The occasional insight into learning and development and whatever sparks our fancy.
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
Last week I began to wonder just what employers value in their L&D teams, particularly their L&D leadership. I hopped on indeed.com and searched for L&D manager positions. I grabbed the first 50 job descriptions I could find and plugged them into a word cloud generator and this is what I found: Continue reading
In just over a month, I’ll have an opportunity to speak at Learnapalooza, a super-fun annual conference in Seattle that features a wide variety of learning blocks – from speed learning sessions and demos to breakout sessions to keynotes from some of the most important L&D voices found in the Pacific Northwest.
The theme of the conference is superheroes and my session will revolve around three superheroes in the world of instructional design.
One of those superheroes is a tool called SessionLab. Continue reading
When there’s a deadline looming and you haven’t quite found the right creative solution for an upcoming training program, it’s tempting to keep pushing late into the day, even into the night, until a good idea finds you.
According to an article I recently read in a Time magazine special edition focused on the science of creativity, pushing through and sacrificing sleep may not yield the result you’re hoping for. Continue reading
I was sitting in the same conference room I’d been sitting in for two weeks, across the table from the same client, working on the same project. The clock was ticking.
The client had come to the Seattle office for two weeks. We had two golden weeks to work together in person, then we’d need to rely on remote meetings and emails and file transfers once she returned to her field office.
While we were both working as hard as we could and we were both feeling a sense of urgency to keep moving forward, I think both of us were also bored.
“What if we have the learners create an FAQ document – we’ll give them the questions and they need to come up with the answers – as the culminating activity for this section?”
“It’s practical,” she responded, “but I don’t think I like it.”
Ugh! We were never going to finish before she went home.
“I liked the idea you came up with for a prior section – the activity with the mountain climber theme. Can’t we do something like that here?” Continue reading
Instructional design, at its core, is about creating learning experiences that engage and excite learners to embrace new knowledge and skills. That said, does the context – whether instructional design is applied to a traditional school classroom or a corporate training room – matter? Or is instructional design the same, regardless of context, setting and audience?
Last Monday, Endurance Learning welcomed its newest employee – Lauren Wescott – to our team. I first learned of Lauren and her skill set about 6 months ago when I saw a post on LinkedIn that said she’d been working in a K-12 setting as a teacher and instructional designer for several years and now wanted to explore the world of corporate training.
Today, Lauren is going to share some of her insights on the similarities and differences between instructional design in a K-12 setting and a corporate training setting. Continue reading