Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,

Hoping internet couriers soon would be there.

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The children were nestled all snug in their beds,

While visions of X-boxes danced in their heads.

And Mamma with her Kindle, was feeling not bad,

We’d put out the cat and turned off the iPad.

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When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.

Away to the window I flew like a flash,

Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

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The light from my iphone on new-fallen snow

Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below.

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,

But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer.

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A driver was installed, and none could be fitter,

I knew he’d arrived for I read it on Twitter.

More rapid than email his coursers they came,

And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name!

.

I filmed it for YouTube so I would have proof

Of the prancing and pawing of each little hoof.

As I drew in my head, and was turning around,

Down the chimney St Nicholas came with a bound.

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His eyes-how they twinkled! his dimples how merry!

His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!

His mouth was drawn up, he had beard on his chin

He looked like the photo he’s put on LinkedIn.

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He gave me a smile and he did a quick dance,

I wish I had known he would come in advance,

To see him so briefly  – well frankly it hurts

Whatever has happened to Google Alerts?

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He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,

And filled all the stockings, then turned with a jerk.

And gave what Mamma calls an old fashioned look

And told me to visit his page on FaceBook.

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He said he would come again in just one year

Such gladdening tidings I was pleased to hear

It lightened my mood and it made my heart sing

I paid my subscription to Microsoft Bing.

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He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,

And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.

But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,

“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”

We want you to know we’re thinking of you at Xmas, but we’re sure you will agree that feeding hungry mouths is a better investment than Xmas cards.

In Why you need to set limits, Cathy Moore explains why it is sometimes necessary for the content developer to say ‘no’. Only so much is achievable with one piece of content – if you try and please everyone, you end up pleasing nobody.

I couldn’t agree more. While your learning objectives define the end point for a learning intervention, your target population can be seen as the start point. If your target population is relatively homogeneous, the route from start to end will be clear to see. However, if you have a diverse target population, with very different characteristics, then you are going to need to plan some very different journeys. There’s no guarantee that the same content (or any other ingredient in your intervention) is going to do the job on each one of those paths.

So what is it about a particular target audience that could make a big difference to the route you take? What are the characteristics that really matter?

• Demographics (age, gender, ethnicity, etc.): Sure these might matter in some circumstances, but you’ve got to be careful not to let your prejudices get in the way. There are more important factors.
• Preferences: There are more than six billion people in the world and each one’s brain is wired differently. What there are not are clear-cut categories of preferences that will help us to design content. See learning styles don’t exist, then keep looking.
• Prior knowledge / skill: Now, here we have something important. Those with a fair amount of past experience with a topic or skill are going to find it much easier to extend and enhance what they have. They have all sorts of well-honed mental models in place which help them to come to terms easily with new ideas. Novices need structure and support, because they are easily overwhelmed. Experienced people don’t need all this and might find the whole process patronising and frustrating.
• Degree of independence: Psychologists use the term ‘metacognitive skills’ to describe the attributes of independent learners who seem to be better than most at working out what they don’t know, what they need to know and how to bridge the gap. Like experts, they don’t need as much support and structure.
• Interest / motivation: This is a big one, because if some of your audience is going to take some convincing that your content is important to them, then you’re going to have to take whatever measures are necessary to sort this out. If you go through this process with well-motivated learners, you’ll slow them down and frustrate them.

Obviously there will be times when you can organise your material in such a way that you can accommodate more than one user type. What you have to recognise is when the client is asking too much and it simply isn’t possible. As Cathy says, you need to set limits.

In case you haven’t already seen it, I thought I’d mention that the eLearning Network is running a virtual advent calendar on tips relating to online learning. Mine was published today and is a little advice on preparing for a virtual online session. You can read it here.

Clive’s post on writing a voiceover script was published yesterday.

In many ways, e-learning is doing well. The Towards Maturity Impact Indicator report published last December showed that many UK organisations are experiencing significant benefits from e-learning in terms of efficiency and business agility. Learning Light’s recent survey of the UK e-learning market showed growth of 8% in obviously difficult economic circumstances.

