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Step 4: Decide what can be addressed using non-formal approaches

March 16, 2012 By Clive Shepherd Leave a Comment

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the fifth part of chapter 11:

Having identified the situations in which a formal approach is necessary, your next task is to decide how non-formal interventions can contribute to meeting the remaining needs in question or to support formal learning.

Non-formal solutions are likely to be appropriate when:

on-going efforts need to be made to ensure that the skills and knowledge that employees gain through formal training are successfully transferred to effective job performance;
there is no requirement for the learning in question to be formally assessed;
on-demand learning is not enough, i.e. when aided performance would damage credibility or when smooth and speedy performance is a priority;
the employees in question need to be kept up-to-date with on-going developments in their fields of expertise or prepared for a business change.

Top-down approaches to non-formal learning, such as on-job training, coaching, mini-workshops, rapid e-learning, white papers, podcasts, webinars, internal conferences and online video, are likely to be the most appropriate when:

the knowledge and skills in question are important and/or used regularly;
the employees in question are less experienced and/or less independent as learners.

Bottom-up approaches to non-formal learning, such as the use of communities of practice, open learning and continuing professional development, will work well when the employees in question:

have little commonality in terms of their needs;
are motivated to learn and develop;
have more job experience;
are more independent learners;
have some discretion over the way their time is allocated (or can be allocated time specially to engage in these activities);
have access to the necessary communication channels, e.g. internet access.

Coming next: Step 5: Decide what can be addressed on an on-demand basis

Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: newlearningarchitect

The New Learning Management

March 15, 2012 By Barry Sampson Leave a Comment

At the Learning Technologies conference in January, I took part in a debate about the future of learning management with Andy Wooler and Charles Jennings. We each had ten minutes to make our point. Here’s mine.

Some Background

If you’ve seen me speak at conferences, read articles I’ve written, or just got in to conversation with me, you’ll know that I’ve been an advocate of collaborative and connected learning for more than eight years now (I say collaborative and connected because no one was calling it ‘social’ back then).

I believe that such collaborative and connected activity has a key role to play in organisational learning, today and in the future; at the same time I still believe that there’s a good case for managing learning. Those two statements are not mutually exclusive; this isn’t a zero sum game.

Learning Management <;>; LMS

First of all, let’s clear up one big misconception.

Learning Management does not equal LMS.

Learning management is a process, a way of doing things; there’s certainly a lot more to it than LMS.

If you do make the mistake of thinking that LMS is the be all and end of all of learning management then you’re on the way to the next flawed assumption; that managing learning means tracking it.

Management Should Not Be The Default

That’s not to say that I believe everything needs to be managed, nor that management should be done in the same way it always has been.

Last year, Clive wrote a book called the The New Learning Architect, and one of the ideas he put forward was that when you are designing a learning solution the default option should be online, and that you should have to make a strong argument for any other approach, such as face to face.

He has since extended this to suggest that the default option should also be asynchronous – and again you should have to make a robust argument for doing something synchronously.

I’d like to further extend that and suggest that as a default we should not be managing learning. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be managing anything, but just as with the choice of online vs offline and asynchronous vs synchronous, it puts the onus on us to make a solid case for doing so.

Why We Should Manage Learning

And there are some very good arguments for managing learning.

It’s too important

Some things are too important to leave to chance. This is a really broad category, but some of the more obvious things that fall in here are compliance and regulatory subjects; things that are being done to ensure legal compliance and to mitigate risk.

It also includes things that are critical to the way you do things in your organisation, for example; customer service standards, reporting procedures or keyholder responsibilities – in essence things that have a ‘right way’ to do them.

You should think very hard about what really falls into this category – when designing learning content, I think most of us would expect SME’s to say that people need to know everything, and they’re also likely to think that everything needs to be managed; be prepared to really challenge that.

Every day is someone’s first day

Every day is someone’s first day, whether that’s their first day in the organisation, their first day in a new role or just the first time they do something.

It’s tempting to assume that everyone knows how to go about finding the information they need and where they should go to look for it. It’s easy to forget what it’s like to be a novice; someone who lacks the necessary knowledge, skills and organisational context.

This is a serious issue. If you look at attrition rates in newly recruited managers, by far the most commonly stated reason for leaving is some variation on “I didn’t know what to do, or how to do it”.

They want and need some structure; they want their learning to be managed.

