenments, given the leading role my forebears played in the previous one. For anyone who hasn't read it, I heartily recommend Arthur Herman's The Scottish Enlightenment, with its glorious subtitle (in the American edition) "how the Scots invented the modern world and everything in it". But there's no time to rest on our laurels - we have to get on with what's new. And it seems to me reinventing how we organise learning will be a key part of that - see another of the RSA Animate series, Sir Ken Robinson's talk on changing education paradigms.

As always, comments welcome.

Whither CIPD?

2011-03-07T13:11:00.002Z

I think the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is a great organisation, and I’m proud to be a member of long standing. I often describe myself as having held continuous membership of CIPD and its predecessors for over 25 years – by which I mean I was a member of IPD before it won its Royal Charter, and before that the Institute of Training and Development (ITD) until it merged with the Institute of Personnel Management (IPM).

I voted for that merger. I know learning and development professionals who did not, and they argued that trainers’ interests would be lost in a body that primarily served the interests of human resources (HR) generalists. It’s a long time since that merger, but I often find myself wondering if they were right.

The latest issue of the CIPD magazine, People Management (a title that is little to do with learning) carries a diagram showing “forty years of evolution” (pp 28-29 of the print edition) where the ITD is virtually airbrushed out of history. There’s an image of the IPM journal, but none of any ITD publication.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised: the magazine’s overall strapline is “HR news, comment and jobs…” The institute is often described in shorthand as the body for HR professionals. And the recent revamp of its professional map reduced “learning and talent development” to just one-eighth of the institute’s scope.

Well, I’m not an HR professional; I’m a learning and development professional. And the latter is not simply a subset of the former. The merger was supposed to be a marriage of equals; indeed, numerically there were far more of us in ITD, and I wonder whether that remains the case. I often feel like a second class citizen in CIPD, and I’m a Chartered Fellow, who has spoken at the Scottish and UK conferences, and has written extensively for CIPD publications. If I feel a bit like that, how much more excluded must others feel?

I’ve no intention of giving up my membership. I’m also a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute, and I have no concerns that there I’m part of a much broader community. But I wonder whether CIPD genuinely serves the interests of learning and development professionals, or whether we’d be better served elsewhere?

Authenticity

2011-02-26T12:55:00.003Z

This subject reminds me of the Provencal peasants in Jean de Florette, mocking the eponymous hero’s plans to concentrate his farming on “the authentic”, which they caricature as a crop grown only in books. Yet authenticity is important.

A few days ago I co-facilitated some management training, where my co-facilitator listed various different leadership styles and then offered situational leadership as a model for selecting an appropriate style. I countered with the model of authentic leadership, which until then I hadn’t seen as the antithesis of situational leadership. I think it’s possible to be too adaptable, and leave those we work with wondering what we really believe, and what really matters to us.

Much of what is written about authentic leadership is too touchy-feely for me, with its emphasis on inner spirituality, but I think the essential concept is sound. Nigel Nicholson, in the current issue of Management Today, has his tongue firmly in cheek when he says authenticity is “great if you can fake it”, but he reaches the same conclusion I do: “the essence of leadership is adding value that can only come from the identity of the leader”.

We could all bring a little more of our real selves to our work, and do a little less role playing. A bit belatedly, my New Year resolution is to try to do this.

Learning from mistakes

2011-01-26T17:59:00.002Z

I subscribe to trainingzone and find some of their articles useful, amid a sea of thinly-disguised sales promotions. A recent example of the useful stuff is the ‘the top 10 bad people managers’ by blogger Simon Kenny, who lists some great examples of mistaken behaviour by managers. (You need to register for trainingzone to view his blog.)

This sort of material reads well: it’s funny, so it sticks in the mind, and it can be a memorable way of highlighting good and bad practice. In a similar vein, one of my favourite management books is (was? it was published in 1992 and is now out of print) My Biggest Mistake, edited by Roger Trapp, a compilation of columns that originally appeared in the Independent On Sunday, contributed by many well-known business leaders of the time, including Richard Branson, John Harvey-Jones and Anita Roddick.

But we only learn from our mistakes if we realise that they are mistakes, and work out alternatives for next time around. It can be dangerous to highlight bad practice in case the bad way is the lesson that stays with the learners. This is the long-standing criticism of training videos by Video Arts and their imitators: people remember the bumbling incompetence shown by the likes of John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson, as these were the scenarios the videos often led with, but not the ‘right way’ solutions hastily tacked on to the end. Simon Kenny’s piece gets round this problem neatly by specifying the lesson learned after each of his ten howlers.

The most powerful variant of this, for me – and I’m drawing on my personal experience – is when I make the mistakes myself. I think we often realise we have made a mistake, but don’t quite know what to do about it, and how to avoid repeating the mistake. We need help. Coaches and mentors can be invaluable here, but another option is the anonymous internet discussion forum; unfortunately, even under the cloak of anonymity, I don’t find many people willing to open up about their mistakes. I’d be interested in suggestions for how to provoke this sort of contribution – a much tougher proposition than how to respond to them.

101

2010-12-22T18:04:00.005Z

A few days ago, I delivered the manuscript of my new book, 101 Learning and Development Tools, so it’s perhaps fitting that this is my 101st blog post.

In researching the book, and asking for suggestions for tools, I found widespread misunderstanding of my intentions, and of the scope of the book. A colleague explained this phenomenon to me the other day, with reference to a quote from Henry Ford.

Apparently, when working on the idea of his groundbreaking, accessible motor cars for all, Ford eschewed asking prospective customers what they would want from him, reasoning that they would basically ask for a faster horse. The point being that it is often hard to articulate your needs, and especially to envision new solutions to those needs, when you don’t know what is possible; often we don’t know what we don’t know, and the need for a solution doesn’t become apparent until that solution becomes available, and a new market is formed.

I hope the need for my new book becomes apparent once it’s available – which won’t be until the Autumn of 2011, although it may be available for pre-order on Amazon by the end of summer.

In the meantime, may I take this opportunity to wish all my followers and readers the compliments of the season, and a peaceful and prosperous New Year.

Joyful

2010-12-17T11:48:00.005Z

No, it’s not that it’s that time of year again. Joyful is the translation from the Greek Xerte (pronounced zertay), which is the name of the online course authoring tool my organisation has chosen.

Yesterday a group of us enjoyed basic training in the use of Xerte at our local JISC Regional Support Centre, and came away feeling assured that we’ve made the right choice.

As readers of my blog posts in July will recall, we’ve agonised over the choice of an authoring tool, and it’s taken almost as long to choose one as it did to establish our Moodle platform. We began by defining the criteria we wanted from an authoring tool, and plotted a matrix with these criteria on one axis and the range of possible tools along the other. This process enabled us to eliminate Lectora, Toolbook, eXe and Udutu, among others.

Xerte isn’t perfect – it doesn’t meet all our criteria – but then no other tool did either. However, we are confident of achieving a lot of what we want, and having the scope to develop more, and/or benefit from others developing Xerte further.

Now it’s time to move on and start creating some new content. I’ll let you know how we get on.

Are interns mugs?

2010-12-10T12:29:00.004Z

What is an intern, or an internship? Is it training? Work experience? A student placement? Volunteering?

I’ve been looking at this recently, and I confess to some confusion. Some internships seem to be paid; some not. But where they’re not, is this just a form of exploitation, substituting a free or cheap intern for a fully-salaried employee? Or is it a legitimate way to gain entry to a new organisation or industry?

Wiktionary takes a narrow view. It offers two definitions, the first of “a student who works in order to gain experience in their chosen field” and the second a more specific definition for medical students. Dictionary.com takes a different view: “a person who works as an apprentice or trainee in an occupation or profession to gain practical experience, and sometimes also to satisfy legal or other requirements for being licensed or accepted professionally.” The Oxford English Dictionary goes for “a student or trainee who does a job to gain work experience or for a qualification”.

This question came up, for me, in the context of volunteering. It seems entirely reasonable to me that, just as people give their time freely to public, community or charitable organisations, to make a contribution and/or perhaps to gain useful knowledge or skills, and just as some professionals volunteer their time pro bono, so it may be that those seeking entry to a new career may offer their services free in return for the experience.

This is fine from the volunteer intern’s point of view, but if the organisation uses this as job substitution, perhaps even laying off paid staff to recruit unpaid interns, is this morally acceptable?

My half-formed opinion on this is that we need guidelines. A kind of code on internships. There’s a thorough review of what happens in various countries around the world at Wikipedia. And a provocative discussion forum at interns anonymous.

I’d welcome feedback. Is there a right way and a wrong way to organise and offer internships?

Glorified books?

2010-11-22T16:13:00.003Z

Perhaps the biggest difficulty I find with e-learning is the narrow view most people still seem to have about it. I posted before about how I fear the term ‘e-learning’ is too contaminated – those who have used it and found it helpful are on board, but many others, some of whom have had a bad experience, some of whom have other prejudices, regard it as too toxic to contemplate.

I suppose this view partly reflects my own concern that, increasingly, the purely online course has limited applicability, and instead we should be looking at greater use of collaborative tools, and more ‘blending’ with offline learning.

To clarify further, what I’m saying is that an online course is typically such a passive experience that it’s really only good for acquisition of facts, figures and information, and at best the gaining of knowledge. A bit like a book, really, and increasingly it seems books are what online courses are competing with.

In the Moodle platform I’ve been using for most of the past year, a course authoring tool is actually called “the book module”. It’s basically recognising that all it’s offering is the creation of an online book. And with the development of more and better digital readers like the iPad, the Kindle and the Sony Reader, this sort of Web-based e-reading is going to look increasingly dated and limited.

We need more interactivity, and not just with automatic and dynamic applications that give the learner a sense of feedback, but with real people, connected through the many collaborative tools that are already commonplace. We need to take e-learning beyond being glorified books, into a place where genuine learning is happening.

Nail on head?

2010-11-15T13:07:00.004Z

There’s a good column by Daniel Wain in the 11 November edition of People Management, the CIPD journal.

Daniel quotes Charles Elvin of the Open University saying “I am a business person who uses learning for business transformation, and not a learning person who hopes the business listens to me” and goes on to reason that HR professionals making the case for their interventions are approaching problems the wrong way around, “like a workman armed with a hammer looking for a nail to hit”.

