A brief history of eLearning as seen through the lens of my own personal experience. A look at current trends we're seeing that influence how we design and deliver online learning programs. Presented at ATD Tech Knowledge, January 14, 2016.
ISYU TUNGKOL SA SEKSWLADIDA (ISSUE ABOUT SEXUALITY
Evolving Beyond the E: eLearning Trends
1. Evolving beyond the e-
eLearning Industry Trends and the Future of
eLearning
Cammy Bean, VP of Learning Design, Kineo
www.kineo.com
Presented at ATD Tech Knowledge
January 14, 2016
#ATDTK
2. Poll: How long have you
been in the e-learning
biz?
When you first got
started, what was it
called?
52. And embedding the message
for results.
Ask for change!
Provide ongoing support!
(Tip Sheets, Decoder Wheels)
Keep the messages coming!
Reward participation!
Evolving beyond the e-: eLearning Industry Trends and the Future of eLearning
The use of technology is such an integral part of today's training toolbox that the e in e-learning hardly seems necessary anymore. What do you think? Have we evolved beyond the e?
In this session, we'll map the evolution of e-learning and talk about where it's heading. How has it evolved? (Has it evolved?) What have we been doing right in this industry and where are we still flailing? In today's environment, what does smart use of technology look like? How have blends matured as we look for better ways to support and improve performance in the workplace? How can we better involve frontline managers in the training process and use technology to support them as they support their employees? We'll look at examples and share current trends. You'll come away with some tangible ideas you can use in your organizations.
Application on the Job:
Describe the current industry trends (and think about the ones you want to use in your environment).
Discover a model for supporting and engineering proficiency in the workplace by using a smart blend of technology and real people.
As a bit of background. Let’s go back to 1996. It’s my first day at my new job as a junior instructional designer for a small “multimedia production company” in Massachusetts. I get on a plane on go on my first business trip ever. Yes, first day on the job. And head down to Washington DC for my first instructional design project…
My first ID job and my first day on the job: Navy Federal Credit Union, THE largest credit union out there. I feel like I’ve come back to my roots or something…
That first project I did for NFCU was a CBT. Remember that term? Computer Based Technology. It was 1996 and we delivered courses to our clients on CDs. Remember those?
The training model was pretty simple: instruct, demo, practice, assess. For lesson after lesson until the user had mastered the basics of how to login, to how to deposit a check, etc.
It was a video world back then – and an hour of CBT content costs a company about $40,000 – by today’s standards that would be the equivalent of around $65,000 or something.
We did everything from scratch back then. There were no magical PowerPoint conversion tools or rapid eLearning products. We dreamed of that day and the efficiency and speed that would give us.
While I was working at the CBT company, this thing called The Internet really started to take off. We started Googling things and finding stuff online. It was pretty amazing. My company started talking in terms of Knowledge Management and browser-based learning. Things were changing, and fast.
Around the same time, some of these products that my team had dreamed of in the late 1990’s started to appear. We saw a different eLearning landscape emerge. Articulate, Captivate, Adobe Presenter. The organization’s own training team could now create eLearning content with the click of a few buttons. For better or for worse, right?
As we moved in to the early 2000s…The Web began to evolve from web 1.0 to web 2.0 – where user generated content and collaboration and social networking started to happen.
YouTube – early 2006 I remember the first YouTube video I watched….Just 2 Guyz by thelonelyisland
People starting wikipediaing…. and then eventually we started blogging, facebooking, tweeting, and instagramming. This was my very first blog post in 2006.
Today we’re no longer passive participants in what goes up on the web but active consumers and active contributors to that content.
I started using Facebook in 2007. One of my clients at the time as a national sorority. College students. Who were using Facebook. And in 2007 Facebook went open to the general public, and a lot of the eLearning bloggers I was connected to were trying to figure it out.
Today Facebook remains the most popular social media site – "72% of online adults are Facebook users, amounting to 62% of all American adults. Growth on the site has largely plateaued. There has not been a significant change in the overall share of users since 2012. Those on Facebook remain highly engaged with 70% saying they log on daily, including 43% who do so several times a day. ” *
* http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/09/mobile-access-shifts-social-media-use-and-other-online-activities
We also started to get these things called iPads and iPhones. I got my first iPhone in 2009. I was a late adopter but I was so quickly hooked. Content was no longer locked to our desktop computers and the world became increasingly mobile. Which meant, I could check emails from my bed at 10:00 at night. Send out a pithy tweet. Check in on Facebook. Really great stuff, right?
