This is another skiing themed post - I think I’m becoming obsessed. I recently returned from a short ski break. I’ve been thinking about what I enjoyed most about the trip - and it’s got to be skiing off-piste. If you don’t ski; pistes are the marked routes on the mountain. Outside of these routes is known as off-piste and here there is much adventure to be had. Now off-piste can involve having a helicopter drop you on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. But it can also mean heading just slightly off the beaten track, between the pistes. I’m just getting back into skiing and found the latter was great fun. Reflecting on it I realised that I’ve spent much of my life slightly off-piste, doing things a little differently and sometimes better. So why go off-piste? You can find better, quicker routes Others can benefit from your explorations It’s more creative and you learn more On the flip side: It’s more risky You could become isolated It might be harder to justify to others why you don’t just follow the herd I would argue that off-piste learning design is where true innovation lies. Yes it can be risky but you stand the chance of opening up new more effective routes that others might benefit from. It’s more challenging, more fun and more rewarding as a designer. In reality you wouldn’t constantly design off-piste but rather allow your explorations to inform your more on-piste projects. One of the ways that I find helps to design off-piste is not to initially research what the common approach is. Instead follow a creative but rigorous design process and see where you end up. Then look around at the approaches that others have taken and see what you can learn from them. Incorporate elements of these into your design where appropriate. If you have few opportunities for off-piste design as part of your commercial work, why not develop some ideas for a project of your own. You could learn some things to feed in to your commercial projects. At the very least it’s a good design exercise and damn good fun too!

By Tess Robinson, Director, LearningAge Solutions It is incredibly disheartening to put all of your creative efforts into a piece of learning design for it to be largely ignored by your target audience. You’ve identified the organisational need, followed a robust design process and come up with a killer approach - so why won’t people engage with it? The answer is often that internal marketing and communication about the project has been ineffectual, or even non-existent. Here are our top tips to stop this happening to you… People won’t use something that they don’t even know is there. Find out where your target audience hang out and focus your communications there. For example, this could be posters near the coffee machine or using particular online social networks. Help your learners to understand what’s in it for them. Depending on your subject matter and audience, introducing a fun or a competitive element can be very effective for raising awareness and encouraging your learning to go ‘viral’ within the organisation. Align your elearning to a wider organisational initiative or strategic objective. Any training that is being undertaken should be in line with company strategy anyway, but it can help raise awareness and encourage participation by piggy-backing onto something that is already high-profile within the organisation. Find yourself some advocates. Imagine what a difference it will make to take-up if you have someone who is visible, influential and popular within the organisation telling everyone else how great your learning intervention is. The flip side is to find ways of communicating with your detractors. For example, if you know one of your stakeholders has issues with your approach, don’t just ignore them and hope they’ll go away. Take time to listen to them and work through their objections. If you do it right, they could become an advocate too! Run a pilot. Although end-users will have been involved in your design process, this will give you the chance to gain more feedback from the users themselves and to create a bit of excitement around your elearning. Their feedback will help you to hone your offering before rolling it out and your trailblazers can then also be used as champions to help spread the word. Don’t just communicate about the project when it is launched but share progress throughout the build. Be open about the challenges you have faced in creating the learning intervention and celebrate any successes with the wider organisational community. The aim is to have your audience feel like they have taken a journey with you, that they are active participants and that everyone can share in the glory when it all goes right.