There’s another problem too. Even if it is possible for someone to explore and discover these things themselves, it’s often much quicker if their learning is given some structure; if it is managed. Reducing the time to competency is a very reasonable business goal.

But remember what I said earlier – even if we make the case for managing the learning we shouldn’t assume that means tracking elearning modules or face to face workshop in an LMS. It could just as easily be other employees adding content to a wiki, or on blogs or whatever platform you want to use.

The business of learning

Then there’s the business side of learning. I’ve been an L&D manager, in traditional face to face delivery environments as well as technology driven ones, and a lot more of my time was spent on management than it was on learning delivery – and that’s as it should be. I had a responsibility for managing budgets, and suppliers and the management and allocation of resources. Just like managers in every other department.

To do that effectively I needed the right tools and the best possible data, otherwise how would I know where to focus my resources? That’s learning management.

Learning or Training?

I’ll leave you with one final thought. In this post I’ve used the word learning a few times, but is that actually what we’re talking about? Ten years ago the kind of jobs we did were called training, and we worked in a training department. Some time after that the name changed to learning and development, but has the job really changed? Indeed, has the business changed it’s expectations of us? I don’t think so.

In the debate all three of us agreed on one thing; only learners can manage learning.

The thing is, that much of the time when we say ‘learning’ what we mean is ‘training’ and that can, and in some cases should, be managed.

The vision: 1. Learning and development that is aligned

March 14, 2012 By Clive Shepherd Leave a Comment

In the first post in this series, we expressed a vision for learning and development that is aligned, economical, scalable, flexible, engaging and, above all, powerful in terms of the results it achieves. In this and the five posts that follow, we’ll take each of these in turn, starting with the need for learning and development that is aligned. In this case, we’ll use an extract from The New Learning Architect:

It is nothing new to be told that training should be aligned to the needs of the business, but that doesn’t mean that it ‘goes without saying’ or is ‘common sense’. All too often, common sense is anything but common. Ask yourself how many of the training interventions in your organisation are clearly aligned to current business needs, rather than fulfilling requirements articulated sometime in the distant past, but which have no current relevance. And how many interventions have originated from the l&d department on the basis of where they believe the organisation should be heading, regardless of the views of senior management? No organisation ever set up an l&d department so this department could then determine the direction for the organisation. It is not up to l&d professionals to decide what is good leadership, what is good customer service or what are appropriate values for the organisation. Their job is to help senior management make their vision a reality, regardless of whether that vision is shared by the professionals that staff the l&d department.

A good question to ask is this:

What behaviours are critical to the future success of this organisation?

Let’s unpick this a little. You need to know about ‘behaviours’ because, of all the various factors which influence the success of an organisation, only these can be influenced by learning and development. You need to find out which are the ‘critical’ behaviours, because you don’t have the resources to devote to the non-critical. And you need to focus on ‘future success’, because learning and development is an investment in the future and can do little to influence what happens right now. The only people who can answer this question with any authority are senior management.

The question can and should also be addressed for each of the main functional and regional departments and divisions within the organisation, as well as at various levels. For example: “What behaviours are critical to the future success of the IT department or European region”; “What middle management behaviours are critical to the future success of the organisation?”

Once you know what behaviours are required if the organisation is to succeed in the future, you need to assess the extent of the task in front of you:

To what degree are employees already exhibiting the behaviours that are critical for success?

Answering this question is no small task. If you work for a larger organisation, then ideally you’ll have set up a performance management system which enables you to keep track of how individuals are performing. This will include a competency framework covering every job position; one that is up-to-date with the constant and inevitable changes in job responsibilities and which describes the behaviours that senior management are looking to encourage. In order for you to assess the extent to which these competences are evidenced in actual performance, all employees will have been regularly assessed against this framework or will have conducted some form of self-assessment. Smaller organisations may not have gone so far, but they should at very least be conducting regular performance appraisals.

If, having carried out your research, you find no gaps, then your only problem is ensuring the continued supply of employees who exhibit the desired behaviours. You should be so lucky! Chances are you’ll have to ask one more question:

What influence can learning and development have on these behaviours?