Video games became standard home entertainment.
Video games. When I was a kid were these somewhat interesting things hooked up to your TV where you could bounce a pixel “ball” back and forth across the screen have evolved. Quite a bit. We now have generations of kids growing up with these games – my own included – and they bring those experiences with them into the world and the workplace. In my house we’ve got games happening on multiple devices: Windows Computer, iPads, iPhones, DS’s, xBox, WiiU….I had no idea that my house would be so technology driven.
We’ve got the Internet of Things happening all around us – Google’s NEST – which lets you program and monitor the temperature of your house right from your phone. These technologies will be embedded in everything we do fairly soon – our toilets will monitor our health, our washing machines will know how long to wash things (if they don’t already)…
And now we’ve also got devices like FitBits and Apple Watches and Oculus Rift Augmented Reality type things – wearable technology is starting to take off….
Oh, and 3D Printers….
This was me in early 2015 on stage at ATD’sTechKnowledge. The keynote speaker demonstrated her technology on me – a portable headset that measured my brain activity. While wearing this headset, I was able to manipulate a computer screen using ONLY MY MIND. Mind blowing, truly.
I’m sure I have missed a few trends and technologies in this grand sweeping history since 1996….but you get the idea. Technology is changing in leaps and bounds. And while I haven’t been talking so much yet about the eLearning industry itself, I think you’re getting where I’m going. Consumer technology – what we use on the “outside” of our jobs – is intensely tied to what we do in the workplace and will – if it’s not already – influence what we’re doing to train our employees.
DISCUSSION/WORD CLOUD QUESTION:
What technology trends did Cammy forget?
Let’s think about how we use technology in our lives today. Naturally.
Case Study:
My husband has become my in-resident car mechanic, pretty much willing to tackle any car problem. He’s not a trained mechanic, but he’s got access to a lot of resources that can help him solve the problems he’s trying to solve. A few weeks ago he decided to fix the air conditioner in our 17-year old car. This involved recharging Freon and a lot of troubleshooting and switches and fancy car stuff.
What did he do? He went to the Google. He searched, he found videos, and he read forums. He had a few failures, too. When he finally got it working, he went back to the forums and shared his experience. And then we sat in the car for awhile and enjoyed the cool air. Ah, the sweet breeze of success.
What did he not do? He did not take a class at our local Vocational Tech School (although he does jokingly chide himself for choosing to get a Masters Degree in English over a Voc Tech degree). He did not get certified in air conditioning repair. He did not find a self-paced eLearning course. He went out and found what he needed in a way that worked for him. He learned from his peers and he shared his experience with others. He tried things out and he was willing to make mistakes. It took him a few days, but he solved the problem just in time for the hot days of summer to strike the dark interior of our car.
He learned, naturally.
A few years ago, rainbow loom was all the rage. I bought my girls a rainbow room set. And boom – there was my 8 year old with her iPad open, watching YouTube videos and making some really cool stuff. Within the first ten minutes of having her rainbow loom set. She just knew what to do to get the information she needed: go to YouTube.
What about you? Think about something that you have had to learn recently – in the wild – not at work. What did you do? How did you approach it? Was technology a part of the mix?
Most likely yes.
The same happens today in the workplace. What do your employees do first when they are stumped on the job? What about you? Does this differ by job role? Are employees asking their colleagues? Googling? Hunting on your LMS? Waiting to solve their problem until the next classroom session is offered on that topic?
Are we supporting learning in the workplace in a way that resembles anything like what we see out in the wild? And what do we see?
Watch the technology trends of your consumers to see what your employees are also doing…how can we model that behavior….
Make sure people can find it. Content and information needs to be easily found. Either on your corporate Intranet, within your firewall – our out on the web.
Think about unlocking content.
Can you unlock your elearning content and make it more accessible to your people? Let them take it with them? Let them wander the floor? Or is your content too locked down and sensitive? Can you guard some content more heavily? At Qualcomm, a mobile company admittedly, they don’t treat all content the same. If it’s proprietary and sensitive information, they’ll look it down more heavily. But leadership training tips? Go mobile.