Whenever I speak at a conference I take the same approach - I look for ways to get people talking to one-another and contributing to the session. I figure; we’ve got a room full of smart, highly experienced people - talking at them for an hour would be a huge waste of time. Better to make use of their knowledge and experience - their ‘collective intelligence’ - for the good of everyone. We try to take the same approach with digital learning. Given how easy it is to connect to other people, wherever they are in the world, it seems like such a waste when online learning is a solitary experience. Allowing people to connect to one another and share knowledge makes the learning richer for all. Every organisation has a huge amount of collective intelligence in it’s people, so how can you make use of it in your digital learning initiatives? Here are a few ideas: Set short assignments and have learners comment upon and critique each others work. Not only will this provide useful feedback but it also prompts a valuable reflection process in the reviewer. Allow learners to upload or add links to useful resources, web sites and videos. Include a like / unlike function so that the more useful resources can be identified and those less so, weeded out. Identify organisational challenges for people to generate ideas around. These can be used to encourage innovation within an organisation and tackle real business problems. If you use a Twitter-like service internally (Yammer for example) host regular chats that focus on different questions or issues. These could run over a lunchtime and be held once a week or a fortnight. You will probably find that you already have IT systems in place that can do many, if not all of these things. Increasingly organisations are looking for ways for their workforce to collaborate more and they should be doing this in their learning too.      

by Tess Robinson, Director, LearningAge Solutions We’re so used to self-directed learning these days that we forget we’re even doing it. I’m a trainee silversmith in my spare time. If I want to know the best way to solder a joint or set a stone, I’ll Google it, find a video on YouTube or ask my social network of fellow jewellers. I don’t need to wait for my class day to have a tutor instruct me in the technique, although undeniably it’s useful to have an expert on hand to help if I get stuck. We have come to expect this kind of on-demand learner-led learning in our everyday lives, why should learning in the workplace be any different? Learning at work should not just be about someone telling you a bunch of facts and then expecting you to go away and remember it all. Learning should also be continuous, self-directed and personalised - ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’. Not convinced? Here are five compelling benefits of a pull learning approach: Giving people power over their own learning allows them to personalise their learning journey and focus on improving their own specific weaknesses. This makes learning more efficient and effective and prevents organisational resources being spent on teaching people things they already know. Adopting a pull learning strategy shows that the organisation has trust in their people. This inspires confidence in learners and is very motivating; not only in terms of their learning itself but also in terms of how positively they view the organisation and their place in it as a whole. Learners can access information and resources at the point of need, increasing business agility and giving people the ability to confront challenges and draw out the resources needed to find solutions. The ubiquity of smart phones and other small internet-enabled devices make this ever more possible, even in environments where learners don’t traditionally have access to a PC during the course of their working day. Information can be easily updated. Learners don’t have to wait until the next training course to find out new things that can help them with their job role or personal development. Resources can be updated as they change, increasing accuracy and again improving the ability of the business to respond to challenges as they arise. User-generated content, moderated by the learners themselves can be a very effective way of keeping information current. A pull learning approach focuses much more on ‘performance’ than ‘training’. Charles Jennings of the Internet Time Alliance suggested that developing a ‘performance mind-set’ requires the acceptance of multi-channel formal and informal learning, based on limited push and maximum pull. Performance improvement is the Holy Grail. Why else would you invest in training your people if it wasn’t to improve their performance? Does this approach work for everything? Well as a stand-alone strategy, the short answer is no.  There will be times when a formal training course makes sense; for introducing complete newbies to a subject for instance. Where this approach can really add value, however, is in providing additional support and resources to ensure that training is actually implemented and understood in the workplace itself. It’s simply a question of getting the balance right and not being afraid to rescind a little control.    

