Jim, Author at Social Learning Blog

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The Importance of a Learning Climate in Corporate Training

Jim — February 8, 2013 — 2 Comments

learning Corporate training is a huge industry in this country, and in many ways corporations are embracing employee development like never before. According to the most recent numbers from the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), American companies spent over $150 billion on training in 2011 alone. With a national workforce that hovers somewhere around 150 million people, that means American companies are shelling out more than $1000 to provide developmental training for every employee – and they do it year after year.

To put it frankly, that’s an immense amount of money to spend on training. It also seems like a safe bet that if companies are spending so much money on professional development, they must be getting pretty good returns. But the sad truth is much of that money is squandered due to failure to engender a corporate culture that supports and encourages learning every day of the year.

What’s at the root of this problem? To put it simply, a misguided, simplistic, and outdated understanding of how training should be handled. These training plans tend to put too much emphasis on the Continue Reading…

In Training Development, Training Evaluation corporate training

The Role of Incentives in Learning (Hint: Read to the end to get a reward!)

Jim — January 15, 2013 — Leave a comment

One of the little absurdities of human nature that I’ve always found fascinating is how easily we allow our actions and priorities to be shaped by rewards and incentives that are not, when you think about them, very rewarding or incentivizing.

I was recently reminded of this rule while walking through the baggage claim section of the airport in Greensboro, North Carolina. Every fifty yards or so, I’d pass one of those baggage cart stations where you can rent a cart for a few dollars to trundle your luggage to your car. Each of these stations was nicely stocked with carts.

As I passed onwards to the parking lot, however, where one might assume I would find Continue Reading…

In Performance Improvement, social learning, Uncategorized corporate training, instructional design, learning incentives

Measuring Training Effectiveness Through Gaming

Jim — August 3, 2012 — 4 Comments

A very common question that Instructional Designers field from clients goes something like this: “The training plan looks great; now how will I be able to tell if it has an impact?”

While this is a perfectly natural question – after all, why else would one buy training – it can be a particularly difficult one to answer.

For a variety of reasons, the ability of training organizations to measure how well employees are “getting” what the training sets out to provide is limited at best. To start with, while clients often want to know how the training is going, they tend to be unwilling to pay for it – post-project assessment line items are often the first to be cut when any training budget is presented.

Even when money does exist for assessment, the realities of training project-timelines often make it impossible to follow one of the established models, anyway. For instance, the vaunted Kirkpatrick model (covered with great erudition in a series of posts by my colleague, Barbara Camm), which has been the gold standard of project assessment for over fifty years, requires a good deal of time to implement correctly across all four levels – the kind of time that rarely seems to exist in real-world corporate training.

So what does this mean for the lowly Instructional Designer (or his still-lowlier Project Manager) when faced with that scary question about “measuring training effectiveness?” Should we sit the client through a well-worn PowerPoint covering Kirkpatrick’s method, knowing that by the time the project is nearing its completion there will most likely be neither time nor budget for such frivolousness? Or is this the moment to be a training hero and present an entirely new and radical solution, one that can magically combine the first three (and possibly all four) of Kirkpatrick’s levels into the act of training itself?

We’re talking about gaming, people, and it holds out the promise of obviating the need for almost all direct project assessment. Because when a game is well-designed (as yours surely will be), the learner is effectively assessing himself by his very progress.

To see what I mean, let’s take a look at the four levels of the Kirkpatrick method:

Now think of your favorite video-game. For me, something like Skyrim comes to mind. For those who haven’t played it, it’s a classic role-based video game where the player’s character must overcome a variety of situations by developing a set of skills, and then use those skills (often in novel ways) to advance to a higher level and a new quest. When I first got the game, I happily played it for weeks (to the annoyance of my girlfriend), advancing rapidly in skill-level and completing quest after quest.

So did Skyrim-as-training score well on the Kirkpatrick model? Do we need a series of questionnaires, tests, and charts to figure that out? Nope. The answers can all be found in my performance in the game. Level 1 is covered – I wouldn’t have kept playing for weeks and weeks if I didn’t think it was well-designed and engaging. Level 2 is clear, as well – in order to progress in the game (which I genuinely wanted to do), I needed to learn certain skills. On the flip side of that coin, my changed-behavior was clearly demonstrated by my ability to employ my new skills to advance through the quests. So we can check off Level 3, as well.

The Kirkpatrick level that may or may not be measurable simply through playing a game comes at Level 4. In my example, it’s certainly included – the goal of my learning was to “beat” the game, and I was able to accomplish that. In a business situation, it may not be so clear cut (measuring financial performance, for instance, might require careful real-life study). Still three of the four levels covered in the training itself aren’t bad!

While Skyrim is an excellent example of a game that fosters a desire for learning (so effectively, in fact, that a player-run wiki detailing facts, scenarios and strategies for the game has more than 100,000 articles), it is also not something that the average training budget and timeline could produce. Nonetheless, simpler games can also foster intense interest and spark self-directed learning.