Multiple-Devices. Oh yes, oh yes. It’s not about the desktop computer anymore, which may not be your experience while serving customers at the teller window. But think about how your customers do most of their banking these days? I love Mint, I love my banks mobile apps. I pay my bills online. I rarely write checks. I NEVER go to a teller (sorry, guys).
91% of teens go online from a mobile device, at least occasionally. http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/09/mobile-access-shifts-social-media-use-and-other-online-activities/
Is your Learning Management System available on a mobile device? What about your course content?
At Kineo, we created the Adapt open source framework for responsive elearning design. Learn more at: https://community.adaptlearning.org
Video.
Lots and lots of video, that’s for sure. YouTube is the goto place for figuring out how to fix a toilet or an air conditioner these days. My neighbor’s daughter is an amazing artist – no formal classes – all self-taught through YouTube videos.
When creating self-paced eLearning programs, consider ways to include the voice of more than just an all knowing narrator. Find ways to interject the voice of your people into the program. When we hear from our peers, we are learning socially.
You can do this simply, through guerilla style videos, shot on people’s own smart phones. At Kineo, we’ve been calling this the selfie video. Let people hear from their peers about how they tackle certain challenges, learn directly from subject matter experts who share their insights and think through a problem out loud.
This type of user-generated content can be great on your company’s social network as stand-alone, easily discoverable bits, but consider including them in the design of more formal learning programs.
Interactive video.
Some cool new platforms out there that provide the opportunity to post your roleplays and get feedback from your peers and managers.
http://www.rehearsalvrp.com
Microlearning.
In the industry, we hear people talking about “microlearning” – which fits into that YouTube world pretty well. Short, digestible chunks of content.
Learning embedded in the workflow:
Better performance support tools. For software – there are tools like WalkMe and Leo that can lay right on top of your software system to provide in the moment learning and support.
Job aids and tools that help people at the moment of need – and not just in a training program that happened 3 months ago.
Smarter Blends.
We’ve matured to a place where we don’t just build eLearning and then have a webinar to ask questions and call it a blend. Instead, we should be designing a full solution that pulls in the right tools and technologies to complement the face to face that’s happening naturally.
--How can we use technology to make sure that managers are supporting their employees through the training process?
Create mature blends
¥ Webinars
¥ Gamification
¥ Mobile
¥ Social learning
¥ Peer learning
This is the design plan for a two year leadership training program developed for Coats.
Read a full case study: http://www.kineo.com/us/case-studies/management-and-leadership/blended-learning-coats-plc
Build in action plans to create accountability and encourage connection
Learning programs shouldn’t end at the classroom door as people hand in their evaluations or upon clicking the EXIT button in the top right corner of a screen. For the most part, we want people to take their new knowledge and skills out into the real world in order to DO something.
One way to build in some accountability and ensure action after the event is to have the participant create a work product within the program itself. This could be an action plan that they fill out as they go along, or a reflective journal.
We once built a self-paced eLearning course with Lectora, using a forms feature that allowed the user to enter names and ideas into a form as they went through the material. At the end of the course, they printed out their new marketing plan with specific steps they had agreed to take. They then needed to follow up with their manager, showing him or her the action plan and building it into their work goals for the next month.
In a communications course for a global bank, participants downloaded a Word document from the eLearning course and answered questions and completed activities in the workbook. A week after the program, they had a meeting with their manager to talk this through and identify specific action items and ways the manager could support the employee as he or she built her communication skills.
Action plans and workbooks that are embedded into the learning program itself help build a really important social bridge – from the learner back to his or her manager. Over the years, we’ve noticed that with the rise of online learning programs, managers have been able to take a backset in employee development, saying instead, “Oh, they’ve got that all covered in the training department.” But it’s our managers who really have the shoulder-to-shoulder experience with us and who help us build our skills on a daily basis.
Again, this is not new stuff. I was watching an old episode of the sci-fi cult movie show Mystery Science Theater 3000 a few months ago. At the beginning of the episode, they aired a short Chevrolet sales training video from 1940 called “Hired.”