Anyone who has attempted some form of learning design project will know that the goalposts have an annoying habit of moving. The objective that you set out initially to meet might evolve or even change completely. This means that traditional approaches to learning design and development can struggle to adapt the design and keep pace with continually evolving requirements. They are simply not agile enough. Instead quicker, more iterative approaches to design are needed which enable the designer to change and test the design very swiftly. Design tools need to be collaborative so that designers and customers can work at the same time. Designers need to be able to think on their feet, generate, mock-ups and test workable solutions quicker than ever. So, how do you go about doing this? Firstly, in the design phase of your project - anything goes. Any idea, no matter how outlandish or left-field is given consideration. An idea that at first might seem too ‘out there’, can trigger another thought process that leads to some truly transformative functionality being designed into the product. Secondly, use collaborative tools like Google Drive, Basecamp and Mockflow to document, manage and design the product. At the start of the project get your customer on board with your design process and their vital part in it. Encourage collaborative, iterative working. Thirdly, don’t get disheartened if your design or prototype gets some harsh feedback from users. Firstly investigate the comments more fully and get to the heart of the issue. Then thank your lucky stars that you identified this issue so early in the project - you’ve just saved a load of budget and time - hooray! Taking an agile approach to design does require more time with your customer and end users. Fortunately, most will understand that for you to design something that closely meets their needs, they need to provide a lot of input. If they can’t or won’t do this, then you’re playing darts in the dark, with little or no chance of hitting the bull’s eye.  

by Tess Robinson, Director, LearningAge Solutions For me it conjures up images of acrobats and contortionists. Although this is a little strange, it’s probably not too far from the truth because business agility is indeed all about being flexible and adaptable; being able to adjust to changes in the business environment without wobbling or losing your balance. Advances in technology, the increasing complexity of the global economy and escalating customer (and staff) expectations mean that agility is no longer a choice but a necessity. Organisations need to be able to predict, adapt and respond to whatever challenges are presented to them and this needs to be done at lightening speed. Failure to do this will result in being left in the competition’s dust and in this delicate economic environment that is definitely not a good place to be. So what’s the role of learning technologies in all of this? As IBM succinctly put it ‘to act with agility, organisations have to increase communication and collaboration, and improve decision-making processes’. The traditional elearning course is just not enough to address these issues, although it may provide part of the answer. There is now such a wealth of technologies that enable L&D to create really exciting solutions that allow for collaboration, user-generated content, sharing and communities of practice. This is a really pivotal time for learning. The coalescence of the current business climate and the wealth of technology available give us a real opportunity to break out of the cycle of dull and predictable online learning and to really embrace new ways of thinking and working. Towards Maturity have consistently demonstrated the value of introducing a variety of technologies, interaction, depth, opportunities for collaboration and engagement into the learning mix by showing the positive impact that embracing these can have on organisational performance. So why isn’t everyone doing it? Probably the biggest barrier to this brave new world is trust. Rescinding control to learners is really hard and often takes an entire cultural shift. The variety of technology available can also make for an overwhelming choice. So where do you start? Think of yourself on a tightrope, like my acrobats. Begin by taking small steps, tiny risks and once you can see that you’re not going to fall off, hopefully that will encourage you to try standing on one foot and eventually maybe even to do a back flip.  

By Tess Robinson, Director, LearningAge Solutions Technology now affords so many more options to learn new skills without being physically present, but how can we ensure that participants are kept engaged and motivated when they’re not sat in front of us? It’s a constant challenge and one that we haven’t yet completely cracked but we’d like to share some things here that have worked for us… Validation If the learning is taking place within an organisation, get yourself a champion at senior level. Choose someone who is respected and liked and who has influence. If learners can see that the learning is valued by the organisation, they will be more inclined to commit to it themselves. If you are a company providing distance learning to a wide and varied audience, be aware that your reputation impacts heavily on the perception of the distance learning you have produced. For example; if you are an award-winning company, if people have been involved in the design who are well-known and well-respected in the sector you are likely to be perceived far more positively than a company who does not have this track record or involvement. Consider accreditation. The fact that an external body has validated the learning can be very reassuring. Also consider whether the learning could lead to a qualification or provide credits - people do still love to collect ‘official’ things for their CVs. 2.  