I found these comments apposite as I am finalising the manuscript for my forthcoming book, 101 Learning & Development Tools. There’s a danger, in an anthology like that, that I offer a selection of hammers in search of nails. Thanks to Daniel’s timely reminder, I am ensuring that the emphasis in my book is firmly on identifying the business challenges first, before selecting the right tools to help tackle them.

I generally find Daniel Wain’s column pretty good, and I’ve been meaning to find something positive to say about it, since my only previous reference on this blog was to slag it off. I hope this redresses the balance.

Hiatus

2010-11-08T09:47:00.002Z

It’s been a while since I last blogged – more than three months since my last blog post represents the longest hiatus since I started this blog in 2007. My apologies to any followers, commenters, or readers who may have been disappointed.

My excuses are threefold: my forthcoming book – working title 101 Learning & Development Tools – is approaching the deadline for submission of my final manuscript; my day-job has been very busy; and there’s a significant, albeit very positive, upheaval in my family life (sorry that’s a bit cryptic, but I’m only sharing with family and friends).

Anyway, distractions notwithstanding, I have resolved to get back into the habit, and try to resume my old rate of about two blog posts per month. I’m counting this one. I know that’s a bit of a cheat, but it’s my blog and I can do what I want.

Thanks for reading.

More to follow (I promise).

More about MOODLE

2010-07-31T15:50:00.008+01:00

Thanks to those who replied to my previous blog post.

My quest to improve my organisation's MOODLE implementation goes on. The next phase of development addresses three themes: overall look-and-feel, to make the site more user-friendly and give it more visual appeal; developing micro-sites within the site to support different communities of practice; and (three weeks on) still working on the course content development capability.

We've looked at the Accordion plug-in (thanks, Chris), which is great as far as it goes, but we want a lot more of this sort of scope for learners to become more active. We've compared a lot of alternative tools, and decided against Sana EasyGenerator (sorry, Christiaan), as well as proprietary tools like Lectora and ToolBook. However, this review has at least helped clarify that MOODLE's native course authoring software is insufficent for our needs.

Udutu is quite good, but the new front-runner is Xerte, which is open source and free. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has experience of implementing this tool, especially with MOODLE, or indeed anyone who has opinions on it.

I'm looking for a course authoring tool that creates SCORM-packaged content, integrates with MOODLE, offers easy, intuitive navigation for learners, has a straightforward WYSIWYG interface for authors, and offers a good range of simple templates to create interactive and interesting content. All suggestions still welcome!

Moodle muddle

2010-07-10T11:43:00.004+01:00

As mentioned in an earlier post, my organisation is implementing Moodle as its learning platform.

Early days yet, but a big success so far. However, while pleased with the platform, I have been surprised by the limitations of Moodle’s course authoring capability. These limitations fall into two categories:

1. There are limited options for course layout and navigation. We’ve tried using the “topics” format and adding the “Book Module” plug-in, but neither is entirely satisfactory. The book module offers better menu options (although not the choice to show or hide the left-hand menu), navigation arrows on every page, and the option to print each book or chapter. However…

2. The book module doesn’t allow features like activities or questions to be included in a book – as it says on the Moodle website, “the book module is not interactive”. We’d like to keep our build as simple as possible, and with as few plug-ins as possible, but if we’re to persist with any version of Moodle’s own authoring capability, that will mean adding in small apps to offer conceal-and-reveal features, mouse-over options, and other added extras.

So we’re looking at alternatives. Top of the list at the moment is Udutu (which, a little to my surprise, seems to be pronounced “you do too” – there was me thinking it was Swahili or something). The alternative doesn’t have to be open source or free – although that helps – but definitely has to be easily compatible with Moodle.

If anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

Communities of practice

2010-05-31T12:34:00.003+01:00

I was surprised recently to hear a senior colleague refer to communities of practice as though they are a passing fad. The language may have been around for less than twenty years, but communities of practice are as old as human society itself. So what made my colleague think they are a passing fad, and – implicitly – something new?

I think the answer lies in digital technology, the growth of which has empowered communities of practice on a global scale, given them greater prominence, and provided them with lots of new tools and resources. As the tools and resources improve, I think we can expect to see further growth in communities of practice – they’ve become easier to get involved in, easier to manage, and more sustainable.

Communities of practice, as Etienne Wenger explains, are groups of people with not just shared interests, but a shared stake in applying those interests to both practical and theoretical activity. They have a big emphasis on learning, and on sharing the results of learning.

Websites featuring resource sharing and collaborative tools, such as Wikis, blogs, discussion forums, live chat and virtual classrooms, are the new things. Some people – perhaps my colleague – confuse these tools and resources with the community itself, and of course we can expect the tools and resources to change. But as long as the purpose for a community existing remains, its members will keep in touch, stick together, and find new ways to collaborate and share learning.

Some applications of digital technology are fads, and will pass. I happen to believe Twitter is one of them (a subject for another post, if ever there was one), but I’m confident that communities of practice will continue to go from strength to strength.

Emotional metadata

2010-05-22T14:15:00.003+01:00

I took part in a workshop last week where the facilitator made reference, en passim, to “emotional metadata”. I immediately thought of Daniel Goleman’s ground-breaking Emotional Intelligence, but there’s no reference to it in Goleman’s book, and I haven’t come across any reference to metadata in this context before. (For those unfamiliar with the concept of metadata, it’s basically data about data, or, crudely, how we label data on the Web to enable searches using those terms.)

I was surprised to find emotional metadata is quite a common phrase, yielding 391 Google hits – or 161,000 if you take away the quotation marks. But on browsing those, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. In essence, the idea seems to be about developing search routes based on how people feel about stuff, rather than more information-based definitions. This sounds potentially useful, in that we can use it to find related information that makes users feel happy, or nostalgic, or anxious – or whatever. But I’ve yet to see a demonstrably useful application.

In principle, I’m open to any tools that help us gain deeper understanding based on emotional rather than intellectual responses. By coincidence the day after the workshop where this came up, I participated in another, where the facilitator showed a variant of the diagram (left). He was making the point that our feelings influence our thinking, which in turn influences our behaviour. But I think the diagram is flawed, and the point may be made more strongly – sometimes thinking doesn’t come into it at all, and our behaviour is driven purely (even passionately) by our feelings.

This suggests to me we should all be paying more attention to the concept of emotional metadata, and what we can learn from it.

Mind games

2010-04-26T13:02:00.005+01:00

We know surprisingly little about how the brain works, so I’ve been even more surprised by advertised claims for handheld devices with software applications that “train the brain”. And it’s no surprise at all that recent research reports have rubbished these claims.*

As this article in Scientific American, for example, reports, repetition of ‘brain training’ activities improves performance in those specific activities themselves, but nothing more (UK reports say the same). In particular, there is no evidence of transfer of learning to other activities.

This is pretty damning, since many scientists believe the capacity to transfer learning is “hard-wired” into the brain, as we constantly seek ways to take ideas from one sphere and apply them to another. This suggests there are plenty of better ways to prepare your brain – or, more accurately, your mind – to adapt to new challenges.

Transfer of learning is an important issue for learning and development professionals: we are constantly seeking ways to promote learning off-the-job that may be successfully applied on-the-job. These reports could be interpreted as evidence that software applications are unlikely to support learning transfer. However we should be wary of leaping to false conclusions: brain training applications are really just simple games, and worlds apart from software applications, such as simulations, designed to impact on performance at work. Many software applications can help – but brain training is not among them.

* Victoria Coren, in her Observer column yesterday, tried to claim the research is insufficient to substantiate its conclusions. Her argument seems to rest on effects of brain training, unseen for six weeks, having a longer term effect. Coren, usually so incisive and witty, is wrong, as comparison with any other form of learning proves – the key point is that there is no transfer of learning.

Another book review

2010-04-24T11:11:00.005+01:00

I am indebted to Professor Martyn Sloman for his generous review of Delivering E-Learning, which appeared in the April edition of Training Journal.

(Time-limited link expired - copy available by personal request to the author.)

Obliquity

2010-03-31T14:12:00.002+01:00

Those who’ve read my published work will know I’m a great admirer of John Kay, the Edinburgh-born economist, business strategist and Financial Times columnist. I especially enjoyed his two eminently readable short books collected from his FT columns, Everlasting Lightbulbs (on economics) and The Hare and the Tortoise (great case study material on business strategy). Kay is one of the best exponents of the ‘distinctive capabilities’ view of strategy, and has been further endeared to me by his habit of writing while walking in Provence, one of my favourite parts of the world.So I’m approaching his latest book with great interest. I confess I have yet to read Obliquity: why our goals are best pursued indirectly, but I’ve read his introductory article on the subject in Management Today, and I’ve warmed to his themes of maintaining a flexible approach, thinking laterally, always looking out for new knowledge, and taking a roundabout route to success.

These themes ought to resonate with anyone who has ever tried to facilitate learning, as simply reciting a litany of facts and figures is rarely the best way to help people absorb and apply new ideas. People learn better by tackling subjects in different ways, via discussions, reflection and activities, and by interchanging ideas with the facilitators of their learning. It makes sense that the same approach should work in pursuing business goals. Perhaps learning and development professionals have been pioneers in the new science of obliquity?

Why e-learning DOES work

2010-03-11T09:22:00.004Z

A response to Mark Walsh

Among the headline-grabbing claims made by Mark Walsh in his trainingzone article published on 19 February are that e-learning “isn’t really learning” and “it doesn’t really work”. Absurd? I think so. Extreme? Certainly, but it soon transpires that that’s what Mark was setting out to do.

Later in the article, he modifies the red-top sensationalism of his headlines and makes the caveat that “much of what I have said is also not fair to all e-learning providers”, and even concludes “perhaps blended learning solutions are the future - bringing together the best of e-learning and traditional training?”

What Mark (or his editor) has done is single out some of the worst practice in e-learning and use it to attack all e-learning. As he concedes himself, he could have done a similar hatchet job on classroom-based training (or any other approach to learning, for that matter).

Mark claims that e-learning can’t train people to do things. He correctly spots that e-learning is good at helping people acquire knowledge, but its limitations in transferring that to behavioural change at work are equally true of every kind of off-the-job learning. I would argue (and did so in my book Delivering E-Learning) that e-learning is one of the best of such approaches when it comes to transfer of learning.