Performance is influenced by a lot more than skill and knowledge. Situational influences on the performer include the clarity of roles and objectives, the suitability of the working environment, and the tools and other resources at the performer’s disposal. The performer him or herself has aptitudes (indicating his or her potential to learn) and motivations, as well as their accumulated knowledge and skills. The performer’s responses are also influenced by outcomes (the incentives and disincentives that are likely to result from performing in a certain way) as well as the timely availability of relevant feedback. The whole performance system has to be functioning correctly if performers are to exhibit the desired behaviours. Learning and development is only going to work if (1) unsatisfactory performance can at least partly be attributed to a lack of knowledge or skills, and (2) the employees in question have the aptitude to acquire these.

L&d professionals may have to be assertive in conducting and communicating this sort of logical analysis. As Wick, Pollock, Jefferson and Flanagan remind us, “The problem typically begins when someone in upper management decrees that the company needs to have a programme on some particular topic. And when the goal of having a programme is defined as ‘having a programme’, the initiative is in trouble from the start.” Senior managers may be experts in determining the problems that are getting in the way of performance, but they are not experts in finding the solutions – that’s your job, and this is your time to speak up.

Coming next: The vision: 2: Learning and development that is economical

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: transformation

What’s Yours Is Mine – Copyright in the age of Social Media – Part Two

March 13, 2012 By Barry Sampson Leave a Comment

In part one we looked at the shift to sharing content and the potential challenges that may present to L&D.

Part 2 – Copyright and IP

Let’s just pause for a moment to consider what copyright and intellectual property are, because they’re both terms that are used frequently without being fully understood.

Intellectual property (IP) refers to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognised. Under intellectual property law, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets, such as musical, literary, and artistic works; discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs. Common types of intellectual property rights include copyrights, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets in some jurisdictions. Copyright – a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time. It gives the copyright holder the right to be credited for the work, to determine who may adapt the work to other forms, who may perform the work, who may financially benefit from it, and other, related rights. It is an intellectual property form (like the patent, the trademark, and the trade secret) applicable to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete. The contemporary intent of copyright is to promote the creation of new works by giving authors control of and profit from them. Some jurisdictions require works to be registered to establish copyright, but most recognise copyright in any completed work, without formal registration. Original source: Wikipedia

In short, the creator of a work is usually the copyright holder and in the UK and US a work is the copyright of its creator as soon as it is created, without any requirement to register it or to explicitly claim copyright, such as by adding a copyright symbol. That’s not say that it isn’t good practice to be clear when content is copyrighted and who the copyright holder is. Of course this situation is effected by legal arrangements, so you may want to check any contracts of employment or other agreements to find out whether the IP that you create as part of your work belongs to you or your employer.

Alternative Licensing Models

So if we accept that all of the content we produce is our own IP, and that for most of us in L&D that IP either directly or indirectly provides our income, how should we address the issue of sharing? How do we protect our IP when there’s a universal shift to sharing content.

We could certainly take a stance in which we fully enforce all of the rights granted to us through copyright, aggressively pursue anyone who breaches them, and limiting the access and use of our content. This is a perfectly legitimate and understandable approach; after all if we’ve worked hard to produce something we should be rewarded for it. Most of us use this approach by default, perhaps because it’s the only one we know.

In some cases this approach may be quite straightforward. If you produce a piece of elearning content and then licence it to be used within a company, the technical constraints around hosting or delivery should make it easy to control. On the other hand, if you run a training course during which you give the attendees handouts, how do you stop them being circulated amongst their colleagues when they return to work?

If your content is online, or in any digital format, potentially it becomes much harder to manage.

One option is to consider an alternative licensing model, in which we retain our IP but at the same time make it possible for people to share it. There are a number of licences that allow us to do this, but probably the best known and most widely used is Creative Commons.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons (CC) provides a set of free licences that offer a more flexible approach to copyright than the usual “all rights reserved” method. Instead they allow you to take a “some rights reserved” approach, meaning you as the creator of the work can decide which rights you will grant to the end user.

There are four key aspects to a CC licence:

Attribution – Every CC licence requires attribution, meaning that when CC licensed content is used the original creator must be acknowledged, in effect saying “I created this, give me credit for the work I did”.

Commercial Use or Not – In allowing other people to reuse your work, you can choose whether it can be used for any purpose or only for non-commercial activities.

Derivative Works – You can also choose whether people are only able to use your work in its original unaltered form, or if they can create derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike – If you do allow people to make something based on your work, you can also choose whether they must offer it on the same terms (i.e. a Creative Commons or compatible licence)?

