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Wednesday, 2 April 2014
Tuesday, 1 April 2014
I'm in the mood for love...learning love, that is! Kineo Valentine's Day Webinar
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Learning Record Stores with Tim Martin #ASTDTK14
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Why you want to put the activity first
Let’s say we’re designing a course that will help widget sales people overcome buyers’ objections. The objection we’re focusing on right now is this one: “I’ve read that your widget creates a lot of heat.” We have a specific way we’d like our sales people to respond to that objection.
Some people in our audience are familiar with the concerns about heat, while new people might not know as much.
How do you think most training designers would approach this? I think they’d do it like this.
The designers would think, “First, we’ll tell them the common concerns about heat, to make sure everyone knows them. Then we’ll tell them what our own research shows about the heat and why it’s not a big deal. Then we’ll tell them how to respond to heat objections, and finally we’ll let them practice with a scenario.”
Why did I label this “boring and inefficient?”
The learners have to trudge through many screens before they finally get to use their brains.Some people already know the stuff presented on the many screens.The how-to info is presented immediately before the scenario, making the scenario a simple check of short-term memory.Here’s a more efficient approach that has the added advantage of helping people learn by doing.
We immediately plunge learners into a realistic scenario — followed by another and another. Then we concisely recap what they’ve figured out through the scenarios.
The material feels like a stream of activities, not pages of information followed by one lonely memory check. The recap will be memorable and concise because it refers back to concrete examples, such as, “As you saw with Ravi’s objection, it’s best to …”
But what about the information?
We can include the information about heat issues as optional links in the scenario.
Now our material is more efficient and a heck of a lot more interesting. People who already know all about the heat issues (or, importantly, think they know) will forge ahead without reading the optional documents. Newer or more careful people will check the documents to make sure they know what’s going on. Both groups will figure out if they chose correctly when they see the results of their choices.
In addition, the optional documents are low-tech PDFs or pages on the intranet, the same documents that people use on the job. This makes the information much easier to update and puts the scenario in a more realistic context.
But they might just guess and miss important information!
The usual argument for the boring and inefficient approach is, “We have to make sure everyone is exposed to the information.” But who cares whether they’ve been exposed to it? What we care about is whether they know it and can apply it.
So we’ll design scenarios that make them prove they know it, and we’ll design enough challenging scenarios about the same important information to make sure no one is slipping through the cracks. And if we’re really worried about information being missed, we can include it in the feedback, as shown in this post.
But you didn’t show them how to overcome objections!
We haven’t led them by the nose through the Heat Objection Handling Process because we want them to figure it out through experience. Our feedback will help. For example, if someone chooses option C above, they’ll see the following result:
“I’m not surprised that your studies don’t show any problems,” Ravi says, sounding a little annoyed. “But Widget World does rigorous, independent testing, and they found heat issues. What can you tell me about the heat?”
From this, learners realize that shoving research at the customer backfires. It sounds like option A was the better option, and for their next step, they’ll want to calmly discuss the concerns. (This post goes into more detail on why we’re just showing the result rather than telling the learner what they did right or wrong.)
More design time, less development
This approach usually requires more in-depth discussions with the subject matter experts and more careful script writing. However, it often results in quicker and easier development. We’re building fewer screens and, happily, we feel less compelled to add bling in a desperate attempt to make a boring presentation more interesting.
Scenario design workshops and online seminar
The example used in this post is taken from my new and improved scenario design webinar. It’s a one-hour online workshop you can request for your team or ASTD chapter.
I’m also developing a 4.5-hour scenario design mini-course that anyone can sign up for. We’ll meet online for three 90-minute sessions starting this fall. If you’d like to be notified when the online course is available, please sign up here and you’ll be among the first to hear about it.
Have you had any success designing material that puts the activities first? Let us know in the comments!
When do you need a branching scenario?
A mini-scenario. Make your decision, see the result, that’s it.When should you go to the trouble of designing a branching scenario? Let’s look at some examples. First, you might not need a branching scenario. Most of the time, a one- or two-scene mini-scenario does the job fine.
In a mini-scenario, you make your decision, see the realistic consequence, and figure out if you made a good choice. You might then go to a very different scene representing a different situation.
Mini-scenarios are great for covering a lot of possible problems, but they’re not so great for getting deep into a more complex situation. For that, consider using a branching scenario.
It’s not just a series of scenes
In a branching scenario, decisions made in early scenes affect later scenes. This helps people practice such skills as:
Recognizing and challenging their own assumptionsRecovering from mistakes in a long or complex processNavigating extended, ambiguous situationsDeciding when to stop gathering information and act
A lot of you are familiar with the Haji Kamal scenario, in which you help an inexperienced Army officer make a good impression on an Afghan leader. You have to make many decisions in one conversation, and things you say at one point affect what happens in later points.