The problem with Mark’s sort of critique of e-learning is that it sets out to attack, rather than to understand. In its rush to dismiss, it ignores the interactivity of cleverly-designed e-learning, it’s huge advantages over old-style open and distance learning, the speed of delivery and unprecedented scalability of e-learning; ignores its capacity to be carried into the workplace via smartphones or handhelds, ignores the power of digital simulations to practice real work scenarios safely and securely, ignores the new approaches to learning digital technology has opened up, and much more; worst of all, it ignores the countless success stories from e-learning implementations all over the world. In short, it ignores the fact that e-learning demonstrably does work.

Mark needs to set aside his prejudice and attention-seeking, and look again at what’s to be learned from e-learning.

Volunteering

2010-02-27T15:35:00.002Z

I’ve had a crash course in understanding volunteering in recent weeks, since joining the voluntary sector last year. I should say re-joining, as I had a spell of seven years in the sector early in my career, except that I didn’t really learn about volunteering, as I have been recently.

In the current issue of Management Today, the Chief Executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, Stuart Etherington, contributes the opinion column, and writes earnestly over a full page about voluntary organisations and charities, but completely omits to mention volunteers or volunteering. Surely this is what the sector is all about?

My current responsibilities include managing (and co-delivering and assessing) a range of SQA-accredited courses in the management of volunteers and volunteering. This has given me greater insight into how we manage people in all organisations: if we consider the motivation of those whose work is unpaid, I believe we get closer to understanding what motivates paid workers too.

We all do things we don’t get paid for at some time or other (even in our jobs). We do them because we want to, because we benefit from them in some way, and because often they’re the right things to do. We don’t always recognise these things as volunteering, but perhaps that’s at least partly because even some representatives of the voluntary sector are missing the point.

I’d love to read comments from others in the sector who recognise what I’m describing. And for everyone else, I can recommend Essential Volunteer Management by Steven McCurley and Richard Lynch.

Silver Jubilee

2010-02-13T12:11:00.003Z

This year is my twenty-fifth year working in learning and development. I started my first job as a Training Officer (for the Glasgow Council for Voluntary Service) in April 1985; I undertook my first certificated trainer-training course from 1985 to 86; and I took out membership of the Institute of Training and Development (one of the forerunners of CIPD) in January 1986.

So I’m designating this year as my silver jubilee celebration!

This gives me an excuse to recall some of the key developments of my 25 years in this career. Like…

E-learning. Having specialised in open, flexible and distance learning, I should have been better prepared than most for the advent in the 1990s of e-learning, which essentially enabled these approaches with digital technology. But, like many people, I took a while to grasp the full scope of what the new technologies could offer. I find many people still see e-learning as just online distance learning, which is a shame, as it means we’re only scratching the surface of what may be accomplished.

Corporate universities. Despite having been around for more than 50 years, this remains a misunderstood concept. The corporate university, or academy, became popular in the USA in the 90s, and in the UK and Europe in the past decade, but is still poorly communicated. For me, it’s the most significant strategic tool we have, and fits well with the broader use of e-learning.

Talent management. This has become an important idea in HR, but many still associate it mainly with recruitment, and the ‘War for Talent’, when equally important are the applications of key talent development and succession planning. Again, I believe this is something we have yet to make the most of.

Of course, there have been many other big ideas. One which has not fared so well over the last ten years is knowledge management, which in the late 90s seemed set to be perhaps the biggest idea of all. But I suspect we haven’t heard the last of it, and I predict it will re-surface in a new form over the next ten years.

Many of us are working to older retirement dates now, but I doubt I’ll be active in learning and development for another 25 years – perhaps another 15. However long it is, I hope I find as much variety and career satisfaction as I have so far. Thanks to all those I’ve worked with along the way, and please feel free to comment!

Implementing MOODLE

2010-01-30T18:43:00.003Z

I’m in the middle of a major new MOODLE implementation. For those who don’t know, MOODLE is an open source virtual learning environment; the initials stand for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, although enthusiasts (and there seem to be plenty of them) also use “moodle” as a verb. More information at http://moodle.org/.

We haven’t yet got to significant content development. We’ve started by downloading the platform to a staging site, and we’re concentrating on the branding and styling, on allocating roles to those who are going to be user administrators, content developers, and those who are going to support learners, and on organising training for them. We have modest plans for some initial content, and a big vision for what the platform can offer us.

I’ve been surprised by some of the language, including referring to every module you can build as a “course”, and surprised that there isn’t really a virtual classroom module, although we’re integrating Dimdim, a compatible open source application.

I’d be interested to hear from others who have experience of implementing or managing MOODLE, and I look forward to sharing more of my experiences as our site takes shape. Comments welcome.

The Learning Curve

2010-01-23T12:06:00.004Z

The learning curve is a bit of a cliché, frequently used and misused. People talk about any new learning experience, especially a challenging one, as a learning curve, which is fair enough up to a point. So what’s it really about?

The learning curve is an S curve. You could think of it as a journey, where you’re travelling along, steadily, on a straight road; then the road turns uphill and the journey becomes harder work; before it levels off again at the top of the hill, and you find yourself making steady progress again, but at a higher level.

Without wishing to labour the metaphor, if you apply it to a work situation, you may be working away steadily until you encounter something new, whereupon you struggle a bit until you learn how to tackle this new development, and then you continue to work away, but now perhaps more productively, or to a higher standard, as a result of the learning.

But this is an example of the classic misuse, which is to talk about a steep or sharp learning curve when what is meant is that the learning is difficult; the metaphor of the uphill journey encourages this misunderstanding. In fact, if the curve is steep, this means the learning is quick and easy; a slow ascent of a more gentle curve would indicate a more challenging learning experience.

Perhaps we should conceive a new metaphor, but the best I can suggest is to reverse the gravity, so that the steep curve goes downwards like a slide, working in the learner’s favour. I’m sure there must be a better way of representing the curve to correct the misuse and render its undoubted relevance greater clarity. Any suggestions?

Happy New Year!

2009-12-31T11:19:00.004Z

As we draw to the end of what has been (for me at least) an eventful year, and look forward to whatever 2010 will bring, I'd like to wish my family and friends, colleagues and associates, and everyone who reads this blog, a peaceful and prosperous new year.

Informal and non-formal learning

2009-12-14T21:49:00.003Z

I’ve just returned from an international exchange meeting in the Netherlands, discussing validation of informal and non-formal learning (through volunteering). It’s a big subject, not least because the terms of reference are open to a wide range of interpretation.

Informal learning is usually taken to mean learning that takes place inadvertently, even subconsciously, and is rarely planned. Non-formal learning is usually considered to be planned learning that takes place away from the classroom, and does not follow an accredited programme or lead to a qualification.

However, these definitions are set from the perspective of educationalists who see only classroom-based and certificated learning as “formal”. I beg to differ.

Surely any planned learning intervention, especially any that is subjected to summative assessment and confers some sort of award, ought to be regarded as formal? I certainly see organised work-based learning in this category.

My organisation offers a range of competence-based qualification programmes, involving assessment of evidence generated from work experience, with tutorial support mainly at a distance, and just occasional workshop events as milestones. Barely a whiff of the classroom, no educational institution, and no exams, but surely that’s still formal learning?

Next year, we plan to add e-learning to the mix, making it an even more sophisticated, multi-dimensional, learning experience. We don’t really stop to worry about how formal it is. But if I were to classify it, I certainly wouldn’t regard it as informal or non-formal.

What do you think?

My next book

2009-11-29T11:27:00.004Z

I’m researching a new book, which is intended to be a compendium of tools and techniques for learning and development. I plan to explain and analyse some of the most popular tools, not just for delivery (although there will be plenty of those), but also for applying learning theory, analysing learning needs, strategy and planning, and perhaps especially reviewing, evaluating and quality-assuring learning.
I’d be interested to hear from any reader about the tools and techniques you’ve found most useful or effective in managing and implementing learning and development. Do you have a particular favourite tool?

The idea of the book is to provide a handy manual for learning and development professionals, and anyone who has to undertake any task to do with learning and development. I hope it may also be useful to students on courses in HR or learning, perhaps as a companion volume to the more theoretical tomes like Harrison, Walton and Wilson. As usual, the timetable is slow: my publisher, Kogan Page, don’t expect to get this book on the shelves until early in 2011 – hopefully it’ll be worth the wait!

All comments and suggestions welcome.

Pedagogy?

2009-11-17T19:36:00.005Z

Many educationalists, and even some corporate learning and development professionals, talk a lot about pedagogy. From the classical Greek, this literally means “leading the child”, but it is widely understood, in educational circles, including further and higher education (i.e., education that is not for children) to refer to underlying theory of learning, including understanding how children/people learn, and how to design learning for best effect.

In the 1940s, the American educationalist Malcolm Knowles proposed a new theory of andragogy – “leading the man” – which highlighted the different ways in which adults, as distinct from children, learn.

In the last decade, Australian academic Stewart Hase has advocated a new theory, heutagogy – “leading the self” – which shifts the emphasis to self-directed learning, in keeping with recent moves towards more learner-centred learning.

Simpler language, eschewing debate about rival theories, and focusing on the practical application of pedagogy/andragogy/heutagogy, is learning design.

There's some useful discussion of this in Sam Chapnick and Jimm Meloy's excellent book, Renaissance eLearning: creating dramatic and unconventional learning experiences, Chapter 3, ‘From Andragogy to Heutagogy’.

HR-inform

2009-11-17T06:48:00.006Z

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is creating a new subscription-based information resource on the web. HR-inform will hold a vast repository of tips, tools and other resources for HR professionals.

I’ve contributed some of the resources, including case studies, policies and model documents. Among the topics I’ve contributed are: learning methods and styles, costing learning, course facilitation, talent management, e-learning, blended learning, internal marketing of learning, outsourcing versus insourcing, use of consultants, learning centres and virtual learning centres, choosing learning materials, quality management of learning, corporate universities, the learning organisation, innovative approaches to learning, knowledge management and learning evaluation - around 50 items in all.

I suppose I would say this, but I’m sure it will be a very valuable resource for HR professionals. HR Inform is being launched at a breakfast seminar at the CIPD conference in Manchester tomorrow - how’s that for up to date? - so perhaps it's appropriate that I'm posting this at breakfast time.

The Learning Value Chain

2009-10-28T21:25:00.008Z

Many people view learning as being just about knowledge transfer, from a teacher or a textbook to the learner. This is a common fault in e-learning, where this over-simplistic view of learning is often encountered. In fact, learning is much more complex: yes, we learn when we passively read something, or watch a video, or listen to a speaker. But we learn more when we get active, and this is especially true of learning for work, where the idea is to apply our learning, practice our skills, and develop new competences.