As well as the many independent content creators using CC licences, there are some big names you will undoubtedly be familiar with, including Wikipedia, the White House and Al Jazeera. CC also provides the legal framework for the Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative under which some educational institutions are making their courseware freely available.

Potential Benefits

We’ve already established that our IP has value to us, so why would we want to give away some of the rights to it? If we are going to give up some rights we needs to offset that against the good it may do us, and beyond simple altruistic reasons, there are quite a few potential benefits.

It clarifies the copyright position of the content, offering a clear set of licence terms instead of relying on implied licence terms such as fair use or fair dealing.
It encourages and legitimises the sharing of content, without hiding the source. If we think back to our earlier example of workshop handouts, there is a good chance that the delegates will share them anyway. By explicitly granting permission to share them we would remove any motivation to hide their origin, thus allowing our name or brand to be associated with the resources as it spreads through the organisation.
Services such as Youtube, Flickr, and Picasa integrate Creative Commons search, as do search engines such as Google and Yahoo. This can be beneficial to anyone creating content where it’s hard to find original resources, such as photos on niche topics that you wouldn’t find in a typical stock image library. It’s beneficial to the creators of that content too, because it helps to ensure attribution.
Taking a pragmatic view, it also saves the time, effort and cost of chasing anyone who infringes your copyright. As an individual this would be very difficult to do, and even for organisations it can be a time consuming and costly process with no guarantee of success.

The ease with which such licences allow people to legally share your works is a significant benefit. The trend for sharing and the increase in online content places ever greater importance on our networks, the people in them and the content that flows through them. Anything that ensures we keep the credit for our work as it moves through these networks can only be a benefit.

Conclusion: To share or not?

Thriving in a networked world means using every available tool to spread our content and our reputation. Choosing to licence our work in a way that encourages sharing has the potential to give us visibility far beyond the reach of regular marketing channels. That’s not to say that everything we do needs to be licensed this way, but we should be open to forms of IP protection that are fit for purpose in a network economy.

As an example of the simple practical benefits of CC licensing, in this article I’ve used and remixed content from Wikipedia and the Creative Commons website, safe in the knowledge that I’m within the law.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License too, so you are free to share and remix it yourself if you wish.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Note: It probably goes without saying, but this post isn’t legal advice and you shouldn’t make any big decisions about your intellectual property without consulting a suitably qualified professional.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: connected learning, copyright

Why training may not always be the right course of action – part 6

March 12, 2012 By Phil Green Leave a Comment

In Part 5 we asked why health professionals in hospitals still fail to observe simple rules of hygiene to avoid infection and cross-contamination. We profiled three behaviour patterns: skill-based behaviour, knowledge-based behaviour and rule-based behaviour. Now we’ll consider the need for physical and mental supports, see what the US Coast Guard knows, and draw lessons from Rudyard Kipling.

Physical and mental supports

And so let’s return to the notion that the right kind of intervention or support depends upon identifying what the performance blocker seems to be. If someone lacks the height, physical strength or motor co-ordination to perform a task, then no amount of training will make matters change. That’s obvious. Of course most emotional, cognitive or psychological obstacles may be less obvious than the physical mismatch between a person’s physique and the power or reach required to perform a task.

Anyone who has ever bathed a new born infant will know that a baby under these conditions may be perfectly compliant, or may be uncooperative. He will certainly be wet and slippery, and will not yet be able to sit or lie in a full sized bath without restraint. Water must be at the perfect body temperature of 37°C . Simple job aids are essential – a supportive plastic shell in which to hold the baby safe and supported; a floating thermometer that keeps a check on the temperature. Certainly there are such things as pre-natal and parenting classes, but they cannot control conditions in the physical environment at the point of performance.

What the US Coast Guard knows

Of course, early in 2012, safety at sea is tragically very topical, and there is no shortage of data related to marine, aviation, medical and environmental disasters. As the US Coast Guard notes in Prevention Through People: Quality Action Team Report (1995), when you organise people in a particular structure, mix in some technology and a hostile environment, then you have a combination of factors which affect performance. Sometimes the weak link is within the people themselves; but more often the weak link is the way that technological, environmental, or organisational elements influence the way people perform.