This wasn’t a problem for us, but it’s easy to imagine a stakeholder saying, “We shouldn’t spend all our budget on just one story! We should have lots of short scenes so we can cover things like how to deal with children, what to do when you have to search someone, what to do when someone tries to give you a gift…”
I’ve seen cross-cultural training that uses that approach. You’re tossed from one mini-scenario to another so you can practice social niceties. In one scene you accept a business card correctly, and then suddenly you’re eating in a restaurant, and then suddenly you’re deciding what gift to bring to someone’s home. This is surface training. There’s no deep change involved.
For the Army, we used a branching scenario because we wanted deeper change. Our (many!) interviews with soldiers suggested that one challenge they faced was their western perspective of “We’re here to help you, so let’s get down to business.” We wanted them to practice recognizing when that perspective was hurting local relationships and, importantly, practice recovering from mistakes.
More examples
In their “Family of Heroes” scenario (registration required but worth it), Kognito also focuses on just one conversation. Their goal is to help us see from another’s perspective, manage our emotions, and recover from mistakes. Imagine how much weaker the interaction would be if it were instead a series of unrelated one-scene snippets from the couple’s life.
In this fake language learning scenario, the branching isn’t complex. In order to make sense of later scenes, you have to choose correctly in previous ones, and the branches are just little loops to make sure you choose correctly. But because later scenes build on vocabulary learned in previous ones, your learning is repeatedly reinforced, and I hope you also gain confidence.
By Sunil RaoIf you want to cover different situations but also want the advantages of some branching, you might present a series of shorter scenarios. One artist’s intriguing Flash interaction uses that approach. You meet three different young people and try to talk them out of killing themselves. Finally, at the other end of the production spectrum, the BBC helps you learn Spanish and Spanish customs with an interactive TV mystery series.
All of these use branching to some degree, because their goals include challenging our assumptions and encouraging us to build our own knowledge. While they don’t cover the variety of topics that mini-scenarios could cover, they aim for deeper change.
I’m looking for more publicly available examples of branching scenarios. There are several on my recently updated elearning examples page, but the world needs more! If you know of any, please share the links in the comments.
Upcoming workshops
Sydney, Australia, Nov. 13: Join us for “Training design for business results,” a one-day workshop for learning managers at the Learning@Work conference. There’s currently a super-early-bird discount available through the Learning@Work site. Please see more details in my workshop calendar.
Other workshops in Australia and elsewhere are in the planning stages. I’ll announce them in this blog; to make sure you don’t miss anything, subscribe to the blog if you haven’t already.
Photo credit: Signpost image used to represent this post is by The Nick Page
Tips for webinars or virtual training
“What works for webinars?” People have asked this a lot lately, so here’s my opinionated answer.
I do a lot of online workshops, such as the scenario design course that starts soon. I’ve ditched many of the conventional webinar techniques. Here’s what’s left on my list.
My main recommendation:
Include many, many thought-provoking questions for people to answer in the chat.These aren’t polls or multiple-choice questions. They’re more like, “Here’s a problem. How do you think we should solve it?” or “Here’s a draft of a solution. What’s wrong with it?”
I try to ask a question like this every couple of minutes. In my personal notes for the presentation, I highlight in blue every question I plan to make and then scroll through the file to make sure there are blue blobs sprinkled everywhere.
This results in slides that tend to be activities instead of information presentations. For example, I’ll display a slide that has a draft of a scenario question and ask what should be done to make it better. Information that might have spawned a series of bullet-heavy slides called “97 rules of scenario design” goes in the handout, where text belongs.
You could also repurpose a self-paced elearning activity. For example, you could run a scenario in the session. Display the first decision point and ask everyone what they want to do and why. As the debate goes on, one choice will probably surface as the preferred one, so click that and continue the scenario.
Again, I’m suggesting you do this as a discussion, not a poll. It’s harder on you, because you have to read a lot of chat comments, but the learning is far deeper and the issues raised will be surprising.
The chat is where it’s at!
This one change — your commitment to ask a ton of thought-provoking, open-ended questions — means that you’ll design a series of mini-activities instead of an information dump. Your participants will stay with you, thinking and participating, instead of clicking away to plan their Bali trip while you talk to an empty room.
This one change will require a few more changes:
You’ll need a webinar platform with a big, public chat window. For now, I’m using WebEx. I hope to use FuzeBox in the future when I’m sure that it plays well with the extreme firewalls some of my customers have. GotoMeeting is out for me because the chat window can’t be resized on my Mac.You’ll need to stop talking and listen. I periodically say, “Hang on, I need to catch up with the chat.” I’m silent while I read what has happened in the chat, and then I respond to it.If you’re recording the session and the chat won’t be recorded, you’ll want to read chat items aloud so the recording makes sense to someone who wasn’t there. Just as you do when presenting to a big group, repeat the question aloud before you answer it. It’s often impossible to read everything; I just hit the major points.If the chat is super-busy, some participants might hide it so they can focus on you. That’s another reason to pause periodically and read aloud the major points being made.As soon as people realize that you want them to use the chat, they will definitely use the chat. This might happen in ways you might not have intended, such as answering each other’s questions or literally chatting. Don’t try to control them. At least they’re in the room with you instead of pricing hotels in Bali.Yes, you can handle the chat! It can help to have a second person, but I’ve flown solo with up to 400 people typing furiously away. They realize you can’t read and respond to everything. All you need to do is pause occasionally to catch up with the major points or questions.