An example that comes to mind from my own past is the strategic board game Diplomacy, which was designed by a graduate student at Harvard to mimic the strategic conflicts in Europe at the beginning of the 20^th century. This game requires little more than a map of Europe and some game pieces, but it is instantly engrossing and has inspired thousands of articles on game strategy (e.g. here). Compared to the millions of man-hours (and dollars) that went into making Skyrim, Diplomacy was the work of one guy and some paper, and yet it still succeeded in creating a dedicated group of players who by their very actions prove the effectiveness of the game’s design.

So the next time you’re faced with a need to demonstrate training effectiveness, consider attacking the problem head on with a training game. Not only will you give the learner a welcome break from the usual classroom and web-based training routine, you’ll actually receive clear evidence of how well your training is doing – all without a single test or questionnaire in sight!

In Evaluation, Gaming Theory evaluation, feedback, gaming, Kirkpatrick, user adoption

Microsoft Project for the Thrifty Project Manager: 3 Free (or Almost-Free) Alternatives

Jim — April 5, 2012 — 5 Comments

With what free time I have at work, I’ve lately been on a mission to find a project management suite that can reproduce the best features of Microsoft Project, add on others, and cost less than $30/month all-together. Some people of course might ask why I would take the time to do this – Project is a great tool, one that many PMs would swear is worth its weight in gold (and judging by the sticker price, they’re not far off).

For whatever reason, getting “just-as-good” alternatives is something of a hobby of mine. It’s why I proudly purchase store-brand instead of name-brand, and I like to think it helps me to be a better project manager. Our job ultimately is to think of our clients’ money as if it’s our own, and from that perspective, it’s certainly worth my time to see what’s out there for limited-cost. Naturally, I wouldn’t recommend using an inferior product just to save money, but with so many wonderful options available online, “cheap” doesn’t have to be a by-word for low-quality.

So… on to the quest! As with many of the business-software applications Microsoft produces, Project contains a whole bunch of nuanced features that are cool and add to the “neat” factor, but which the average training-project PM probably won’t need very often. Much as I can understand a PM working on, say, an aerospace project with dozens of resources and hundreds of variables appreciating the variance and earned-value functions, it’s not something I’ll use very often. Instead, I need a tool or set of tools that can handle the core functions I deal with in everyday training implementations, but which aren’t otherwise satisfactorily covered by Microsoft Office. These include:

• timeline and tasks
• issues tracking
• collaboration

Finally, saving money on a tool like Microsoft Project doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if I have to spend hours switching among fifteen different tools (especially if those hours are billable!). Therefore, the final requirement of my search was that all of my desired features had to be encompassed in no more than three tools. Why three, you ask? Because obviously using four tools would be ridiculous. What a silly question…

Anyway, after hours upon hours of searching the web in my free time so you don’t have to, here are the three free project management tools that I think jointly make up a pretty bitchin project management suite on the cheap:

1. Collaboration: Twiddla

For teams that are not able to meet in person frequently, a good online collaboration tool can be absolutely essential. Most people would cite Google Docs as the best free tool in this category, but the requirement that everyone must have a Google account can cause unnecessary headaches (it always amazes me how many people still don’t have one!). Similarly, Microsoft SkyDrive is a wonderful option in that it allows you to upload and share Office files, but again, requires a Microsoft-based online account (such as Windows Live). For all these reasons and because it’s free, I’m giving my collaboration shout-out to Twiddla, an online whiteboarding service that offers instant, no-signup/no-setup collaboration space for groups of all sizes.

Twiddla best uses are for things that don’t require a whole lot of typing, since to my knowledge there’s no way to save the output as a document (rather, the save button produces a screenshot). As a result, it works well for reviewing web-based training modules, learning portals, graphics, etc. You can upload documents and mark them up, but again, with the screenshot-save function, someone may end up doing a lot of re-typing.

2. Issues-tracking: Lighthouse

Anyone who has ever tried to manage testing and review of a web-based training system without a robust issues-tracking system knows that it is not an experience worth repeating (sadly, I’m talking from experience here). With that in mind, I’ve recently discovered Lighthouse, a very easy project-development tracking application that is particularly good at issues-ticketing. Along with a host of other useful features, Lighthouse gives testers and PMs the ability to create and reply to tickets directly from email, which is a major time-saver (letting Lighthouse collect and organize your issues emails behind the scenes is a heck of a lot easier than having them come directly to you!). Of further use, supporting documents and images can be attached directly to tickets so that anyone on your team can find them. Assigning responsibilities and setting milestones is easy and, as a bonus for the busy PM, Lighthouse gives you the option to consolidate multiple projects and tasks into one overview screen, which greatly increases your ability to stay up-to-date (and stay sane).

While Lighthouse is the only one of the three tools mentioned here that does not have a free option, it’s not exactly expensive ($25/month). Still, I’m always on the lookout for truly free options, so if I come across one in my searches, I’ll let you all know!