And when catastrophe happens, are we seeing proof that training doesn’t work? I do not mean to trivialise so much human loss and suffering, but the underlying cause of an incident like the tragic Costa Concordia is often a puzzle worthy of the great fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling is much quoted by l&d professionals. Author of The Jungle Book and Just So Stories, and of the poem If, he also gave to trainers the gift of his six honest serving men. You know the one …

I keep six honest serving-men, (they taught me all I knew), their names are What and Why and When, and How and Where and Who.

These are good questions. Learning designers use them with great skill to arrive at the best possible training solutions:

Who is involved?
How many people need training?
What do they need to know?
Why do they need training?
When must training start and when must it be completed?
Where will training take place?
How much is in the budget?
Etc.

But do we ask them at the right time, and are there some other, better questions we should be asking too? I’ll return to this question shortly.

That is the end of Part 6. In Part 7 we’ll challenge the perception of training as a “silver bullet” and we’ll see why Kiplings’ six honest serving men deserves to be far more than a cliché for trainers.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: performance support

Step 3: Decide what must be tackled formally

March 9, 2012 By Clive Shepherd Leave a Comment

Over the past year we have been publishing extracts from The New Learning Architect. We continue with the fourth part of chapter 11:

You can now start to shape your solution, starting with those needs that are best addressed, at least in part, through formal learning interventions.

A formal solution is likely to be your most appropriate option when:

the organisation can only achieve its objectives if the employees in question possess the relevant knowledge and skills;
the organisation needs to be able to demonstrate compliance to an external regulator;
a high degree of proficiency is absolutely vital to avoid the chance of an expensive error, damage to the organisation’s reputation, or risk to health and safety;
the employees in question are complete novices and are likely to depend on a structured approach to their initial training;
the attainment of a formal certification or qualification can make a big difference to the career prospects of the employees in question.

Top-down interventions, such as classroom courses, self-study e-learning, outdoor learning, collaborative distance learning, computer games and simulations, and blended learning, are likely to be the preferred choice in most situations. Bottom-up approaches, such as professional and postgraduate qualifications and formal adult education, are more likely to be used for medium-to-long term employee development.

Coming next: Step 4: Decide what can be addressed using non-formal approaches

Return to Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10

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Transforming learning and development: the need

March 7, 2012 By Clive Shepherd 1 Comment

Do any of the following apply to you?

Budgets for training are flat or reducing.
Managers are finding it harder to release their staff for days at a time to attend training programmes.
Travel budgets are under pressure making it harder for participants to travel to central training locations.
Learning & development staff are apprehensive about the idea of using new learning technologies.
You have had a poor experience in the past of using rather tedious self-study e-learning.
You are reluctant to compromise on the quality of the solutions you offer.
You know you really do have to make changes but you’re not sure where to start.

If your answer to any of the above is ‘yes’ then it will be small comfort to know that you are not alone. The fact is that changes are necessary and sooner rather than later.

Over the past three years, as we in the learning and development profession have battled with almost unparalleled levels of uncertainty and pressure on resources, my colleagues at Onlignment and I have found ourselves engaged more and more often in discussions with learning providers, both external and in-house, looking to reinvent their offerings for their particular markets.

Of course this is not the first time that learning providers have had to struggle with tight market conditions. But this may well be the first time that customers – internal and external – are beginning to question the basis of the service offering. So what’s changed?

First of all, customers cannot any longer afford for their employees to be off-job for protracted periods. That’s because they don’t have the spare capacity they once had to cover the time lost, and they need all hands on deck. They are also short on budget and, as we all know, training (particularly when external) is one of the easiest expenses to cut. However much we might complain about the importance of learning as an investment in the future, I doubt if any company ever went bust because they delayed formal training when times were tight. We have to accept that fact and realise that learning is typically a medium to long term investment, and some organisations have not been so sure they are going to have a medium to long term.

Customers are also more aware of the environmental impact of excessive employee travel. A good proportion of those cars on the motorway or planes in the air are carrying people to learning events, and not always in situations where face-to-face contact is essential to success. The environment may not be the biggest issue on anyone’s agenda right now, but it will return as economic conditions improve. By then, many organisations will have got used to the idea that many meetings and other events can be handled perfectly adequately using web conferencing.

Finally, there is an increasing awareness that stand-alone classroom interventions have a limited impact on job performance. However enjoyable they may be at the time, and however high the knowledge assessment scores might be at the end, these are no guarantee that what is learned will be retained, applied and then put to good use.

