Last week I spent some time over at the E-Learning Guild’s Learning Exchange sharing tool tips. One of them was near and dear to my heart, as a student, and now as an Instructional Designer working in higher education and using Moodle as a Learning Management System (LMS). The way our institution’s process works is that faculty members are responsible for adding all content to their Moodle course sites. As you can imagine, approaches to this are all over the map in terms of how faculty members choose to go about this task. Often times, faculty will use the Moodle default settings, and when I receive their course to review, I see long lists of content and main page scrolling abound! I sob a little on the inside, but then I quickly rectify the problem. Here’s how I easily reduce main page scrolling on a Moodle course site: Turn Editing On. From the Administration block, select Edit Settings. Scroll to, and select Course Format. From the dropdown menu, select Show one section per page. Select Save changes. If I’ve lost you, here’s a video demo:

For the past month or so, I’ve been discussing the five main phases of Instructional Design. Now it’s time to talk about the implementation phase! The goal of implementation is to get the training you developed to its intended audience. Or deliver the training. Essentially, you’re pressing the Power ON button for your course! There are several elements that might come into play along the way, but it’s all in the name of implementation. Some of these elements might include: Training faculty members or facilitators in the technology Making a course ‘go live’ for the audience Creating job aids and course documentation Installing the courseware on a client’s server Testing courseware in the intended environment However you or your organization chooses to deal with implementation, the goal is always the same - get the training to the audience! For some, the implementation phase might be the end of the road in terms of instructional design processes; however, for many (should be for all), there is one more critical phase: Evaluation. Stay tuned next week for my thoughts on evaluation and its importance in Instructional Design.

As this series on the phases of Instructional Design comes to a close, I’m going to be talking about an under-utilized phase (in my opinion) - Evaluation. I’ve talked about Formative and Summative Evaluation in the past, and I have to emphasize the cyclical nature in which I believe evaluation should occur. Evaluation is essential to the success of any course. How can you know if your learning outcomes are aligning with the course objectives? How can you identify whether your students are grasping the material in the intended manner? How can you identify training gaps in the course? How can you gauge the overall success of the course? Evaluation. That’s how! Now, evaluation doesn’t need to just be reserved for post-implementation. You can evaluate your course at various phases in the Instructional Design process. For example, you might want to evaluate your analysis for the course…is a course going to solve the problem? You might also want to evaluate during the design phase…will the design of this course meet the project requirements (is it responsive? Does it meet the needs?)? You may want to evaluate during the development phase…What are the stakeholder’s thoughts on the prototype? And you’ll definitely want to evaluate in the implementation phase, because that’s where your users will likely barrage you with ‘it’s not working!’ emails. But at the very least, evaluation should always occur at the end of the instructional design process as doing so provides you with feedback and additional context with which you can improve upon the course. No one is perfect, and that can be also be said for courses - no one course is perfect. You can get close, but there is likely always something you could have improved upon. Evaluation gives you the information you need to improve upon your courses.

So, the folks at Articulate have done it again! One of the plaguing issues for e-learning developers is how to curate a beautiful portfolio of their e-learning interactions. Now, you can easily do this within your E-Learning Heroes Community profile! Now you really have no reason not to have a portfolio! The Concept This week’s challenge was to build up your E-Learning Heroes profile by adding course samples! The Method To add course samples, you will need to access your profile by either clicking your avatar on E-Learning Heroes, hovering over your avatar and selecting My Profile, or by creating a new profile. Once you have accessed your portfolio, you will select Add a Course: Once selected, you will fill in the Course URL, Title, include an optional Description, and upload an image to associate with the course. Once completed, select Add Course, and your course will be added to your profile page. The Result Click Here to view my E-Learning Heroes Community profile.