Introduction Make sure that learners understand what is expected of them. They will need to know what the learning outcomes are and what the purpose of each element of the distance learning is, before they start to use it. For example; this could be in the form of a course guide that is emailed out in advance. It’s also important that learners are aware of the technical spec that they will need to run the learning and that they have the opportunity to install any relevant programmes, apps or upgrades before the learning starts in earnest. 3.  Motivation Whatever DL intervention you offer, it should always aim to be rewarding, involving, engaging and enjoyable. Participants also need a very clear idea of what is in it for them. The learning outcomes and their benefits need to be stated at the outset. 4.  Design Even if you get all the emotional motivators right, a badly designed intervention will soon put learners off and their motivation will take a rapid nosedive. Consider how learners will access the learning; one or two clicks is far better than wading through pages and pages to get to what you want. The choice of technology should be appropriate, relevant and aligned to the characteristics of the audience. If you have a few different elements, the purpose of each should be made clear at the outset. Make sure your content is concise and to the point - think ‘more quality and less quantity’. Make it interesting, engaging and memorable. Use humour or try something a bit different, such as setting it in a fictional world or using story-telling to make your points. Anyone who has ever undertaken distance learning knows that it can be lonely. Designing in elements of collaboration, peer review and tutor interaction, assignments and deadlines can help draw learners in and keep the pace of the course going. A ‘live’ element such as a webinar or ‘live chat’ can also help with engagement and to maintain interest. 5.  Goal setting At the outset, encourage learners to think about their goals in relation to the learning and beyond.  On a simple level this can be achieved through reflection or, if you want to make it a more substantive part of the learning, through integrating goal setting technology into the course. These goals can be linked to performance review if necessary or can be stand-alone goals for the individual. They can also be tied to workplace transfer to ensure that what is learnt is put into practice. 6.  Reflection Learning by experience is not a new concept. Reflection can be a powerful way to improve motivation, skills and confidence by allowing the learner to take a step back to consider and understand their experiences. It gives them space to think about what they might do differently next time, to challenge assumptions and to consider the positive as well as the negative. This can be done through a learning blog or wiki, or even privately off-grid. If you have a collaborative element to your learning, it can be very useful for learners to be able to see and comment on each other’s reflections. The success of this does, however, depend on your audience and the culture in which they are embedded. 7.  Tutor skill A skilful tutor can make all the difference to the success of distance learning. It is the tutor’s job to set the ball rolling, set the tone for the course and to maintain momentum, for example; through setting assignments. The tutor can also facilitate collaboration by asking questions and encouraging others to ask questions of him/her and each other. The tutor is most effective when they maintain a presence. This might mean regularly clocking-in to the course, providing surgery times and responding to queries in good time. 8.  Peer support Giving a human face to participants encourages interaction. At the beginning of the course, learners can be asked to upload photos of themselves, to introduce themselves and share their goals for the course and beyond. Peer review is an interesting and potentially very valuable tool. As long as participants can use it honestly and constructively, it encourages knowledge-sharing and provides a network of support alongside the tutor. This is particularly good for distance learning where the audience is spread globally, as learners can get feedback or ask for advice and get a reply from someone, be it peer or tutor, at any time of day. 9.  International awareness If you have a global audience, be aware of cultural differences, language barriers and time zone differences all of which can have a significant impact on participation. Review where your learners are coming from and schedule ‘live’ elements at times when most people can make it. Vary the times if necessary and always record it so that those who cannot attend can watch later. 10.  Feedback/ problem reporting There is nothing that makes you want to switch off more than if something isn’t working or you don’t understand what is being asked of you and you have no mechanism for feedback. Clearly, in most cases, the tutor cannot be available 24:7. It may be that peers can provide the answer but, if not, make sure that learners have access to a log, messaging facility, email address and/or phone number. Clear instructions on how to use these should be given at the outset along with expected response times.

