The occasional insight into learning and development and whatever sparks our fancy.
A friend of mine was sharing her experiences recently on a dating site. She had met an international man of mystery – Tomas – on a site. He seemed good looking enough and successful. Tomas was Portuguese and apparently made his money by doing something with gold bars and China.
And then on his most recent trip, Tomas got stuck in China and couldn’t get his gold bars out, unless… Continue reading
The year was 2015. I was sitting in a breakout session at a training conference and the speaker was about to discuss ways to easily bring animation into an elearning course. As she introduced her topic, she shared a bit of research that was new to me: Thanks to all of today’s technology and distractions that surround us, the average human attention span had dwindled to under nine seconds, which is shorter than the attention span of a goldfish! She even cited this article in Time magazine as her source.
The problem with this eye popping statistic is Continue reading
Several weeks ago I introduced our presentation design tool — Soapbox — and asked for volunteers willing to test it and provide feedback in our Beta phase. This week we’ll begin Beta testing on this tool intended to save people time in the design of their training programs.
As our Beta testers have waited to get their hands on Soapbox, we’ve asked them to participate in several short surveys about how they’re currently spending their time. Following are some insights from their responses. Continue reading
Reviews and feedback are critical to making any project a success. That feedback coming in a meaningful and useful way can be challenging, especially when faced with timelines and with several content experts. By the time a project is at the development phase of an eLearning project, many decisions should be final. However, feedback is still very important at this stage, and not always easy to document. Continue reading
Several weeks ago I wrote some observations for job seekers after reviewing 50 L&D manager job descriptions. In today’s post, Mary Cropp, Director of Training and Development at Bluetooth SIG, writes this guest post to share some very blunt advice for anyone looking to land their next role on an L&D team.
As the hiring manager and in-house consultant for all things L&D within my organization, I am choosy about who will be on my team and who will be providing contract work for the organization. Choosy? Make that very choosy. If I lift the veil for a moment on hiring practices within the L&D realm, I want to prepare all you facilitators, trainers, and instructional designers out there with a bit of what a hiring manager looks for in a candidate. Continue reading
On Monday, Brian shared with you his top 10 technology-based tools for the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (C4LPT). In no particular order, here are my top 10 tools for 2019.
I receive weekly reports from Grammarly, and it is pretty cool to see that I am averaging over 10,000 words per week. I write a lot and with that many hours spent at a keyboard I make a lot of mistakes, even the free version of Grammarly catches most of them. Continue reading
Each year, Jane Hart and the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (C4LPT) compile a list of the top 200 (technology-based) tools for learning. This list is compiled by submissions that come in from learning professionals from around the world.
If you’d like to submit your votes for the top learning tools of 2019, you can do so by filling out this form.
Here is the list of the top 10 technology-based tools (listed in no particular order) that I’ve been using for learning and development throughout this year: Continue reading
The moment of need is an interesting concept to me. When we are evaluating our learner’s level of training, many of our instincts tell us to train them on every step and every term because we don’t want to turn them loose untrained for goodness sake! But training isn’t isolated to what happen in the classroom or virtual course and we need to consider to what degree information should or rather will be retained when people exit.
I am working on a few projects right now that require different levels of performance support. What is interesting about them is how much digging it is taking to understand enough about our learner’s moment of need to support their training/performance support balance. As I work through these projects, I find myself setting a couple of common rules on implementing performance support. Here is what I have come up with so far.
If you find yourself writing steps of a process that your participant will not do on a regular basis, consider turning it into a resource. Instead of spending time in the training teaching them the steps of the process, turn it into an activity where they learn how to access and use the resource.
A good example of this is new hire training when people want to acclimate staff as quickly as possible. Acronyms, company jargon, and technical lingo fly around, and eyes glaze over like a donut. Taking the time to develop solid resources and teach people how to use those resources to amplif the learning experience for everyone involved.
How do you use performance support in your training? Let’s talk about more ways to use it in the comments below.
If professional development experiences are a sort of lab, in which learners can test new knowledge and skills and instructional designers and trainers can concoct new and engaging ways for people to learn, I wonder what the basic elements for this lab would be.
Being inspired as the son of a science teacher, I put together this periodic table with elements of amazing learning experiences organized by solids, liquids, gases, radioactive elements and interactive elements. Continue reading
Have you ever played Conference Call Bingo? Basically, it is a bingo card full of squares with common occurrences that happen on conference call like a hearing barking dog, or someone asking “did ___ just join?” another person saying “can everyone see my screen?”. The regular rules of bingo apply, except it is frowned upon by most leadership to yell BINGO in said conference calls. Continue reading