However, it took the more recent Towards Maturity2010 Benchmark Report to show that the true picture is rather less encouraging. It would appear that face-to-face classroom courses are being converted lock, stock and barrel into self-paced, self-directed, online courses as a panic solution to a lack of funds. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that these decisions are being made hastily and unimaginatively as a defensive measure, and certainly not out of a heartfelt desire for e-learning. Most depressingly, the report suggests that a high proportion of users feel that the e-learning they are being offered is irrelevant to their jobs, probably as a simple tick-in-the-box compliance measure. When you consider how rich a learning environment the Internet is capable of providing (and does do for many of us outside work), this is a tragic waste of a wonderful opportunity for enlightened change.

The term e-learning is only a little over 10 years old, but in its most common form (interactive, stand-alone, self-study tutorials) it actually dates back to the late 1970s and has therefore been around long enough now to be considered traditional. This format certainly is efficient and agile, as the figures suggest (and when resources are tight, these benefits are definitely worth having), but they’re not the only measures that matter. Efficiency and flexibility only matter if you are doing the right things in the first place. What really matters is whether e-learning is delivering in terms of improved competence.

While there is much really excellent traditional e-learning, much of what is inflicted on learners falls short in a number of ways:

The end result is that e-learning is neither as popular nor as effective as it should be. It is time to envisage an alternative e-learning – just as efficient, yet more flexible, more engaging, more responsive, more powerful.

With alt-e-learning, the lengthy, interactive tutorial will be only one of many options available. The emphasis in terms of content will shift instead to tightly-focused, highly-modular media objects that can be employed on both a ‘push’ basis (as elements in top-down learning interventions) and ‘pull’ (accessed on-demand). Not all of these objects will originate with the l&d department, as subject experts from across the organisation become empowered and incentivised to contribute to the learning of their peers. The objects will be accessible on all sorts of devices (often as mobile apps) and come in many forms:

Importantly, this content will often be integrated with a wide variety of collaborative online experiences:

Alt-e-learning provides an online experience that mirrors how we use technology outside work, which your typical traditional tutorial certainly does not. It also blends seamlessly with face-to-face activities and offline media such as print. Many of the elements of alt-e-learning will already be available to you or can be put in place at low cost and without heavy reliance on outside specialists. And because alt-e-learning is so modular, the elements are easy to re-use, enhance and maintain.

Onlignment is committed to the alternative e-learning. We’d like to think we’re not alone.

This YouTube video was created by Common Craft for GoTo Training to explain the benefits of the virtual classroom:

For some reason, there are lessons that take a long time to learn – however often an action leads to negative consequences, you just seem bound to repeat it. One lesson I really hope I have now learned is that reading from a script doesn’t work – at least not for me. In the past few years I have tried this in numerous situations:

• giving speeches (such as at the E-Learning Awards a week or so back)
• when presenting a Pecha Kucha (that’s 20 slides each displayed for 20 seconds if you’ve yet to be initiated)
• when recording a screencast (it sounds so much better when improvised)
• when recording a podcast (free-form interviews work much better)

There are good reasons for thinking that reading from a script will work. After all, the best TV presenters do it convincingly. And you can be absolutely sure that you’re going to cover every point clearly. However, reading from a script doesn’t work well in a face-to-face setting because it forces you to lose eye contact with the audience for sustained periods. And even when you’re recording a voice-over it’s really hard not to come over as wooden and rather boring.

Can it be made to work? Well, perhaps, but professionals have one of two advantages: either they’ve got the luxury of a teleprompter, which allows them to retain eye contact with the audience or camera; or they’ve rehearsed well enough that they’ve got so familiar with the words that they only need to refer to them periodically. As Mark Twain said,”It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.”

I’ve made two resolutions. First, to avoid having to use any type of script if at all possible. Far better to trust in your instincts and talk around some key headings. Second, where a tight structure is absolutely essential, make sure I write the words to be spoken and not read, and then put in the hard work as actors do and learn your lines.

As a natural speaker, my father is my model here. He would quite happily get up and speak at any occasion. He never prepared and he never had a single note. He just said the right thing without fuss and sat down again. No slides and few jokes, but effortless.