Firstly I should clarify what I mean by a ‘distance learning course’. A distance learning course is something that: Is undertaken remotely Typically takes a number of weeks, months or years to complete Includes self-study and assignments I’m not talking about elearning tutorials or online webinars, though these may form a part of a distance learning course. With the prevalence of freely available learning material there has never been a better time to create a distance learning course. With some careful searching and curation you can assemble a course using pre-existing resources. Don’t just make it all about knowledge though, remember that participants want to learn new skills too. Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping process can also be applied to the design of distance learning courses. Identify the skills that you are trying to teach to students Design assignments where students can practice these skills Seek and curate some core learning materials that will support the assignments, and encourage students to do the same Design in ways for students to collaborate on assignments and add to the body of knowledge Consider whether you will accredit or grade students and what form this will take Without the motivation of a tutor and fellow students physically being present, ‘completion’ rates can be low. In our free Rapid eLearning Development (ReD) course we see the following approximate ratio: 100 people - enrol and are sent joining instructions 60 people - log in to the social network where the course is hosted 25 people - make a start and tackle some of the assignments 12 people - form a core group and complete more-or-less everything Essentially about 10% ‘complete’ the course. This rings true with massive open online courses (MOOCs) whose completion rates are typically around 7%*. Do I mind? No. Just because people haven’t completed everything it doesn’t mean they haven’t got value from the experience. We explain that people can pick and choose what they undertake - not everyone needs to learn everything. What I get great satisfaction from is watching that core of 12 or so work together and collaborate. They are often from different sides of the globe and from different cultures, yet they are able work effectively together.   * This figure of 7% comes from a study by PhD student Katy Jordan conducted of 29 free MOOCs over 2012 and 2013.

We were thrilled this month to win Silver at the 2013 eLearning Awards in the ‘Best eLearning Project (Private Sector) for a project that we did with bookseller, Waterstones. It was the toughest category with over 30 submissions. This project was a lot of fun to do, as Waterstones embraced an innovative and creative approach with commitment and enthusiasm. They were brave enough to do something a bit different and it has reaped rewards. Here’s their story… Waterstones is one of the leading booksellers on the high street and online. They first opened in London, in 1982 and currently trade from nearly 300 shops in the UK and Europe. Waterstones’ reputation is built upon the knowledge and enthusiasm of their 4,500 booksellers, who are able to offer passionate and informed recommendations and advice to customers. With the introduction of the Kindle as a product range, there was a need to train booksellers on how to operate and sell these new devices, so that they could offer the best possible service to customers. Although Kindle training was the starting point for this project, Waterstones’ vision extended beyond that and they wanted the Kindle training to sit within a bespoke system/website which could be built upon to include induction, career progression, ongoing training, a Certificate in Bookselling Qualification, task management and a simple performance review process. The Challenge Waterstones needed to introduce their booksellers to their new Kindle product range, however, the booksellers had a range of technical abilities. Despite this, they all needed to be able to confidently and competently talk about, demonstrate and sell the full range of Kindle devices as quickly as possible. With Christmas, traditionally the busiest time of year for Waterstones, on the way in just a few short months, the timescales for building a solution and training all their Booksellers were extremely short. Another challenge was the availability of technology in-store. Booksellers are not desk-based, whatever solution we came up with had to fit into their working patterns and be accessible, not just on the in-store computer, but also on Kindle devices themselves. In terms of the system itself, Waterstones wanted the site to behave differently for different people or people at different stages of their career - so varying subjects and functionality would be made available to individuals, depending on their position or area of work. They wanted to be able to set timescales for completing goals and to have a facility for learners to allow their line managers to review what they had done. The goals needed to include text, images, videos, podcasts, quizzes and assignments and have a star rating system. The final challenges were that Waterstones wanted to be able to create and edit the content themselves. The site needed to work cross-platform (so on computers and the Kindle devices themselves) and also the design needed to have the Wow factor. The Solution Waterstones