To illustrate this, the learning value chain is an idea I have developed from David Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle (1984) and Michael Porter’s Value Chain (1985). It identifies five distinct learning processes:

1. Knowledge acquisition, when learners acquire information and convert it to knowledge
2. Reflection, when learners apply knowledge to their work situation, and reflect on its impact.
3. Practice, when learners practice new skills or behaviours, either at work or in a simulated environment.
4. Interaction, when learners exchange experiences with other learners and synthesise new experience.
5. Escalation, when learners build on their newly acquired skills and behaviours to develop new knowledge, apply it, and develop new skills and behaviours.

In the learning value chain diagram, below, these five processes occur in a sequence, each building on the value of the preceding process. It is not essential that these processes occur in this order, but taken together like this, they add the most value. The diagram is completed by sample support inputs identified for each process, and by underpinning people management and development inputs, and formal and non-formal education and training inputs.

© Kenneth Fee. Please feel free to quote the learning value chain, or develop the ideas, as long as you cite the copyright of this author.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

2009-10-15T08:47:00.004+01:00

I’ve just read Practice Made Perfect by Roberto Moretti (published by Robert Salomone, 2009).

There’s a lot in this deceptively slim volume. It takes the familiar model of unconscious incompetence (we don’t know what we don’t know) to conscious incompetence (we know what we don’t know) to conscious competence (we can now do it, if we think about it) to unconscious competence (we can do it without thinking), and weaves a new thread through it.

Moretti’s five processes for efficient practice are practical steps to follow to move through the competence model, and as such are invaluable for those managing work-based learning, or anyone who wants to learn a new skill. They’re also a useful antidote to those who perceive e-learning as being simply about information transfer, as they explain what learning for work is really about – applying knowledge and developing your skills.

The five processes are:

Identification – where the learner clarifies what it is they are going to practice.
Isolation – where the learner focuses on an element small enough to practice to perfection
Reinforcement – where the learner repeatedly practices to get it right
Integration – where the learner links each practiced element of skill to another to accomplish more complex, or higher level, skills
Escalation – where the learner builds on the new skill to begin to tackle new skills

There’s a lot more in the book, which I’m pleased to recommend.

Learning more about e-learning

2009-10-08T15:09:00.002+01:00

I've added a new feature to this blog. I’ve joined a community of e-learning bloggers connected via a site called eLearning Learning. Basically, this collates all of the input about e-learning from contributors around the world into one digest.

You’ll find a button about eLearning Learning in the sidebar towards the bottom right hand side of this page. All you need to do is click the button and you’ll be taken to the site.

You’ll also find a “Best Of” feed. You can subscribe to this, if you wish, and receive regular email updates selected from eLearning Learning.

I hope you find this useful.

Career Move

2009-10-08T10:46:00.006+01:00

I'm giving up my consultancy business. I began Executive and Professional Development Ltd in 2005, when I left the eLearning Alliance, having undertaken very little consulting work prior to that. It's been varied and enjoyable, I've met many interesting people and undertaken some great projects. But the time has come for a change: I've found the fluctuations in workflow difficult to contend with, and the economic downturn hasn't helped.

For some time I've coveted a more 'traditional' learning and development role: I've worked as an old-fashioned training manager in sectors as diverse as engineering/manufacturing and voluntary/charitable; I've worked on the supply side of management development; I've been a consultant and writer; and I've been involved in e-learning strategy at a national level. But I haven't tackled a learning manager's role for a while, and its lure is irresistible.

I'm pleased to announce that I'm joining Volunteer Development Scotland, based in Stirling, in their new role of Learning and Practice Development Manager. Among my new responsibilities, I'll be looking at learning through the practice of volunteering, national occupational standards and professional awards in managing volunteers, and increased use of e-learning and blended learning. There's a big agenda, and I'm enthusiastic about adding value in VDS's programmes providing leadership, quality assurance, and resources for volunteering in Scotland.

I also intend to keep up my writing and blogging, and I look forward to growing my network.

Experiential Learning

2009-09-28T14:15:00.002+01:00

I recently (only about 2,300 years after the event!) came across this quote from Aristotle: "for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them." It kind of sums up the problem with experiential learning. As Peter Honey (a couple of millennia more recently) said “learning from experience is tough, you get the test first then the lesson afterwards”.

And yet experiential learning remains one of the most important approaches to learning and development, especially in the world of work. Learning for work is about more than the acquisition of knowledge or even skills: it’s about applied learning, about changing behaviour; about demonstrating competence or more; about using the knowledge and skills acquired to gain performance improvements. And not just for the individual learner, but to share them with their work team and among the whole organisation – to achieve business results.

Given this importance, it’s odd that we don’t have very much simple language to explain it, as distinct from the range of terminology associated with learning through teaching and the classroom (or more recently, all the techie jargon associated with e-learning, but let’s not go there again). Some of the cumbersome phraseology in the last couple of paragraphs – “experiential learning”, “demonstrating competence”, “performance improvement” – requires quite a lot of explanation for what is essentially very simple activity.

I’m coming round to the view that “practice” is a succinct way of describing what we’re talking about. It’s commonly used to describe sporting activity, like football practice, or musical activity, like piano practice; it’s widely understood to represent the process of learning by doing things repeatedly, until you get them right; and it’s a common word with little ambiguity attached to it. We’re all familiar with the saying that practice makes perfect.

So perhaps we should talk less about “experiential learning” or “work-based learning” and more about plain, simple, practice.

I hope to get the opportunity soon to apply this thinking – to practice what I’m preaching. In fact, I’m dissembling a little: I know I’m going to be looking at this in a major new project I’ll soon be undertaking, so more on this theme will inevitably follow.

Learning platforms

2009-09-23T15:08:00.003+01:00

I sense some disquiet among techies when we refer to learning platforms: it may be the terminology is not strictly accurate. But I increasingly prefer it to the array of acronyms, none of which is much clearer when spelled out, and which only serve the cause of mystifying e-learning when presented in abbreviated form.

VLE – Virtual Learning Environment – is my favourite, but remains open to misinterpretation, as is its near relation MLE (Managed Learning Environment). The popular LMS, short for Learning Management System is, I think, especially misleading, as it conflates Learner Management System with Learning Content Management System, two different things.

A learning platform, whatever we call it, essentially comprises some or all of three components (and perhaps some additional features). These are illustrated in the diagram.

The Learner Management component manipulates information about learners. This is what enables learners to manage their personal information, and it is what yields records and reports for organisations. Crucially, this is not just about e-learning, as it may be used to manage learner information relating to all learning activities, including those that remain exclusively offline.

The second component is about courses, learning objects and learning resources – the content of learning programmes.

And the third, sometimes neglected, component is about managing the learning processes. Hopefully this is about more than simply building pages of illustrated reading with quizzes bolted on at the end. It can include a virtual classroom, or collaborative tools like discussion forums, blogs and mini-blogs, or wikis.

Many platforms have been around for a decade or more now, and amazingly, we still seek clarity on what they actually do. I hope this post helps.

Why coaching is misunderstood

2009-09-02T13:24:00.005+01:00

I used to think that coaching was something I hadn’t done very much of. Even though I wrote about coaching, mentoring and related activities in my first book, A Guide to Management Development Techniques, offering a couple of coaching case studies along the way, I still felt it was something I hadn’t practiced much. I’ve recently learned this is a common misconception.

I’ve been looking more closely at coaching recently, as a result of writing a short contribution on the subject in the CIPD’s Learning and Development manual. John McGurk, CIPD’s Learning, Training and Development Adviser, writes in the August 2009 issue of Impact, Quarterly Update on CIPD Policy and Research, that “if we identify the behaviours of coaching rather than the concept of activity, we find that coaching is already much more embedded through the activities of line managers than might be expected”. In other words, managers already do a lot of coaching – they just don’t recognise it by that name. Frustratingly, McGurk doesn’t go on to give examples of this, but they can be found in the report he references, Coaching at the Sharp End (CIPD, 2009).

The report highlights some characteristics of a coaching style of management, including:
# Development orientation (I help them develop themselves as individuals)
# Planning and goal-setting (I help them express their own action plans)
# Mutual support (If any of them has a good idea, I always use it)
# Effective listening (I spend more time listening rather than questioning)

..and the lesson for learning and development professionals is that we need to engage with people at this level of detail rather than speaking our own code of “coaching” that we mistakenly assume others implicitly understand.

Performance and potential

2009-08-18T11:26:00.004+01:00

Performance management doesn’t get the press it used to. It seems not so long ago that every other article you read about learning and development was addressing a performance agenda. Even some learning and development job roles were being redefined, and renamed, as being about performance improvement.

And rightly so. Too often, in the past, learning was seen as being about serving time on apprenticeships, or completing courses and qualifications, as though acquiring knowledge, skills and credentials was the main objective. The emphasis correctly shifted to applying that knowledge and skills, and the changes in performance that could be achieved for individual job roles, for teams, and for organisations as a whole. Linking learning and development to performance management meant it was more business results oriented.

So what’s changed? The answer is that talent management and development has come onto the agenda. It’s still important that learning helps develop performance, but there’s now another focus as well. Potential. Instead of just focusing on performance improvement, learning and development is now also about developing employees’ potential, such as to foster critical skills needed in an organisation (key talent development) or to prepare people to take on new roles in an organisation (succession planning). Leadership development (for future leaders) is perhaps the most glaring, and common, example, of investing in the development of potential rather than performance.

Talent management is about maintaining not one focus, but two – the distinct but complementary imperatives of performance and potential.

Do learning objects really exist?

2009-07-21T16:10:00.009+01:00

Twenty years ago, learning and development professionals were preoccupied with concerns about not reinventing the wheel. This was the time of the creation of National Standards (NVQs and all that), and the idea was that a lot of work was going into defining generic job roles, and training and assessment routes – work that could be picked up and re-used almost anywhere, with a little tweaking. This made some sense, especially if there were opportunities for learning through sharing ideas.

Ten years ago, e-learning pursued the same obsession when it introduced the concept of learning objects.

illustrated by this diagram (click to enlarge):

A college lecturer of my acquaintance, well-versed in teaching National Certificate modules, was puzzled as to how much further courses could be broken down beyond the modular level, and suggested to me that these objects were no more than “facts”. Of course, learning objects come in many other forms, but whatever they are, they haven’t caught on in the same way.