Guest post by Clark Quinn (@quinnovator) One of the hottest topics around right now is gamification, and as with any hot topic, just as there’re reasons to be excited, so too are there reasons to be wary.  I suggest there is an important distinction between serious games and gamification, and the former is the reason for excitement and the latter is the reason to be wary. Quite simply, gamification is about motivation.  We know that people perform better when they’re motivated, and we’ve seen historically and more recently through video games that there are certain elements that affect motivation.  For clarity sake, let’s distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  Intrinsic motivation is that motivation that comes from doing something you find engaging, interesting in and of itself. This is the ideal type of motivation, as it doesn’t require any extra work.  Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is when we add external motivators to get desired behaviors (largely because it’s not intrinsically interesting).  There are certainly times when external motivators make sense. Simulations, Scenarios, and Serious Games As long as we’re covering definitions, let me also clarify the differences between simulations, scenarios, and serious games.  People tend to use these indiscriminately, and it’s important to be clear.  Technically, a simulation is just a model of part of the world, representing important elements and relationships.  The simulation can be in any state and specific operations can take it to any other viable state. A motivated and self-efficacious learner can use that simulation to learn what they need to learn, but that’s not the way to bet.  So, for the purposes of learning, we tend to choose an initial state for the simulation to be in, and ask the learner to take it to a goal state that we’ve chosen such that the learner won’t be able to succeed without learning the relationships we want the learner to understand about this world.  (We typically wrap a story around this.)  That - start state, goal state, story - is what I term a scenario.  And we can tune a scenario into a serious game.  What I mean is that we can turn that scenario into a game by tuning: adjusting the elements in the game - the challenge, outcomes, story, etc - until the learner has a subjective experience of engagement. The Difference Between Gamification and Serious Games So what’s the difference between gamification and serious games?  Some people consider them to be the same, or that serious games are a subset of gamification. I prefer to keep a distinction between them. For me, it’s back to the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, serious games are the former, while gamification is the latter.  Gamification involves specifically taking ‘game mechanics’, those elements that are purported to make games compelling and wrapping them around behaviors we would like people to perform but they are unlikely to per status quo. We see things like scores, and leaderboards, stories wrapped around objectives, and even prizes.  And these have been shown to be effective. Of course, these should not be used indiscriminately; I heard an expert on gamification speak, and he made the point that they can be detrimental as well as desirable.  If not properly balanced, the behavior won’t be exhibited as desired. Just as tuning is required to turn a scenario into a game, so too gamification requires tuning to set the right value of the rewards, etc., to achieve the desired motivation. In my opinion, your preference should be intrinsic.  If you can help people understand the intrinsic value of what you’re doing, not necessarily just for them, but also for the organization or society as a whole, you get a more persistent commitment and a more satisfying feeling of accomplishment.  However, there will be circumstances when gamification makes sense, and there are definitely reasons to consider gamification.  For example, think of tasks that are worthwhile, but avoidable (e.g. exercising; those wristbands are a form of gamification).  People can enjoy the competition and success that comes with successful gamification, and the organization can benefit from the outcomes.  For example, motivating to persist in the the amount of drill required to develop expertise in a task beyond initial success, or the times when rote knowledge absolutely, positively has to be in the head.  Gamification and serious games are not really distinct so much as points on a continuum.  I prefer the far end, but there are benefits to be seen across the spectrum. For Learning, I Advocate Serious Games For learning, however, I am very much an advocate of serious games. Why?  It’s not only because of the intrinsic motivation, but it’s one of the highest forms of learning.  The best learning is individually mentored live performance, but there are two problems with this. The first is that mistakes during live performance can be costly, so in instances when the cost of failure is high, we prefer sample practice first.  Second, individual mentoring doesn’t scale well.  To me, serious games are the next best thing. When designed well, they intrinsically embody the best learning practice: contextualizing the same decisions you want learners to be able to make in meaningful settings, with repeated practice, adapting the level of difficulty and providing real feedback from the consequences. Designing Games and Meaningful Practice Designing games and designing meaningful practice aren’t all that different, with a caveat.  To implement a full serious game, you not only have to define meaningful objectives, choose a context, identify how learners go wrong and make those compelling alternatives, but you also have to build the model of the world.  The good news is that you only need to do so in those areas where you really need deep practice.  Otherwise, there are approximations that deliver much of the benefit with no more overhead than you already use. Branching scenarios allow complicated consequences to play out without requiring an explicit model (the model is implicit in the links).  Where only limited replay is required to help learners ‘get’ the learning, branching scenarios (or a suite of them) can achieve the necessary goals.  And mini-scenarios are really just better written multiple-choice questions embodying only one decision.  I’m hard pressed to think of any situation where you wouldn’t to at least have a mini-scenario instead of any other type of multiple-choice question, since the ability to use the information is what is (or should be) key. There’s a lot more that goes into creating a meaningful learning experience (graphics, writing, etc.), but the focus on creating meaningful experiences is a step we need to go both for our learners and for the learning outcomes.  Again, games are the best form of learning practice that you can accomplish.  Unless you’re hoping people will pay you for the learning experience you create, you don’t have to go as far in your polish as would a commercial game designer, but you should work to make it a plausible scenario and tune the experience until there’s a subjective experience of engagement. The effort is a valuable investment in optimizing the learning outcomes. A number of years ago now, my research led me to the realization that the elements that lead to effective learning practice and the elements that lead to engaging experience are the same elements.  Learning can, and should, be hard fun.  You should want to know how to design games, as it’s really a natural investigation of what makes good learning.  And that, ultimately, is what we should be focusing on. The post Making the Distinction Between Serious Games and Gamification - Guest Post by Clark Quinn appeared first on Litmos.