In this series of posts, we’ll start by developing a vision for a transformed learning and development function; one that is aligned, economical, scalable, flexible, engaging and, above all, powerful in terms of the results it achieves. We’ll move on to look at some of the changes that can be made to realise this vision, expressed as six shifts:

from generic to tailored solutions
from synchronous to asynchronous
from compliance to competence
from top-down to bottom-up
from courses to resources
from face-to-face to online

In each case we’ll be making clear that these are shifts along a continuum, not the abandonment of practices that clearly deliver results. We’ll also keep reminding you that every situation is different and that every organisation needs to strike its own balance

Lastly, we’ll spell out a process that will get you started on the journey to transformation, starting with a thorough analysis of your particular requirements, target populations and constraints. We’ll look at the implications these have in terms of your learning architecture and infrastructure, the way you analyse performance needs and design blended solutions, and the skills you’ll need to take advantage of new learning technologies.

Coming next: The vision: 1. Learning and development that is aligned

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: transformation

What’s Yours Is Mine – Copyright in the age of Social Media – Part One

March 6, 2012 By Barry Sampson 1 Comment

Part 1 – The Shift to Sharing

If there is one concept that sums up the way we use the internet today it, would be “sharing”. We share interesting articles and blog posts that we find. We use services like Foursquare to share our location and activity. We post our presentations on Slideshare, our videos on YouTube, our photos on Flickr. We share reviews on everything from book purchases to holidays. Some of this we do from our desktops, but ever more commonly we’re instantly sharing content from the same mobile device on which it was just created, irrespective of location.

Our online world is expanding at a rate that’s hard to grasp. There was more data transmitted across the internet in 2010 than in all the previous years combined. According to Intel, the number of internet connected devices is expected to grow from an already staggering 4 billion today, to 15 billion in 2015 and 50 billion in 2020.

Nearly everywhere we go on the internet, content publishers are actively encouraging us to spread the word. They add buttons that make it a one click activity for us to share their content with our own social graph; utilising our relationships with other individuals to promote their product.

There is also the human element to consider. I don’t subscribe to ideas that divide the population into digital natives and digital immigrants, but we have to recognise that the people currently reaching adulthood are younger than the web. They don’t remember a time when sharing content was harder than tapping a button.

So we can be pretty sure that the amount of content will grow, and the sharing will continue.

What Does That Mean to L&D?

So what does that mean to those of us in the world of learning, development and training? Potentially, quite a lot. Much of the L&D industry is based on the sale of intellectual property (IP), whether that’s content or advice. No wonder then, that so many people in our industry work so hard to extract as much value as possible by controlling their IP.

Not everybody is effected in the same way, but if you’ve built a business model based on the sale of training materials, this shift to a culture of sharing is a real challenge. Let me give you an example.

I recently spent time with a group of people from some of the biggest software vendors on the planet, and they were responsible for the sale and delivery of training to the users of their products. Anyone that’s worked in a large organisation will be familiar with their model; they supply their software at very low cost, sometimes at no cost at all, and the bulk of their revenue comes from selling a range of related services (which of course includes training).

The trouble is that their clients are creating and sharing their own learning content. They’re not producing courses, they’re mostly creating practical “how to” material in all sorts of formats from short videos, to blog posts to pdf documents, and they’re not just using it internally, it’s being shared on the internet too. You only have to do a quick search on YouTube or any other video hosting site to find examples of this.

You may not be effected to the same extent, but if you’re in the learning or training business, you will have some form of IP that you need to manage; consultants sell their expertise, training providers and elearning vendors sell course content, product vendors sell supporting materials. Even internal L&D departments are likely to produce content in which they own the IP.

In part two we will consider intellectual property, copyright and alternative licensing models.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: connected learning, copyright

Digital learning content: A designer’s guide – now on Kindle

March 5, 2012 By Clive Shepherd Leave a Comment

Digital Learning Content: A Designer's Guide

Our new book, Digital Learning Content: A Designer’s Guide, which was launched in paperback in January, is now available on Kindle for $9.99 / £6.50 or thereabouts.

We fully intend to produce a glossy, multimedia ePUB version for the iPad but that’s likely to take a while. We’ll let you know when that’s available.