Everything else
Some more tips:
Avoid headaches and reduce development time by creating a presentation without animations or transitions — PDF is usually safe.Use a headset with a decent mic, not the computer’s default mic.Limit sessions to 90 minutes at most.If you’re providing a handout, make it useful, not just a copy of the slide deck. You might create a handout that includes the main slides with additional text.Make the handout available at the beginning or shortly before the presentation, so participants can use it to take notes. If it’s in Word or another easily edited format, they can take notes right in the handout.Practice giving your presentation, of course, timing yourself and allowing lots of time for the chat.Finally, here are some common webinar techniques that I avoid. Maybe you can convince me that they’re great — leave a comment!
Not allowing public chat. This is Mortal Webinar Sin #1 for me. Probably 90% of the sessions that I’ve attended have no chat. You’re only allowed to send questions in secret, and they go only to the presenter. I rarely stick around.Adding “interactivity” by using polls to vote on non-questions, such as “How many people here have seen a boring PowerPoint presentation?”Sending people to breakout rooms. Maybe I just haven’t seen this done well. When I’ve been a participant, breakout rooms have meant five minutes of technological confusion followed by several minutes of “Is anyone else here?” and then “What are we supposed to be doing?” followed by me quietly disappearing to watch the Shiba Inu puppycam.How about you? What are your favorite techniques for live virtual sessions? What do you recommend avoiding? Let us know in the comments!
Scenario design online course open for January and February
Become a scenario design master with “Scenario design: In-depth and hands-on,” a live online course (with lots of chat!). There’s still room in two of the sessions that start in January and February.
People who have signed up for the course alert list learn about new courses before they’re announced in the blog. Sign up and you’ll be among the first to know when the next sessions are scheduled. The US session sold out quickly after the last mailing — sign up so you don’t miss out next time!
My current very tentative plans are to have an on-demand version of the course available in April and to give another live version in July.
Image credit: iStockPhoto ©petekarici
Throw them in the deep end! (but keep a life preserver handy)
“You’re setting them up to fail!” You’ve probably heard this if you’ve proposed starting with an activity instead of first providing instruction.
“Everyone knows” that people should be carefully shown how to do something and only then allowed to practice doing it. If you just throw them in the deep end, frustration and cognitive overload and squashed self-esteem will supposedly inhibit their learning.
However, several studies suggest that when we first challenge learners and then give them instruction, we can improve their ability to apply and extend their new knowledge. They could more effectively apply what they’ve learned to their jobs and to new situations.
In Scenario-Based Elearning, Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer point out this study on “productive failure,” which led me to several others.
In these and similar studies, students with some knowledge of a discipline were given a problem without first being told how to solve it. They floundered, usually in groups, and then their solutions were examined and they were taught the correct process.
These “productive failure” groups were slightly weaker at applying the new process than were the “direct instruction” groups who were first taught what to do. But the former flounderers were clearly better at applying what they learned to other situations and at developing additional models that they hadn’t been taught.
It’s not clear how much support is best during the initial challenge. Collaboration with other learners seems to help, so in lonely, asynchronous elearning you’ll want to provide at least some scaffolding, such as hints or questions that guide learners to the correct steps to take. If I were queen, this scaffolding would be optional, it wouldn’t teach the content, and it would be provided in the activity, not as pre-activity instruction.
Like most research in instruction, these studies were done on elementary and university students, not adults in the working world. But in contrast to many studies, the researchers went beyond assessing the correct regurgitation of facts and looked at how well learners applied and extended their knowledge, which is our goal in business training.
This slideshow by one of the researchers, Manu Kapur, summarizes some of the findings that might apply to us. Some papers are available as full text:
When you think about the lessons you’ve learned, which are the most memorable — the ones in which someone first taught you everything you needed to know, or the ones in which you at first floundered and even failed? Have you been able to convince stakeholders to let people learn through a challenge rather than instruction? Let us know in the comments!
Online course in scenario design
I’m developing a 4.5-hour scenario design mini-course that anyone can sign up for. We’ll meet online for three 90-minute sessions starting this fall. If you’d like to be notified when the online course is available, please sign up here and you’ll be among the first to hear about it.
I’ve also overhauled my scenario design webinar. It’s a one-hour online workshop you can request for your team or ASTD chapter.
Australia: upcoming public workshops
Nov. 13, Sydney: Training design master class for training managers at the Learning@Work conferenceNov. 26, Melbourne: Elearning Design for Business Results one-day workshop for ElNetNov. 29, Sydney: Elearning Design for Business Results one-day workshop for ElNetPhoto by anuarsalleh
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