The truth is there’s a lot to be said for reinventing the wheel, in terms of the learning process you go through when you try it. And in reality, many learning designers have preferred to start from scratch, especially when the technology represents no barrier to doing so. So the vision that never materialised was that all courses could be disaggregated (clumsy term, but is ‘chunked’ any better?) into components that could then be re-assembled into other courses.

I suspect the most workable solution lies somewhere between the vision and the everyday reality (the latter is often at least partly driven by "Not Invented Here" syndrome). Certain objects may indeed be stored in a databank for frequent re-use, such as diagrams, pictures, video clips, audio clips and reference documents. But the elements of learning that bring these resources together are probably best reinvented for each use.

My Visual CV

2009-07-01T11:36:00.006+01:00

I have recently discovered, and been very impressed by, a great resource called Visual CV. I think a better name would be Online CV or Web-based CV, but the idea is that rich and dynamic content may be added to your CV by placing it on the Web instead of on paper. You can make your CV visible to everyone at its own URL, as I have done at http://www.visualcv.com/kenfee. Or you can restrict access to whoever you want - the private version (not visible at my URL) includes all your personal contact info.

Creating my visual CV reminded me that I keep meaning to add video clips to this blog. The snag is I have to create them first, as I don't already have some. However, as a test, a starter, and to encourage me to create new video clips, here is the short clip I've included in my visual CV - it's almost six years old, and shows me introducing the Inaugural Scottish E-learning Lecture, which was themed around a food analogy, to explain my otherwise bizarre comments!

Book review

2009-06-30T18:24:00.002+01:00

I am indebted to Richard Wright, Head of Learning for a medium sized global business based in Devon, England, for contributing the following review of my latest book, Delivering E-Learning, on Amazon:

“This book has been all of the following: a great read, a toolkit, a handbook and an inspiration. I am extremely happy that I chose this one out of all the other e-learning books. For anyone who needs to understand e-learning at work from a strategic perspective, I cannot recommend this book too highly. The references for further reading and research are excellent”.

The original review may be found here.

Thanks, Richard!

Digital learning tools

2009-06-16T07:42:00.005+01:00

There's an excellent resource at the online Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies, which lists and explains digital tools to support learning, many of them free.

The list is compiled annually by Jane Hart (left) who runs the centre, and is a compilation of tools recommended by users from all over the world. Each user (134, so far) submits their top ten tools, and these are compiled into a list of the top 100, and the top 25 categories.

The top 25 are listed below:

1. Web browser
2. Social bookmarking tool
3. Blogging tool
4. RSS/Feed reader
5. Micro-blogging tool
6. Email
7. Instant messaging
8. Personal productivity tool
9. Mind mapping tool
10. Presentation tool
11. Presentation sharing tool
12. Online office suite
13. Web conferencing tool
14. Course authoring tool
15. Screen capture tool
16. Demo/screencasting tool
17. Web authoring tool
18. Wiki tools
19. Image/photo tools
20. Audio/podcasting tools
21. Video tools
22. Personal dashboard
23. Course management system
24. Social networking tool
25. Integrated social media platform

Visit the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies to view the contributors, the top 100, an explanation of the top 25, including clarification of which tools are free and which have costs, a presentation and an explanatory article.

Terminated!

2009-06-13T09:22:00.003+01:00

It’s not often that online learning gets discussed in the mainstream, and I must admit I missed the Governor of California’s most recent pronouncement. I caught up with it on primetime TV last night on the BBC, when it was discussed on Have I Got News For You. Well, not so much discussed as ridiculed, albeit for the wrong reasons

Arnold Schwarzenegger has advocated greater use of online learning in schools. His actual statements make perfect sense. For example,

"California is home to software giants, bioscience research pioneers and first-class university systems known around the world. But our students still learn from instructional materials in formats made possible by Gutenberg's printing press"
(from USA Today)

However, he made the mistake of emphasising the cost savings of replacing textbooks, allowing critics to focus on claims that he is only proposing this to save money, and to caricature his position as “getting rid of textbooks”.

This underscores a point I have made many times before, about advocates of digital technology in learning needing to focus on the real benefits. Sadly, it also highlights the uphill battle we face in getting traditionalists to accept that there are now new ways of learning, which are often better than the old ways. As far as the Have I Got News For You panel were concerned, the arguments for online learning were terminated.

Mapping the scope of learning and development

2009-06-11T12:42:00.002+01:00

CIPD has a new initiative to re-define and re-explain the HR profession, comprising a map of the profession, which is intended to replace the profession’s competence framework. I am convinced this ostensibly administrative activity will lead to many positive new developments, by prompting people to think about HR issues in new ways. One thing it’s caused me to think about already is the creation of some sort of map of the scope of learning and development.

For example, how should we define the relationships between learning strategy, knowledge management, talent management and development, and corporate universities? These are all areas I’ve worked in, and yet I’m not confident that the new HR map will help clarify their relationships.

According to the information released so far, the map will include ten professional areas, eight behaviours and four “bands” or levels of competence, ranging from “entry level” to “HR Director”.

The 10 professional areas are:
1 Strategy, insights and solutions
2 Leading and managing the function
3 Organisation design
4 Resourcing and talent planning
5 Organisation development
6 Learning and talent development
7 Performance and reward
8 Employee relations
9 Employee engagement
10 Information and service delivery

For a learning and development strategist, I can see relevance in 1, 2, 5, 6, and to some extent 4 and 9. But it looks like the map will identify learning and development only as a sub-set of HR: it is that, of course, but it is also something more, with overlaps into the sphere of educationalists and others. I think I’d like to see a more expansive and inclusive map of the learning and development profession, but I certainly await further information with interest.

The map/diagram shown above is from here.

Learning on the move

2009-06-01T08:45:00.002+01:00

Many learning and development professionals argue that mobile phones or personal digital assistants (PDAs) are not useful devices for learning. Their rationale boils down to complaining that the screens are too small.

You don’t have to adopt superfluous jargon about “mobile learning” to take the opposite view. I’ve always thought that learning is more about communication than about information, and there’s no doubt that phones and PDAs are powerful communication devices. But even the small screen argument is looking increasingly irrelevant.

I’ve only had a handheld device with a good-sized colour screen for five years: before that, I had one of those tiny green-tinged monochrome screens on my phone, and carried a separate PDA. But the real revolution has only started for me in recent weeks, as I have acquired an iPhone. The screen may be just 3 inches by 2 inches, but that is ample for all sorts of activities, including sending and receiving email, playing games and even watching movie trailers.

I don’t want to get into Apple/Microsoft wars: I’m sure there are equally impressive MS-based alternatives to the iPhone. But I’m amazed by what my new handheld can do, and it reinforces my belief that much more learning in the near future is going to be conducted via devices we have hitherto regarded primarily as just phones.

If I can read email, I can read learning materials; if I can send email, I can complete multiple-choice tests; if I can play games, I can undertake interactive exercises; if I can watch movie trailers, I can watch educational video clips. I can browse the web. I can make best use of my handheld via tailored apps designed specifically to be used on it. And I can communicate with a tutor or mentor by phone, text and email. This is not just me getting carried away with my new piece of kit – the age of learning via handhelds has definitely arrived.

To twit, or not to?

2009-05-15T10:20:00.003+01:00

Lots of interest in Twitter these days, and not just from celebrities like Stephen Fry and Jonathon Ross. Clive Shepherd, e-learning consultant and chair of the eLearning Network, undertook a three month personal trial, detailed in his article in the current issue of e.learning age, but could reach no definitive endorsement. Clive likes it himself, but says, “whether the benefits I have found are universal, I couldn’t possibly say”.

Without having undertaken any trial, I have reached a similar conclusion. It’s an interesting and laudable attempt to offer something new in the field of social networking, and may be personally attractive to some, but I doubt it will offer enough lasting value to remain as a widely used tool. And its application specifically for learning is doubtful.

I’d liken it to instant messaging, in that it has immediacy, it’s a small-scale app, it appeals to those of limited writing ability (I don’t mean that to sound condescending – that has its place) and it can combine well with other things. But how many of us still use instant messaging regularly? The gap it set out to exploit between email and texting doesn’t seem to exist any more, especially with many of us using the same handheld devices to do both.

To be fair, I’m not a great one for generic social networking sites either – I don’t have a Facebook account, although I am on LinkedIn, a site with a sharper business focus. But I have been using niche discussion forums for nearly a decade, and I was an early adopter of Friends Reunited, perhaps now the most passé social networking site.

My guess is Twitter won’t last. Partly because I question its long term value, once the novelty factor has worn off, and partly because I can’t see how anyone is ever going to make any money from it. But maybe I’m just being a twit.

Learning with technology

2009-05-12T17:53:00.003+01:00

The current issue of Managment Today questions the role of HR, and concludes, among other things, “Here’s one way the human resources profession can shatter some of the tired old stereotypes that cling to it: get online”. The article goes on to argue that this is already starting to happen.

By coincidence, the current issue of People Management carries a similar message. Reporting on HRD Week, held in London from 21 to 23 April, its headline says “Embrace online learning, HR urged”.

The message is so consistent, the argument seems rather one-sided.

And yet, we also know there is huge resistance to e-learning. Every year the CIPD annual survey tries to put a positive gloss on what its members report, and yet the survey returns show unmistakeable hostility to e-learning. Hardly any HR professionals rate it as one of the top three most effective techniques for learning, and around half don’t use it at all.

Are HR professionals all schizophrenic, or is there a rational explanation for this apparent contradiction?

I’m increasingly seeing this as an argument over semantics. In my new book, I show that digital technology is an essential part of everyday life, including working life, and naturally that extends to learning. Most people will accept this, but they don’t recognise many technology applications they use as being “e-learning”, which they view as a narrow kind of learning, not often very useful. Trying to persuade them otherwise seems increasingly futile, and a diversion from the main task of getting them to engage with technology for learning.

OK then. Maybe it’s time for us to stop talking so much about e-learning, and focus instead on the broader arena of learning with technology.

The Apprentice is crap

2009-05-04T11:20:00.006+01:00

Reviews of business books tend to be anodyne (I say this without yet having seen a review of my latest book) but I read a great exception to this rule in the latest issue of Management Today. Peter York’s review of Linda Gratton’s Glow is as funny as it is savage.

One of only two pieces of praise York had was for Gratton’s focus on co-operation:

“Businesses actually work better if people share and co-operate and merge their heuristics – a hugely 2009 perspective set against the individualist warfare-for-dummies language of The Apprentice – which is so instantly, hideously dated by events”.