In “Hired,” we meet Mr. Warren, a used car sales man who’s worried because his team is just not performing. So he sits on the porch and talks with his father, a retired salesman, who shares his wisdom and advice. First, the dad says, “hire good men and then see they are well trained on their own product and on competitive products." Second, get them the equipment and help they need; third, help them plan their work; fourth, stay in close touch with each man; fifth, encourage every man every day." Finally he tells viewers that those they hired need the help of their managers.
This was a 1940 training video. And yet, we’re still seeing sales training programs filled with the same materials. We’ve known that we need to get managers involved for decades, if not longer. This is what apprenticeship models are really all about, after all. The challenge has always been building in some structure to that process, holding managers accountable for having those conversations, and giving managers the tools they need to provide that type of training and support.
Mr. Warren Senior shares his wisdom in five key points that basically boil down to this: A manager plays a critical role in helping his or her employees do their best work. You need to hire good men, he says, and you need to train them, help them plan their work, stay close to them, and encourage them. Essentially, a manager is a trainer, a coach, a mentor.
We can use our LMS to structure that shoulder to shoulder experience – ensuring accountability, trackability, and follow through. To help you better record and understand performance gaps when and where they’re happening.
We’re currently working with a fast food company. They came to us with a challenge: every year they train more than 1,000 people on mostly procedural content. We could have created 20 hours of eLearning for them, which is what they initially asked us to do.
Instead, we’ve collaborated with them to design a training program where technology doesn’t replace people, but enhances the process and supports them. Much of the training still happens on the store floor, where people are shoulder to shoulder with experienced mentors and managers. No one wants to replace that human part of the experience—it’s through these social interactions that people can ask questions, get immediate feedback, and take their understanding to the next level.
We’re finding ways to use the technology to enhance the training they’re doing on the restaurant floor, give managers the structure they need, and provide support for them through rubrics and observation checklists. Taking a flipped classroom model, short eLearning nuggets explain why something matters and provide up close demonstrations. The managers and coaches on the store floor then get to keep their focus, not on lectures, but on mentored practice and coaching. Checklists and observation forms launched from the LMS provide rubrics—and tracking—for managers to identify where team members need more support.
At its core, this is social learning. We’re keeping people involved and connected with each other to support organic learning as much as possible, getting people to proficiency faster and more efficiently.
How are you finding ways to build connections between peers in your programs? Are you putting the manager back into the process? How do you hold them accountable and provide the structure and support they might need?
Developing a learning plan WITH your manager. And the manager has to approve it and be involved and provide checkpoints. Keeping content open and unlocked.
Developing a learning plan WITH your manager. And the manager has to approve it and be involved and provide checkpoints.
Another way to think of continuous learning...as an ad campaign. Advertisers are relentless. They know how to get into our brains, how to incite our desire and curiosity, and how to get us to buy. Bottom line, marketers know how to change behavior better than almost anyone. And isn’t that what we’re all trying to do?
Marketing aims to:
• Attract and convert prospects into advocates and believers, even raving fans (we explore models for this later)
• Using a range of channels and techniques that are specifically designed to reach the target audience(s)
• In a sustained campaign that evolves and responds based on early feedback, and brings about measurable results
(For us campaign management means an ongoing effort to impact behaviour. Learning about compliance is not a one off. It’s something you need to think about every day until it comes as naturally as locking your own front door.
Marketing professionals. They’re in the persuasion business. If you involve them (as we do) in ‘learning projects’, they are refreshingly disinterested in the efficacy of the design model or the details under the bonnet of your approach. They talk about how you’re going to stimulate demand. Who are you trying to reach? With what message? Where do those people hang out now? How do we use those channels? How are we going to get action? What is the campaign theme? How will we know if it’s working? These and a hundred other questions are their stock in trade.
If you really want to change behaviour, you wouldn’t start from the position of event-driven adult-to-child enforcement.
To move beyond ticking the box and towards transforming behaviour is no small undertaking. Think about other transformation projects outside of the learning context you’ve been involved in. No e-learning module on its own is going to do it. We know you know that.
This is your brain on drugs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FtNm9CgA6U&feature=related
Crying Indian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful
Smoky the Bear: http://www.smokeybear.com/vault/#!prettyPhoto[1950sP]/0/
The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve
Since we forget, best to make it continuous! Will Thallheimer Research: http://www.willatworklearning.com/2010/12/how-much-do-people-forget.html
A typical graph of the forgetting curve purports to show that humans tend to halve their memory of newly learned knowledge in a matter of days or weeks unless they consciously review the learned material.