A few months ago I had the chance to take a sneak preview at a new online video education service called Grovo. I enjoyed it so much that I made a note to post about it when it finally launched. Well, that’s now happened so I suggest you take a look. As Eric Capper of Grovo told me, “Grovo is designed to teach people how to use the Internet with 2-minute videos that roll up into 10-15 minute courses featured on our dynamic learning platform. Courses cover everything from Internet Safety to Google Documents to YouTube and more.”

I’ll admit my first thoughts were negative. I reckoned that there was little I didn’t know about the web already and that I would find the videos boring. I was wrong because, as it turned out, there’s lots of important stuff I didn’t know and plenty of tools I had yet to be introduced to. I was also wrong because the videos are so short and so slick that I defy you to be bored or confused.

These little videos are a perfect example of where online learning content is going – short and simple.

Problem solving is an essential skill for all managers. When you consider the component parts of problem solving as a process, you can easily see why it lends itself well to same-time collaboration online:

• define
• identify
• understand
• invent possible solutions
• analyse
• evaluate
• select.

Strategic consultants use a variety of well-proven tools to define what the problem is.

A very simple tool is to ask the question “Why?” five times. In doing so you often get right to the heart of a problem. I’ve found that a clear whiteboard can be very effective in capturing the answers to the “Whys”.

For cause and effect analysis I prime the whiteboard with a diagram which resembles a fishbone like this:

Online and close up the various members of the group often pay closer attention to the task and become more personally engaged than if we do the same thing around a table with a flipchart.

I use text boxes or the chat facility in a virtual meeting space to facilitate ”drilling down”. This form of analysis, rather like fishbone, separates the elements of complicated issues. I ask the group to type a problem into chat. Next we take each one selectively into its own whitebaord or else into a shared mind map. We note the factors that impact upon the problem. For each point, I repeat the process until the group has revealed for itself all of the contributing factors, down to the smallest detail.

Questions one always asks when problem-solving are:

“How will we know the problem has gone away?” “What will “success” look like?”

In Management Consultant jargon, that is identifying the Critical Success Factors (CSF). I often find that groups have difficulty in setting a goal. My favourite aid for this is still Bob Mager’s Book ”Goal Analysis” (ISBN 1-879618-04-4). The process he describes is very well suited to close intensive collaborative work. Once again I make the point that doing this online and live intensifies the concentration. The gift of the skilled and patient facilitator is to enfranchise all members of the group equally. It is important to give people time to reflect without interruption and then use the combined creativity of the group to arrange CSFs into a hierarchy and assign a clear measure to each. Here is a graphical device I use often online to assist this process:

Understanding a complex issue may call upon a range of different tools.

SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) helps to build a view of whether the reasons for tackling a problem or opportunity are outweighed by reasons for leaving it alone. It lends itself very well to a virtual meeting environment in which tools for making notes and for capturing and sorting ideas are readily on hand.

Porter’s Five Forces where the power resides in a situation:

1. supplier
2. customer
3. threat of substitution
4. ease of new entry
5. competitive rivalry.

Each can be set in its own column for a small group to think through. On some occasions we have put each “Force” in a different breakout room with a small group to analyse it and then report back.

Here is an image taken from a session on PESTLE Analysis, used to probe the background against which the problem has occurred.

Risk Analysis is another process that we’ve found works well when facilitated in virtual meetings.

This is the “traffic light” template that most readers will find familiar. It is used to show how risk is the probability something bad happening multiplied by the consequences of the event.

Chris Agyris’s Ladder of Inference helps teams to test assumptions and check that all proposed solution are well-founded. Here is the template I work with online.

Impact Analysis helps managers to forestall undesirable consequences of a course of action. A form of this is Decision Tree Analysis which sets out potential solutions and channels thinking through the probable outcomes of each. It helps to pre-empt risks and tend towards advantages of each of the options under consideration. The sequence of images that follows show progresses stages drawn from a real session.

The final stage in the thinking is recorded through a mindmap. For this I app-share MindJet MindManager or MindMeister which can be had free, and is a collaborative online mapping tool.

My final example is the Johari Window. It is widely used to investigate relationships, and often associated with “360 degree feedback.” It is particularly successful when used live online. In Part 7 of this series of blogs I described how I use the performance wheel. The Johari window works in much the same way by combining a preparatory online survey with the virtual meeting.