Filed Under: Blog

Why training may not always be the right course of action – part 5

March 5, 2012 By Phil Green 1 Comment

In Part 4 we gave a little thought to the matter of memory. Now we’ll ask why health professionals in hospitals still fail to observe simple rules of hygiene to avoid infection and cross-contamination. We’ll look at performance in hospitals in Britain and the USA. We’ll begin with a profile of three behaviour patterns: skill-based behaviour, knowledge-based behaviour and rule-based behaviour.

Behaviour patterns

Skill-based behaviour

Formal published research often refers to particular behaviour patterns. One such is skill-based behaviour. This is inadequate performance due to our brains storing instructions. We don’t stop to consider how to tie a tie or shoelaces, for example; we are pre-programmed to do it. We become so familiar with aspects of our daily work routines that they become second nature. That’s fine as long as nothing changes, but when we become this comfortable with our environment, we open ourselves up to errors from overconfidence— the “I’ve done this a thousand times” mentality.

Knowledge-based behaviour

This is inadequate human performance governed by analytical processes and stored knowledge. It occurs when we face a situation that we have never faced before (or infrequently faced) and no stored rules exist for it that would provide us guidance. In such cases, we must depend on our knowledge and expertise to solve the situation. For example, much of the chaos associated with the first responders’ response to the 9/11 attacks was due to the fact that their disaster preparedness plans did not anticipate that type of attack. Therefore, first responders had to rely on their individual experience and expertise in how to effectively respond.

Rule-based behaviour

This is inadequate human performance governed by stored rules accumulated via experience and training. For example, we are typically governed by policies and procedures within our work environments. Some hospital workers are lax about hand-washing hygiene because they have never personally suffered an infection and so feel the risk is overstated. In other circumstances, for example in the case of CPR, campaigns recognise that some people are reluctant to do it because they don’t believe they can or because they would “feel stupid” doing it in public. Like the Massachusetts cartoons on delaing with strokes, the British Heart Foundation video It’s Not Hard featuring Vinnie Jones makes use of all the appropriate media – and a good deal of humour.

Example

Matters might have improved a little over the past 5 years but unwashed hands in the UK’s hospitals still contribute to the spread of MRSA. Ensuring health professionals follow simple rules of hygiene like hand washing is key to stopping bacteria spreading. But observed practice shows very poor rates of adherence to guidelines and reveals that staff fail to take account of risk, even with patients with MRSA. The Journal of Hospital Infection reported that 38 per cent of a research sample of health professionals failed to wash their hands after contact with MRSA patients, while 25 per cent failed to wash their hands after contact with faeces and 38 per cent failed to wash their hands after contact with blood. This was despite the knowledge that they were being observed. The Professor of Psychology heading the research said, ‘What is most worrying here is that healthcare professionals say one thing and they do another. There is no link between what they say and what they do. If we adopt a culture where we urge healthcare workers to treat everyone as if they are infected, then they stop risk assessing. They can’t wash their hands all the time, so we need to teach them how to risk assess.” 2006 research from the University of Hertfordshire and the Institute for Employment Studies (IES)

Figures from a spot check in South Wales showed that 42 per cent of doctors and consultants were failing to clean their hands properly according to guidelines. When challenged over whether they had washed their hands, some asked “why?” A director of nursing said: “We have had a lot of discussions at executive board. We instigate disciplinary action if they have been told to wash their hands and they don’t do it again.” The culture of not washing hands was affirmed to be completely unacceptable, and yet it was still, “a custom more honour’d in the breach than the observance” (Shakespeare, Hamlet).

The North Carolina approach

The same problem exists further afield, in North Carolina, where years of awareness programs have had little effect. Part of the problem, according to a study in the journal Psychological Science, are the actual signs posted in hospital washrooms urging health care workers to wash up. Changing the message from “Wash Your Hands to Protect Yourself” to “Wash Your Hands to Protect Your Patients,” the study found, could motivate some doctors and nurses to wash their hands more frequently. The patient-focused sign produced a 33 percent increase in the amount of soap and disinfectant used per dispenser over a two-week period, compared with the other signs. In a second phase of the study, trained observers recorded how often doctors and nurses physically washed or disinfected their hands. The sign urging doctors to think about patients produced a roughly 10 percent spike in hand washing compliance, a jump that was small but statistically significant.

That is the end of Part 5. In Part 6 we’ll consider the need for physical and mental supports, see what the US Coast Guard knows, and draw lessons from Rudyard Kipling.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: performance support

Step 4: Decide what can be addressed using non-formal approaches