Granted, this is a more articulate one-line critique of The Apprentice than my headline, but it’s surprising how many Google hits you get for “The Apprentice” and “crap”.

Nearly two decades ago, I was involved in sponsorship of The Business Game, an early attempt to make business sexy for television. It, and many other attempts, failed, so The Apprentice has at least succeeded in capturing the public’s imagination. But surely to the detriment of the general view of business, if all it is about is seeing who’s best at selling shoddy goods and toadying to Srallun?

The British Chambers of Commerce have even condemned the programme’s portrayal of selling as a profession, and believe it could harm recruitment to the sales profession. And everyone joins in the chorus of how it is guilty of “dumbing down”. Come to think of it, Dragon’s Den is a much better business programme.

What is e-learning?

2009-04-23T12:52:00.002+01:00

What is this crazy little thing called e-learning?

· Self-study courses delivered online?
· Self-study courses on DVD or CD-ROM?
· Self-study courses available over a corporate network?
· Online courses interspersed with face-to-face events?
· Tools for electronic performance support?
· Live e-learning events – Webinars?
· Use of learning resources made available online?
· Use of online discussion forums?
· Blogs?
· Wikis?

Could it be it’s all these things and perhaps a lot more? Some people don’t think so, and have made up their minds e-learning is a marginal aspect of learning and development. I respectfully disagree, but I’m increasingly seeing this as a debate about semantics.

Perhaps we need to re-frame the debate as one about learning and applications of digital technology. If the term e-learning is becoming an obstacle to engaging in serious discussion about the use of some of the tools listed above, then perhaps it’s time to stop talking about e-learning.

Shameless plug

2009-04-03T08:05:00.004+01:00

Today is the official publication date of my new book, Delivering E-Learning: a complete strategy for design, application and assessment.

Actually, truth be told, it's been available from Amazon at least for a couple of weeks now.

AmazonLink and KoganPageLink.

As previously indicated, happy to discuss anything to do with the book here, especially the more controversial aspects, which include scathing criticisms of e-learning vendors and disparagement of technology standards. But for the moment, I'm just pleased that it's in the shops.

Set learning free

2009-04-02T13:40:00.006+01:00

I continue to meet quite a few people who are very critical of Wikipedia (WP), and stress its unreliability. This argument is becoming tired, but every source is fallible, and one of the good things about WP is that its fallibility is clear: I find increasingly that entries I consult on WP have been discussed, edited, improved, and cite clear references; the occasional exceptions are flagged as not yet meeting standards in some way, and can be viewed as a work-in-progress.

Some criticism of the use of WP, as opposed to the intrinsic value of the resource, seems fair. An academic of my acquaintance is surely not alone when he bemoans the laziness of his students who cite WP. No matter how often he tells them to look for the original sources at the foot of the WP page and cite them, they continue to take the easy option. His complaint is understandable, but the frequency with which the students consult the world’s biggest online encyclopaedia bears testimony to its usefulness as an initial source of reference.

I consult WP nearly every day, and take it for granted now, but lately I’ve been getting more excited about Wikiversity (WV), another site in the Wiki family.

WV is “devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning”.

WV is "a centre for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Its primary priorities and goals are to:
· create and host a range of free-content, multilingual learning materials/resources, for all age groups and learner levels
· host learning and research projects and communities around existing and new materials".

So it doesn’t offer courses, but rather a more participative model of e-learning. How this came about is discussed here.

WV will be three years old in August of this year, and I predict it will go from strength to strength, perhaps becoming as widely recognised and used as its sister project, WP.

Metaphor in learning and development

2009-03-24T14:19:00.001Z

Have you ever stopped to count the metaphors we use routinely in learning and development and wonder why they come from where they do?

I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that many of them derive from the industrial age, and reflect the activities that people seemed to value in an industrial setting. Thus we speak of workshops and of benchmarking, and use this sort of language so much that many of us will not stop to think that these are, in fact, metaphors and not literal expressions for what we’re doing.

What’s interesting about e-learning is that the metaphors are different, perhaps reflecting our move away from the industrial age to the information or digital age. Thus we have portals, platforms and even passwords. This seems to me a good thing, as instead of dwelling on the past, we are looking ahead, and many of the new metaphors are about rising, or opening up, or reaching for something new. If this encourages a more positive, creative outlook, that has to be of value.

Now just don’t get me into the ball-park of sporting metaphor: I’d hate to sound like I’m not a team player, but everyone wants to hit a home run, right?

Intellectual Capital

2009-03-12T11:05:00.002Z

Intellectual capital seems to be making a comeback. It features as the cover story of the current issue of People Management, and the expression, dormant for a while, seems to be in use again. For me, this is a welcome development.

It first emerged in the 1990s, and was a vogue expression, along with knowledge management, in the most swollen state of the dot com bubble. When that bubble burst, the expressions went out of fashion, but that always struck me as unfair, as the underlying principles were sound.

Tom Stewart’s Intellectual Capital, the seminal text on the subject, is one of the best books I have ever read, and more than ten years from its publication still seems very profound.

What I like about the concept is it explains hidden assets, intangible capital, and value that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. This is important for advocates of learning and development: we see spend on learning as valuable investment in human capital; accountants tend to see it as just running-cost expenditure. If investment in learning is to be taken seriously, we need to be able to show that it adds value, and is not merely a drain on expenditure.

Tom Stewart argues that the most important measures of value in a business are its knowledge assets, and that strategic development and deployment of these assets is the key to lasting competitive advantage, now and in the future. Stewart caricatures the work of corporate accountants as counting the bottles rather than describing the wine, and insists that it’s the latter sort of value that is the hidden gold of organisations.

Knowledge assets are developed through the efforts of people, who work, learn, research, develop, and create and refine knowledge. Organisations need to recognise that investment in learning and development leads to increased intellectual capital, which in turn leads to business growth and improved profitability.

The Seven Pillars

2009-02-27T10:50:00.003Z

My latest article, The Seven Pillars of the Corporate University, has just been published on the EPD website. Link.

I chose the “seven pillars” imagery, a blatant steal from Lawrence of Arabia, because of the happy coincidence of there being seven factors to consider, and because I liked the idea of the factors, or pillars, supporting the edifice. The association of Lawrence’s original usage with wisdom helps the metaphor.

I’m finding an upsurge of interest in corporate universities. The American market may have become saturated a long time ago, but the concept has been much slower to catch on in Europe and the rest of the world. Perhaps that’s because the academic universities of the old world have a different gravitas, derived from their longer histories, or perhaps in Britain the legal meaning of the word university has been an impediment. There may be other explanations.

I prefer to believe it is because the latest incarnations of corporate universities offer much more than was conceived in the pioneering US institutions like Walt Disney, or later Motorola. The most popular current model is more like Hilton University, with its new emphasis on digital learning.

As always, happy to discuss.

Discussing my book

2009-02-13T12:46:00.003Z

Readers interested in my new book on e-learning may want to know more than the usual publisher’s blurb that appears on Amazon and elsewhere. The book sets out to demonstrate a strategic approach to considering and implementing e-learning, and includes features like: a foreword contributed by Bill McGrath of Scottish Enterprise; an introduction that places modern learning in the context of how digital technology is increasingly dominating our lives; a “virtual round table” discussion; an illustrative project; a glossary of technical terms; consideration of how to evaluate e-learning; an annotated bibliography; and a look at what the future may hold. All of this is relatively straightforward.

However, there are a number of issues raised in the book that I would expect to be more controversial, including:

1. A new way of understanding e-learning, as an approach that encompasses all new methods of learning utilising digital technology.
2. Identification of five distinct models of e-learning – and there may be more.
3. A matrix for considering the impact of different kinds of e-learning.
4. A call for more strategic thinking about e-learning.
5. Condemnation of techies for overuse of misleading jargon.
6. Condemnation of e-learning vendors for misleading clients and “vandalising the market”.
7. Dismissal of e-learning technology standards as largely irrelevant.
8. A new model for e-learning design – the “route map”.

I look forward to discovering how reviewers regard these issues. In the meantime, you can contribute to the discussion by adding comments here.

Publication date

2009-02-06T07:49:00.004Z

I’m pleased to announce the publication date of my forthcoming book, Delivering E-learning: a complete strategy for design, application and assessment.

It will be available in exactly eight weeks, on 3 April 2009.

You can place an advance order with Amazon, or direct with the publisher, Kogan Page.

AmazonLink

KoganPageLink

And I promise plenty of opportunities to discuss the book here.

Evaluation of learning

2009-01-31T12:59:00.003Z

I caught the latest of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen nightmares on Channel 4 last night: a “Great British Nightmare”, it seemed like a couple of extreme examples of the genre, including an exposé of a restaurant in Sheffield run by a former recruitment consultant. You could tell the proprietor had picked up some evaluation tips from the world of HR.

He proudly showed Gordon some customer response cards, where his diners had rated the food as “excellent”, the service as “excellent”, and said they would be happy to come back again. Gordon’s retort is unrepeatable, replete with his trademark in-your-face aggression and gratuitously offensive language. But the gist was to point out that the restaurant was losing money hand over fist, so it didn’t really matter what anecdotes were coming from the diners.

This is the sort of mistake learning and development professionals often make, confusing the easy-to-gather and flattering information from what is critical to their organisation. We have our equivalent of the restaurant’s response card for their diners in our “happy sheets” usually distributed at the end of courses, which invariably show how happy the learners are. What they don’t show is the impact the learning has for the business.

My forthcoming book (another shameless plug, and more to follow in February) dedicates a whole chapter to evaluation, and although my focus in the book is e-learning the lessons apply equally to all forms of learning and development. The chapter discusses Kirkpatrick’s four levels, Return on Investment (ROI), Return on Expectations (ROE), Six Sigma, and Total value-add. All of these systems have merit, but I reserve special favour for total value-add because it reaches the parts other evaluation systems don’t reach. More in another post.

Recessionary pressures

2009-01-22T12:58:00.002Z

They used to say that training was one of the first things a company would cut in a recession. But that was in the days when many companies carried large numbers of trainers on their staff. The old saw may only be true for organisations that still directly employ a lot of trainers.

Still, modern learning and development budget holders are bound to feel under threat in the current climate. So what are the arguments for maintaining spend on learning and development?