Ready to move your corporate training online but aren’t quite sure what your LMS needs are to get the job done? In this article, I´ll share the top LMS requirements for corporate training that you need to know about when choosing a learning management system for your organization. LMS Requirements For Corporate Training In many ways and in the simplest of terms, an LMS is a lot like a puzzle. It must have all the key pieces in place, all of the functions and features your organization needs, if you truly want to get the most return from your investment. In this article, you’ll discover the top 10 LMS puzzle pieces that you’ll need to create a whole and effective corporate training experience for your employees. 1. Site and Online Course Customization Are you going to be able to integrate your branding into the LMS? Is the LMS vendor providing you with your own online training website that employees can log in to access their online training modules? One of the most important LMS requirements for corporate training, particularly for organizations who want cohesive branding, is a product that allows you to customize virtually every aspect of your online course and of your online training site. This can add value to the online training course by increasing its credibility, as well as its aesthetic appeal, which enriches the online training experience as a whole. 2. eLearning Course Building When considering LMS requirements for corporate training, effective eLearning course building tools are a must-have. Not only should the LMS provide a wide range of tools you can use to create the online training course that you have in mind, but it should also allow for both usability and design freedom. In other words, it should be easy enough for your design team to use, while still providing the features they need to take full advantage of their skills and talents. 3. Multimedia Integration Videos,interactive scenarios, and multimedia presentations are all key ingredients to an immersive online training course. This means that one of the major LMS requirements for corporate training is that it has to offer you the ability to integrate multimedia into your eLearning design quickly and conveniently. Can you upload your own videos into the eLearning course, or integrate links that your online users can click on to access online presentations hosted elsewhere? Determine which multimedia elements you will be using regularly and then ensure that the LMS supports these media. 4. Updating Capabilities Chances are that you may need to update your eLearning course contents on a regular basis. This is especially true for compliance online training courses or those that focus on product knowledge. Online assessments will also need to be updated on a regular basis, as well as certifications and links to other online resources. As a result, your LMS should give you the power to modify and add elements to your eLearning course design with relative ease. 5. Multilanguage Support Even if you aren’t planning on delivering training tointernational audiences at the moment, you may need to do so in the future, particularly if your organization is considering going global. Does the LMS offer you the opportunity to add subtitles or captions to your eLearning course, or to create eLearning templates that can easily be modified to accommodate for other languages? 6. Online Assessments Online assessments are on the most effective ways to gauge the effectiveness of your online training program. They give you the power to determine if yourcorporate learners are actually absorbing information and skills or if your eLearning strategy may need to be fine-tuned. As such, having a learning management system that allows for easy test, quiz, or exam integration is fundamental. Do they have a database of questions that you can use? Are there any online templates that will help to make the development process simple and straightforward? Does the LMS enable you to create interactive assessments? 7. Tracking Reports Learner performance, progress, as well as strengths and weaknesses are just some of the items included in online tracking reports. Having a LMS that features online tracking capabilities offers insight into how your employees are faring and whether your training strategy is achieving its goals and objectives. Some LMS providers offer dashboard reports, while others may deliver them directly to your email inbox. 8. Compliance Failing to meet compliance requirements can lead to a variety of negative consequences. Therefore, one of the LMS requirements for corporate training should be that your LMS should be able to track compliance training results and help you to ensure that every member of your staff is meeting the standards. Some may even be able to issue compliance certifications that your employees can earn by completing specificonline modules. 9. Feedback tools One of the powerful tools you have at your disposal is learners'feedback. Having a LMS that has built-in poll, survey and questionnaire online tools can make the data collection process more efficient and streamlined. You can find out which aspects of your online training course you may need to improve and which are offering your corporate audience the most value, without having to use third party poll sites. 10. eCommerce If you are planning onselling youronline training courses, in addition to offering them to your employees, it’s wise to have a built-in eCommerce platform. There are certain LMS vendors who offer you the opportunity to set up a virtual storefront, while others allow for shopping cart integration directly on your corporate site. If you are going the eCommerce route, then you may also want to look for a learning management system that also has marketing and social mediafeatures integrated, so that you can promote your product online. Keep these LMS requirements for corporate training in mind when selecting your next LMS to ensure that you get the most value for money and that you provide your employees with the skill set development they need to achieve professional success. The post Top 10 LMS Requirements For Corporate Training appeared first on Litmos.