Give a student a lesson. Two days later give them a quiz ('according to the instructor, what was the most important first step). After two days ask them to retrieve critical information. It gives them the opp to practice retrieving it.
Touch 3 times (2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months)
The 2 day touch is fact based -- recall facts
After 2 weeks build in elaborative recall. Now ask them -- "Hey, according to that lecture on XXX how can you imagine using that info in our organization?" Then the student gives a written response. So his ideas get fed into a social learning environment.
2 month touch -- ask that same person -- "can you give us examples of how you've used this in your organization?" (so here's the return on investments, here's your Kirkpatrick...)
http://cammybean.kineo.com/2013/01/brain-and-memory-with-arthur-kohn.html
Lose the single event, fellas. Think campaign. Repetition, spaced learning. Multiple messages over time.
Technology Tools that can help: Cameo, MindMarker, Mindsetter
Global Entertainment Company with some dry content. (sound familiar?) needed to:
Raise awareness about threats to privacy and information security
Get people to take compliance-related policies seriously
Empower people to take action!
AND...they don’t do boring! They wanted to engage attention AND deliver results.
Focused self-paced elearning tutorials and How Tos, underscoring key policy and regulation campaign messages.
Tap into peers. Let people show their work. (Yammer examples from the Kineo deck)
Jane Bozarth, author of the 2014 book Show Your Work: The Payoffs and How-To’s of Working Out Loud, reminds us that this tactic isn’t something new, invented in the digital age, but rather goes back thousands of years. “A wanderer who drew a map at journey’s end might be described as someone who ‘showed their work,” she writes. Similarly, a hunter-gatherer sitting around the campfire sharing details of the hunt was also showing his or her work. This is work-based storytelling at its finest, really. Let’s hear directly from your employees, your experts, your senior leaders. Let them tell their stories to make the work come alive.
Tap into peers. Let people show their work. (Yammer examples from the Kineo deck)
Jane Bozarth, author of the 2014 book Show Your Work: The Payoffs and How-To’s of Working Out Loud, reminds us that this tactic isn’t something new, invented in the digital age, but rather goes back thousands of years. “A wanderer who drew a map at journey’s end might be described as someone who ‘showed their work,” she writes. Similarly, a hunter-gatherer sitting around the campfire sharing details of the hunt was also showing his or her work. This is work-based storytelling at its finest, really. Let’s hear directly from your employees, your experts, your senior leaders. Let them tell their stories to make the work come alive.
Tap into peers. Let people show their work. (Yammer examples from the Kineo deck)
Jane Bozarth, author of the 2014 book Show Your Work: The Payoffs and How-To’s of Working Out Loud, reminds us that this tactic isn’t something new, invented in the digital age, but rather goes back thousands of years. “A wanderer who drew a map at journey’s end might be described as someone who ‘showed their work,” she writes. Similarly, a hunter-gatherer sitting around the campfire sharing details of the hunt was also showing his or her work. This is work-based storytelling at its finest, really. Let’s hear directly from your employees, your experts, your senior leaders. Let them tell their stories to make the work come alive.
Tap into peers. Let people show their work. (Yammer examples from the Kineo deck)
Jane Bozarth, author of the 2014 book Show Your Work: The Payoffs and How-To’s of Working Out Loud, reminds us that this tactic isn’t something new, invented in the digital age, but rather goes back thousands of years. “A wanderer who drew a map at journey’s end might be described as someone who ‘showed their work,” she writes. Similarly, a hunter-gatherer sitting around the campfire sharing details of the hunt was also showing his or her work. This is work-based storytelling at its finest, really. Let’s hear directly from your employees, your experts, your senior leaders. Let them tell their stories to make the work come alive.
We’re at a place in 2015 where the technology tools have evolved to the point and the learning models have matured that we can support a more organic learning style that really fits into the way people learn.
Let’s just drop the e. It’s all just learning. And the wise training department recognizes that we’ve got lots of tools and technologies to support workplace in the learning. e-learning shouldn’t be regulated to a separate department…