Investing in people’s talents is always a good idea, but it’s only an imperative if you can prove it impacts on flexibility, competitiveness and the bottom line. As the recession bites, learning and development professionals need to be able to make these arguments, and prove that learning is vital to their organisation’s current and future prosperity – and perhaps survival.

This may be a time to revisit fundamentals, and ask ourselves what resources we really need to fulfil the priorities in our remits. For example, is a software system that costs the annual equivalent of the salaries of two or three HR professionals really the best use of those funds? It may be time to take a blank sheet, or consider the opportunity cost of services we’ve taken for granted up to now.

At the individual level, I’m grateful to HR Network Scotland magazine for drawing my attention to the Open University’s resources “for workers to outsmart the recession”. We need more ideas like this.

New Year resolutions

2008-12-31T12:58:00.006Z

One of my New Year resolutions is to try to communicate more clearly, using plain English whenever possible, eschewing jargon, and of course avoiding clichés like the plague.

We all know the sort of clichés to avoid – the ones that come up far too often, such as:

Pick the low-hanging fruit
Don’t reinvent the wheel
It’s not rocket science
Hit the ground running
The elephant in the room
Keep in mind the big picture

… and so on.

I was amused to find a link to the Encyclopaedia of Business Clichés here.

One of those listed at that link (#11) is the new language of Web 2.0. A more historical example, #77, “let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes” dates back at least as far as the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men (the line is spoken by actor Robert Webber). So perhaps I’m wasting my time and clichés will always be with us.

But I promise to try.

I’d like to wish all my readers a happy, healthy, peaceful and prosperous 2009.

Talent Management

2008-12-10T12:26:00.004Z

Pop quiz. Is talent management about:

a) smarter recruitment,
b) succession planning, or
c) key talent development?

The answer is at the foot of this post.

Can you describe something as flavour of the month if it’s been around for ten years and is still popular? Talent management is one such fashion that has stood the test of time. I can claim this with confidence, having just completed a literature review from the War for Talent (McKinsey report dating from a study in 1997) to the Talent Management Pocketbook, published last year.

And it’s still popular because it makes sense. For the first time, it offers a strategic framework for co-ordinating a range of HR activities, including recruitment, coaching, teambuilding, leadership and management development, and much more besides. Indeed, it goes beyond the remit of HR, to include activities like corporate communications and reputation management.

One of the things I like about it is the positive spin it puts on people’s contribution to our organisations. We’ve had the sterile jargon of “human resources”, which somehow has stayed with us, along with other inhuman expressions like “human capital”. Now we can talk of “talent” (where I come from, in the West of Scotland, this has a slang connotation – talent is what you go looking for at the dancing – but thankfully that sense is unknown to most who use the term). Much better.

What has prompted these musings is that I’ve just written the Talent Management chapter for CIPD’s Learning and Development manual, a subscription-based product that may be found here.

And the answer to the pop quiz question is: all of them, of course.

The learning organisation

2008-11-28T08:51:00.004Z

Daniel Wain’s latest column in People Management magazine offers some resounding shibboleths about learning.

Learning is as natural to people as breathing
and
Learning is not mandatory, but neither is survival.

But I part company with him when he questions the concept of the learning organisation. Wain argues that ‘learning organisation’ is an oxymoron because “learning involves risk and innovation” (agreed) while “organisation equates to routine and predictability” (er, no it doesn’t - you could perhaps argue that’s what organising equates to, but that’s not the same thing). When he goes on to argue that only people learn, not organisations, it’s clear he’s missed the point about the latter.

Organisations are not impersonal bureaucratic monoliths, albeit sometimes some of them seem like it. Organisations are groups of people, who come together to achieve shared goals. They don’t comprise anything other than people, and the mechanisms people create (and can change). Can you imagine an organisation without people? Of course not - it couldn’t exist.

Peter Senge described the learning organisation as one “where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together”. That’s from The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, originally published in 1990, and its sentiments are entirely consistent with those of Wain’s recent column. So it’s a bit puzzling that he rejects the concept of the learning organisation as “unsound” - time for a rethink, Daniel!

Motivation

2008-11-25T14:19:00.001Z

I have railed before against those who claim you need to be highly motivated to successfully undertake e-learning or distance learning or any form of self-study. It’s not that it isn’t true, it’s just that it’s economical with the truth. You need to be motivated to learn. In any way, using any method. Anyone who thinks part of the teacher or trainer’s role in the classroom is to provide the motivation is making a big mistake.

The only person who can motivate you is you. Others can lead, influence or inspire, but only you can provide the motivation.

I like the story of the football coach who shared his approach when taking on a new team. I paraphrase: “The first thing I do is find out which players need motivated – then I get rid of them”. The point being if they haven’t managed to motivate themselves up till then, they probably never will.

It never ceases to surprise me how much of an industry there is around motivation, including self-promoting gurus of motivational speaking, sources for inspirational quotes and superficial puff, and producers of tacky merchandise to make the workplace feel uncomfortable. In this context, I have been delighted to discover the web offers many posters subverting all that.

There are lots more if you Google “demotivational”. You can even make up your own at http://diy.despair.com/motivator.php

And now seems as good a time as any to plug the Business Balls website, which gives a light-hearted overview of any business topic you care to name. Their take on motivational theory is here.

Management development

2008-11-13T10:27:00.002Z

The current issue of Professional Manager magazine highlights a new research report from the Chartered Management Institute. Learning at work: e-learning evolution or revolution? looks at the application of digital technology for management development - in my opinion, a relatively neglected subject to date.

Interestingly, the report considers eight distinct technology applications: blogs, e-coaching, e-books, e-learning, online discussion forums, digital videos, audio podcasts and web-based social networking. For me, the inclusion of "e-learning" in that list sticks out like a sore thumb. Perhaps I'm quibbling over language, but for me, they mean "online courses", so why don't they say so? I'd say "e-learning" is an all-embracing term for all of the applications in the above list.

The good news in the report is that e-learning is no longer the sore thumb of management development. Work-based learning remains the most commonly-used, and most valued, approach, but there have been rises in all of the digital applications since the previous report in 2007, most notably among senior managers and directors, particularly in their use of discussion forums and social networks. The report warns that organisations need to harness these applications to their own ends to ensure management development is on-strategy and not random, inconsistent, or plain wrong.

The report can be accessed here.

Garth Heron, RIP

2008-11-01T12:46:00.004Z

Last year, in reference to Anita Roddick, I wrote lightly about the phenomenon of going on holiday and missing the death of someone famous, only to be surprised when this is mentioned at the end of the year. I had no idea this could happen with someone I knew.

I was in touch with Garth Heron just before I went on holiday – his last email to me was on the evening of 25 August. On 28 August he died suddenly, and the next day I went on holiday. So it was a bit of a shock when I read yesterday - some two months later - the memorial tribute to him in the current issue of HR Network Scotland magazine.

Clearly, we weren’t close, and it wasn’t uncommon for months to pass without us being in contact, but we went back a bit. Garth was the HR Director at United Distillers when he invited me to his table at a charity dinner in the mid-90s at Glasgow’s Grosvenor Hotel, and introduced me to the then world snooker champion, Stephen Hendry (I still have the photograph). This was around the time he became Chairman of the Scottish Advisory Board of the Open College, where I was Manager for Scotland, and although we both moved on soon after, we kept in touch. I have Garth to thank for putting me forward for two jobs, when I was last in the market (one successful, one not) and we often had a coffee together when I was in Edinburgh.

I’m a bit late to offer a tribute to Garth, as it’s all been said by now, but I didn’t like to think of his untimely passing without at least acknowledging him. Garth was easily the most impressive HR professional I have encountered in my career, and the world is a lesser place without him. My condolences to his family and everyone who knew him.

Change of title

2008-09-30T13:53:00.001+01:00

The book proposal I had accepted by my publishers earlier this year was for a work titled E-learning Strategy. The publisher didn’t like that title, and suggested changing it to How to Implement Successful E-learning. This then was the title I had in mind as I wrote the book. Now the publisher has decided to change it again, and the book is instead to be titled Delivering E-learning, with the sub-title, a complete strategy for design, application and assessment.

I can’t say I’m happy with the latest title, as the word delivery is a bit misleading. Those of us familiar with the classic training cycle will recognise delivery as just one of four stages of the cycle (after needs analysis and planning, but before evaluation). This is a familiar distinction for most kinds of service delivery, although in fairness, casual business-speak recognises delivery to have a wider meaning.

But what do I know? The publisher probably knows best, and that's the sanguine view I'm taking. Hopefully the new title will grow on me, unless they decide to change it again …

Brand contamination

2008-08-26T14:24:00.003+01:00

The concept of brand contamination is familiar to marketers, who strive to protect brands from negative associations. Once a brand is “contaminated”, who will ever trust it again? Just ask Gerard Ratner, who described the jewellery sold by his eponymous shops as “crap” and lived to regret it – the business continues, its products still sell, but you won’t see any Ratners stores in the high street any more, as the brand was irredeemably contaminated.

“E-learning” may not strictly be a brand, but I wonder if the name is irredeemably contaminated?

The case that digital technology is all-pervasive in the modern world is surely now irrefutable. The idea is not so strange that people should be as comfortable using digital technology and the Web for learning, just as they do for day-to-day work, for information gathering, for mobile communication, for games-playing, for music downloading, for movie watching, etc, etc, etc.

Yet the 2008 CIPD learning and development survey yields two disturbing statistics: only 50% of respondents (HR professionals) think e-learning is an important way of learning, and hardly any of them rank it in the top three methods. Perhaps they have negative associations with the name.

This is not a conclusion I approach lightly. My own book on e-learning is now complete, although you won’t be able to buy it until April of next year. Will the term e-learning – and my book title – be obsolete by then?

Step away from the screen!

2008-07-29T17:06:00.006+01:00

Yesterday I heard a devastating critique of e-learning, from a source not just close to home, but actually in my home.

My wife is preparing for her ACCA professional accountancy final exams, and was explaining to me why she – and many of her accountancy colleagues – chose to attend classes rather than take the e-learning option. Basically, she spends all day slaving over hot spreadsheets, and doesn’t like the idea of spending even more time in front of a computer. This led into a discussion of the precautions she takes to avoid RSI, and how she always chooses, whenever there is a choice, to do things away from the PC.

As more and more of us spend more and more of our work time in front of computers, is this the fundamental problem with e-learning?