Pre-authoring is the content creation process that occurs before authoring. The media content you create that will end up being used in your authoring tool to create your final product. It's the tools you use to create videos, audio, graphics, animations, screen captures, and text for your eLearning courses. Tools like Powerpoint, Audacity, MovieMaker, Camtasia, SnagIt, Pixelmator, and so many other tools that don't fit the category of authoring tools. Yet they are equally vital to the production of the content we create and import into those authoring tools. And in some cases the content you pre-author is good enough to stand on it's own as learning content. And that is changing everything. Back When the Trend was Multimedia Authoring The trend in corporate training has been moving towards smaller and smaller pieces of content. One could argue that the growth of mobile is responsible for that shift. But we also now know that shorter content is more conducive to how our brains retain information. And we know that repetition is more important than quantity for deeper long term learning. In the early days before eLearning there was computer based training, CBT. There was no internet. And we had little hard science to back up the claims of behavioral psychologists. It was still 20th century school just digitized and delivered via computer. Hour long classroom courses were converted into hour long CBT courses. Nothing fundamentally instructional changed about how content was delivered other than not having a teacher, and not needing a school house to deliver the instruction. The content changed very little in most cases as we converted analog content to digital. 21st century technology has completely changed the way individuals consume media. It's a YouTube world out there. And it's no different if that media happens to be specifically consumed to meet a particular learning objective. Those hour long fully contained, and locked up, lessons are now being unbundled. The Khan Academy has become a cliched example, but there's a reason why. It works. And there are other examples of even shorter content on platforms like Instragram, and SnapChat. Everything is being unbundled and condensed. And if you don't believe me, ask a teenager. Are Authoring Tools Dying? This unbundling of CBTs brings us to why pre-authoring tools have overshadowed eLearning authoring tools in recent years. In most cases they are much less expensive than authoring tools. Some are even free. They've become more powerful and easier to use over the years. Some are even mobile apps. YouTube.com even allows for minor video editing within the browser. Authoring tools were necessary a decade ago because the trend was multimedia. You needed authoring tools to bring together multiple media formats into one interactive environment. An environment that also needed interface and navigation design as well as coding for tracking and data storage. Multimedia authoring was fun! But it came at a price. Fast forward back to present day eLearning and we find that browser designs have become the standard for user interface design and navigation. Cloud based learning management systems have taken advantage of this by handling the navigation and design for you. But they also give users the ability to customize if necessary. Your media content is added as individual modules and can be mixed and matched to create courses. And your courses can be combined to create comprehensive learning paths. All of this work used to be crammed into authoring tools and published for CD-ROMs or later as FLASH files. Within the cloud much of that work is no longer necessary. Instructional media creators can focus their efforts on simply creating the best media they can produce...or afford. That might be a video, or a series of videos. It might include a Powerpoint presentation accompanied by the voice of the subject matter expert. The choices of media selection are many with little need for additional value added by an authoring tool. SaaS and User Trends Point the Way Forward The software as a service platforms have become the standard for almost every industry. Combine SaaS trends with user trends in media consumption and you have a powerful indicator pointing you in the direction of pre-authoring becoming primary authoring. And your SaaS-based LMS being your publishing platform, tracking system, content library, eCommerce store, and so much more. The heavy lifting handled by authoring tools was required in the days of multimedia. But today it is largely unnecessary. We have become a single medium society consuming images, video, and text as separate elements. Video is becoming so ubiquitous that soon there will be very little not captured and published for the world to see...and learn from. It's really quite amazing if you don't let it freak you out. So where does that leave us? Is authoring dead? I have my thoughts, but I'd love to hear from you. Send me a tweet @Litmos or use the hashtag #TellLitmos or #askLitmos.   The post If Pre-Authoring Becomes Primary Authoring...is Authoring Dead? appeared first on Litmos.