knew of our work with University of Cambridge and had already seen our goal-based systems. They immediately saw the potential in the approach to solve their business issue of how best to train all their Booksellers on selling the Kindle range. The solution that we came up with was a goal-based learning system with a number of ‘shields’ (subjects) that Booksellers and other Waterstones employees could attempt. They would work towards attaining a shield by choosing goals to achieve and then completing a range of real-world activities, to be done within their work environment. We also included embedded quizzes and surveys using a third party tool, to reinforce their learning. Many retailers wanting to provide product training would opt for face-to-face training, or elearning courseware plus an LMS. Waterstones went further and embraced a performance-focused goal-based learning approach: Instead of going through courses, users work towards goals that will improve their performance. They undertake real-world activities that build skills and rate how they are doing. They access knowledge-based materials in support of the activities. They reflect upon their learning and gather evidence of it. Waterstones added in the ability for Shop Managers to conduct informal scheduled reviews with the booksellers. This, combined with the goal-based learning, is a truly innovative approach to people development. They now use Waterstones Academy to deliver a nine-month bookseller qualification and have more plans for further development too. Success Factors If we had to say what the key factors were in making this project a success they would be these: Openness to new ideas Aligning the project with organisation strategy Engagement with key stakeholders from the start, including Booksellers, who were the target audience Marketing and communications that kept staff informed and involved in the project from the outset Support - providing great front-line support to users and managers Evaluation - including sales statistics, completion rates, user and manager comments which allowed us to demonstrate that the learning was meeting organisational objectives. So what did they think? ‘The Waterstones Academy site has provided us with a fantastic new tool to develop and train our bookshop teams.  We wanted something both simple and sophisticated in both functionality and look and feel and LearningAge really grasped this.  We are so pleased with the site and have received glowing positive feedback from the users, and seen a great take up from booksellers signing up and completing content.  We are keen to continuously improve and evolve the site and every time we approach LearningAge with suggestions, however seemingly impossible, they give us practical, non-techy advice and make it happen within equally impossibly tight timescales. ‘ Emma Brown, Head of Learning and Development      

This year, I had the great privilege, in my position as Chair of the eLN, to have edited and co-authored the eLN’s first ever book, The Really Useful eLearning Instruction Manual, published by Wiley. The book features contributions from world leading experts in all aspects of elearning and was a fantastic excuse to work with people whom I respect enormously. We wanted the book to be practical, useful and to contribute to the advancement of our industry through best practice. The book covers the basics of ‘what is elearning’ and selling it to your organisation through to more advanced topics such as game-based learning (from the newly anointed Dr Ben Betts - congratulations on your PhD Ben!) and social learning. Here’s what the publisher says about it:  "Technology has revolutionised every aspect of our lives and how we learn is no exception. The trouble is, the range of elearning technologies and the options available can seem bewildering. Even those who are highly experienced in one aspect of elearning will lack knowledge in some other areas. Wouldn’t it be great if you could access the hard-won knowledge, practical guidance and helpful tips of world-leading experts in these fields? Edited by Rob Hubbard and featuring chapters written by global elearning experts: Clive Shepherd, Laura Overton, Jane Bozarth, Lars Hyland, Rob Hubbard, Julie Wedgwood, Jane Hart, Colin Steed, Clark Quinn, Ben Betts and Charles Jennings - this book is a practical guide to all the key topics in elearning, including: getting the business on board, building it yourself, learning management, blended, social, informal, mobile and game-based learning, facilitating online learning, making the most of memory and more." And here’s a summary of the chapters: So What is eLearning? - Clive Shepherd Getting the Business on Board - Laura Overton Build In-House, Buy Off -the-Shelf or Outsource? - Jane Bozarth Production Processes - Making it Happen! - Lars Hyland Making the Most of Memory - Rob Hubbard Blended Learning - Julie Wedgwood Informal and Social Learning - Jane Hart Facilitating Live Online Learning - Colin Steed Mobile Learning - Clark Quinn Game-Based Learning - Ben Betts Learning Management - Charles Jennings A substantial amount of the profits will go to the eLN for the benefit of the whole elearning community. You can buy yours direct from Wiley and get a 15% discount with the code VBF11. It’s also available from Amazon in hard copy and as a Kindle version (of course!).