I think this helps explain why some people are reluctant to choose online courses. But it also illustrates a common misconception about what e-learning involves – it’s not all self-study in front of the PC.

Most importantly, this critique is not actually about learning at all. Instead, it points at how we interface with digital technology in general. See my post of 14 May re new interfaces – the time is near when we’ll no longer use a keyboard and mouse, but instead will use more natural interfaces. This is the problem my wife was highlighting, and for the time being, it remains an issue not just for e-learning, but for all applications of digital technology, especially those we deem less urgent or important.

And no, that's not my wife in the picture.

Zealots

2008-07-02T12:33:00.003+01:00

The other day, a prospective client asked me if I was a zealot – an e-learning zealot. I thought it was an odd question. I responded that I regard e-learning as one of a number of useful approaches to learning and development, alongside classroom-based learning, work-based learning, coaching and mentoring approaches, innovative approaches, and others. This response seemed to go down well – apparently I had demonstrated that I wasn’t a zealot.

But who exactly are these “zealots” that my prospect – and perhaps other learning and development professionals – fear?

Surely there isn’t anyone out there now (there may have been ten years ago) who seriously believes e-learning is the best or only approach to learning, or should be the default approach? Surely nobody actually thinks we should abandon all – or even most – of our learning approaches and put everything online?

I used to think trainers who feared e-learning meant their jobs would be replaced by computers were hopelessly naïve, but perhaps this sort of fear is more widespread than I thought?

What sort of message have e-learning vendors been getting across for the past ten years if this sort of fear persists?

Birthday greetings!

2008-06-16T10:36:00.004+01:00

This blog is one year old: yesterday was the first anniversary of my first post - and this is my fortieth post.

This week also sees me complete my forthcoming book, How to Implement Successful E-learning, which will be published early in 2009. I hope to discuss the ideas in this book, as well as some other stuff, in the months leading up to publication.

My resolution for this 'new year' is to try to network this blog more. I’ve mentioned my LinkedIn network already, and I’d like to invite all readers to join me on LinkedIn.

I’m also going to create some links to other blogs with similar themes to this one. I’d like to expand the readership of this blog, and build it into more of a community. Any further suggestions for ways to develop the community would be very welcome.

Innovative approaches to learning

2008-06-11T10:05:00.003+01:00

A couple of years ago I was introduced to the chocolate factory, a large-scale learning exercise offered by the Wizards Network. In this exercise, groups of learners work together to design, manufacture, and package luxury chocolates, using the finest Belgian chocolate, under the supervision of a professional chocolatier. The exercise may be used to learn about teamwork, team building and team leading, communication skills, customer focus, and much more. A skilled facilitator may use learners’ experiences to help them achieve all sorts of learning outcomes that may have real meaning for their business. And of course, it has particular appeal for chocolate lovers.

The point of this sort of exercise is to find ways to engage learners, in order to get them into a positive frame of mind for learning. Rather than the same old boring routine of sitting in a classroom, looking at a flipchart or a PowerPoint presentation, the idea is to excite minds by doing something new and different – without losing sight of the learning, and business, objectives.

Of course, the chocolate factory wouldn’t excite factory workers in the food industry, or perhaps any sort of factory workers. But it would be extremely innovative for most of the rest of us. What I recommend is finding out exactly what interests a group of learners, and designing a learning experience around that – be it sport, art, music, animals, the outdoors, magic, drama, or whatever.

Unfortunately, many people perceive this sort of thing as frivolous, but there’s a wealth of theory about innovative approaches to learning, and why they are successful. For starters, my 2006 article on the subject is here.

There are many situations where innovative approaches work well, and I’d be happy to discuss them further. Any interest?

Don Draper on e-learning

2008-05-27T08:30:00.002+01:00

BBC Four has just finished the first series of Mad Men. If you haven’t caught this drama about advertising execs on Madison Avenue in 1960, you don’t know what you’re missing.

Super-cool creative Don Draper opens the climactic pitch to Kodak with these bon mots:

“Technology is a glittering lure. But there is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash”.

He was talking about the slide carrousel (1960, remember) but today he could have been talking about e-learning.

Many people are drawn to new technology applications because of their “glittering lure”. Elsewhere, I’ve described this as the “gee whiz factor”. But just because technology is impressive doesn’t mean it’s going to work for e-learning. The reason certain applications engage the e-learning public is because they are effective tools to create interactive learning experiences. And that derives not just from the intrinsic properties of the technology, but also from how imaginatively the learning experience is designed.

I’ve seen some great technology applications that offer simulations, games, 3D panoramic images, avatars, dynamic mind maps, and all sorts of other techno-doowhackery. Without exception, each vendor believed theirs was a world-beating product, but most of them turned out to be no more than a “glittering lure”. The successful ones partner with learning and development professionals, if they want to get beyond flash and engage learners.

New interfaces

2008-05-14T13:04:00.003+01:00

How’s this for a piece of over-engineered old technology? I heard recently that the standard keyboard we take for granted is actually counter-intuitive. The QWERTY layout was apparently designed to slow down typists. In the 19th century, old manual typewriters had a design flaw – when typing speed increased, the keys used to stick. So some bright spark had the idea of laying out the letter-keys in such a way that it was more difficult to type quickly. The more commonly used letters (a, e, s, etc) were placed at the (weaker, for most people) left hand, and the more common letters were also placed towards the edges, so that they had to be struck by the weaker fingers like the pinkie.

Amazingly, nearly twenty years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, with almost everybody using a keyboard every day, we still haven’t got round to replacing it with something more intuitive, more natural to use.

But I don’t think that day is far off. Voice recognition software, touch-sensitive screens, handwriting recognition software are developments that point the way ahead. When Mr Spock first talked to the computer in Star Trek, it must have seemed impossibly futuristic, but now that day is near. And the keyboard and the mouse are on borrowed time.

2008-05-09T09:44:00.003+01:00

I finally got around to joining LinkedIn yesterday. I say "finally", because it seems I've been a bit of a laggard on this.

Last year I accepted an invitation to a free month's trial of eAcademy, pursued it with enthusiasm, as it seemed like a great idea, but found it virtually useless, so didn't renew at the end of the month. Only to discover I'm still registered to this day, still get loads of emails from them, and can't unsubscribe without re-entering my (long-deleted) account. Hmm.

But at the time, a couple of contacts invited me to LinkedIn, and suggested I try that instead. I didn't - how many networks could I possibly need? But I've found more and more people mentioning it. A few weeks ago, in casual conversation with a couple of friends - one in HR, one in IT - I found they were both members.

So yesterday I joined. They told me the average new member already knows 15-20 people on LinkedIn - I found more than 40 within an hour. So I'm going to give it a whirl. Just with one of the free personal accounts - I'm not yet ready to spend whatever the Sterling equivalent of $200 for a souped-up business account. But we'll see what value there is in it. I'm open to suggestions as to how to make more of it.

http://www.linkedin.com/

New partnership needed

2008-05-07T11:07:00.002+01:00

I must admit, I thought my last few posts would have generated more of a reaction. They could have been interpreted as a vendetta against vendors. But they’re not.

Software vendors have made a significant contribution to encouraging e-learning, by introducing learning and development professionals to useful applications of digital technology. But for the efforts of vendors, the ‘e-learning industry’ would never have got off the ground. And they have invested a lot of money in developing e-learning tools.

The downside is that they have misunderstood or underestimated what learning is about, and so have unwittingly set back the cause of e-learning.

But that doesn’t mean they should now be ignored. On the contrary, learning and development professionals need to engage more with e-learning vendors, and explore ways they can work together to create new and better e-learning solutions. This will involve binning most current offers from e-learning vendors, and this will be painful for them, but in the long run it is in everybody’s best interests. We need a new partnership to take us forward.

Top ten bad behaviours

2008-04-16T10:42:00.001+01:00

E-learning vendors cause a lot of problems in the market – here are just ten of their most common faults.

1. Vendors’ definitions of e-learning are often misleading because they are devised to lend disproportionate importance to their own offers.

2. Vendors rarely know much about learning, yet profess to be experts in e-learning – they’re not.

3. Vendors’ simplistic understanding of learning leads to technology of limited value, missed opportunities, and poor e-learning implementations.

4. Vendors often claim to offer complete e-learning solutions, when in fact their core competence lies in just one part.

5. Vendors use technological jargon to mystify e-learning, when they should be trying to make it more accessible. “E-learning 2.0” is a term used by vendors to cover up their past failures, while offering the same products as before.

6. The benefits vendors claim for e-learning serve more to make the vendor’s business case than to identify real benefits for their clients (e.g., ‘scalability’ helps vendors target larger clients, but is meaningless for small-to-medium-sized clients).

7. Vendors typically just sell their products, rather than helping identify clients’ problems and finding solutions for them.

8. Vendors tend to have a better understanding of technology issues but don’t share it in an open and honest way.

9. Vendors over-emphasise the importance of e-learning technology standards.

10. Vendors sometimes offer misleading price information, excluding items such as updates or expenses, which can be a high proportion of the client’s real costs.

They’re not listening

2008-04-04T10:38:00.002+01:00

As I mentioned last month, I spent a few years at the eLearning Alliance mediating between vendors and their corporate clients, bringing together two different communities who spoke two different languages, and encouraging them to learn from each other. This experience left me with the conviction that a lot of the problems of e-learning are down to the vendors.

HR and training managers are rarely technology specialists, and often inexperienced buyers, and vendors have exploited this to win (short-term) business, at the expense of learning more about their clients’ needs and adjusting their offers accordingly.

This is a theme I shall explore in some detail in my forthcoming book, How to Implement Successful E-learning, so I don’t want to give away the farm right now. What I am prepared to say is that e-learning vendors, on the whole, have misunderstood and underestimated what is involved in learning, and so have failed to take advantage of huge potential in the market. They have frequently opted for quick fixes rather than best solutions.

And this has been a causal factor in poor e-learning programmes and thus widespread learner dissatisfaction with e-learning.

Vendors need to re-examine what learning and development is about, and re-think what sort of technology tools they can offer to facilitate it. This is enlightened self-interest, as those who don’t will hasten their own demise.

Joke

2008-03-27T15:20:00.003Z

How many e-learning vendor staff does it take to change a light bulb?

I don’t know … one to execute the task, one to adapt for the Web, one to provide the hosting, one to provide the annual software support and maintenance contract, one to explain the e-learning standards specification, one project manager, one to manage the account … how big a budget do you have?

Sound familiar?