3. Timelines and Tasks: Zoho Projects

If you look online at lists of the best free web-based project management applications, the one that tops the lists most often is Basecamp. I have to admit that I have used (and continue to use) Basecamp, but I’ve become increasingly disenchanted with it as time has passed. The time tracking is well done, but the other features are merely so-so. What I find myself looking for most is a tool that can help me keep track of timelines and tasks in a clear fashion – inevitably when I try to assign tasks on DasheCentral the process fizzles out after people get frustrated with its tedious structure.

Enter Zoho Projects as the new contender for the role of timeline/task champion! While I have not yet had a chance to use the tool in a live project, I’ve played around with it enough to get a feel for what it can do. The interface is intuitive and emphasizes collaboration, offering a robust shared calendaring feature that can track meetings, appointments, deadlines, etc., with automatic reminders and alerts via email or RSS.

It is in the realm of tasks and milestones, however, that Zoho really seems to come into its own. From a single main tab, a project manager can track progress in any number of ways, including tasks, resource utilization, dependency, or Gantt view. The latter is a feature that Microsoft Projects does particularly well but which is absent from many free PM tools, including, conspicuously, Basecamp. Zoho also offers a number of ways to filter the data, and gives a quick view of who owns what, deadlines, and percentage complete. All in all, it seems like a real winner, and I’m eager to give it a go on my next project.

In Project Management/Project Delivery Basecamp, freemium, Google, Lighthouse, Microsoft Project, project management, saas, SkyDrive, Twiddla, Zoho

The Flipped Learning Revolution — Coming to a Brain Near You?

Jim — December 14, 2011 — 7 Comments

One of the concepts in training that has taken the biggest strides this year has been that of the “flipped classroom.” My colleague Jon Matejcek first covered it back in March in his article “Online Academy Helps to Keep Lectures Where They Belong: Out of the Classroom.” Essentially, the idea is to upend the traditional teaching model of classroom lecture followed by personal practice at home. Instead, instructors can deliver lectures via YouTube as homework, and then spend the next day in class helping their pupils work through sticking-points.

As Daniel Pink writes in an article for The Telegraph, the flipped classroom is so intuitive that when you hear about it “you want to slap your forehead at the idea’s inexorable logic.” Luckily, more and more schools are beginning to take notice. The New York Times recently ran an article on the subject titled “Online Learning, Personalized” detailing new software being rolled out by Sal Khan and his Khan Academy (also first introduced on the SL Blog in Jon’s article above) to allow teachers to maximize the effectiveness of the flipped model.

Using this tool, instructors can track in real-time the progress being made by every individual in the class. As the author of the article notes, the software is in essence “a peephole into the brains” of each student, allowing the teacher to “see that a girl sitting against the wall is zipping through geometry exercises; that a boy with long curls over his eyes is stuck on a lesson on long equations; and that another boy in the front row is getting a handle on probability.”

The “flipped classroom” combined with software such as Khan’s, allows teachers and students to maximize the effectiveness of the learning experience. Lectures are no longer a “one-size-fits-all” proposition: pupils are free to fast forward in lectures if they already understand a topic, for instance, while instructors can personalize their instruction, focusing on students individually and at the exact moment they need help.

Given how intuitive this model is, it’s little wonder the Khan Academy has proven so wildly successful. When Jon Matejcek first mentioned Sal Khan back in March, his site had 2,200 lectures available, and had registered more than 42 million lessons “delivered.” Nine months later, those numbers are 2,700 and 90.5 million, respectively. Still, one has to wonder whether other areas of learning outside of the schoolhouse could benefit equally from the “flipping revolution.” Luckily, in a recent post by Jane Hart, we are presented with an interesting and practical example.

Recognizing the utility of the flipped classroom model, Jane has recently decided to flip a webinar she will be delivering for an organization in the Netherlands. Instead of following the usual model of a lengthy on-screen presentation followed by a necessarily rushed Q&A session, Jane is proposing something entirely different, and perhaps as slap-your-forehead intuitive as the example noted above. As she writes:

“I have written a blog post about the webinar, in which I have provided the participants with a link to an article I have written and asked them to submit questions (in the comments on the blog post) in advance of the webinar. This will give them time to read and reflect on it and come up with some considered questions before the webinar itself. We can then use the questions that we have received to plan the structure and format of the webinar. It’ll undoubtedly include some very short presentational elements from me – perhaps one or two slides here and there – to support my answers to the questions, but there will be time for a fair amount of discussion, and hopefully some collaborative activities if the webinar software can support this. There will also be an opportunity to review the flipped/social webinar model to find out if this is what the participants like/want/find useful, etc.”

Given how difficult it can be to keep attendees engaged during a webinar, this strikes me as an excellent method of keeping focus and entertainment – and thus value – high. It does make you wonder what other day-to-day learning models are ripe for flipping. If you’ve got any ideas, let me know!