Technology is shifting again. It all started with a live-casting app called Meerkat at this year's SXSW event. It was quickly followed by Twitter's entry called Periscope. Google couldn't be left out so they launched YouNOW. And most recently Facebook entered the race with Mention. Unfortunately, Facebook made their early launch only available to celebrities. So, I won't...mention...Facebook's app much. HA! Yahoo is also getting in on the live-casting action with LiveText. It's a strange app because there is no audio. It's only texting with a live video stream. Hhhmmm... Not sure I get it. This trend is moving fast. I just recently blogged about the nationwide live-cast of the Applebees marketing event here. And it was just a few days ago that I witnessed another Ferguson protest via Periscope as it was happening. It won't be long before your students begin live-casting your classroom events. They might even begin live-casting your eLearning while they are taking the course. How are we, as a community of professionals, going to respond? My hope is that one day we will become confident technology leaders responding proactively to new technologies, and leaving our legacy of being fearful reactionaries behind. In the short time these apps have been around we've already seen some impressive use cases emerge. Sporting events: The MayWeather/Pacquio fight was pirated heavily via live-casting apps. Music Concerts: U2 partnered with Meerkat to live-cast parts of their recent concert tour. Live News Coverage: First it was a fire in New York covered by a Periscope use and most recently The 2nd shooting in Ferguson hit Periscope before the regular media news outlets knew it was even happening. Marketing Events: Applebee's streamed their new product announcement from locations across the country via Meerkat and Periscope. Let me just pause for a moment and ask the learning community to please leave the live-casting nomenclature alone. As this trend begins to grow you will no doubt find it useful as an education tool, and feel an overwhelming urge to rename it LEARN-Casting. Please do not. I'm begging you right now to resist.  Live-Casting for Training or Performance Support? My very informal survey of colleagues has shown a pattern of usage similar to the early days of Twitter. Many curiously looked but seeing only millennials rambling on about nothing turned off the desire to investigate any deeper. This is similar to the "I don't care what you had for breakfast" complaint heard by many during twitter's earliest days circa 2006. I'm sure most of you remember going through the process. Create Twitter account Decide it's stupid Don't touch it for months...years even. Go back and look to see if your account is still there...because everyone. It's easy to see how much more compelling live video can be when compared to 140 text characters. And with live video having already been around online in other forms, it's easier for non-techie types to "get it". The use case for training is too soon. However, I don't think it takes a lot of creativity to see the value in live-casting for the purpose of learning. And at some point it will end up as part of everyone's blended learning strategy. But will it carry primary content as part of your main training event or will it be considered more useful as a performance support tool? Like every other new trend, experiments will need to be tried. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. For users of the Litmos LMS you don't need to worry about integration. Anything you can link to on the internet can be used as part of your course already. And with the recent announcement of Meerkat's open API, we will also be investigating a tighter integration with live-casting tools. A lot has changed since Meerkat's launch in April 2015.  And I have no doubts that the live-casting landscape will be very different before the end of the year. So hold on and enjoy the ride.   The post Live-Casting Trend Continues to Grow in eLearning appeared first on Litmos.

The role Learning & Development (L&D) can play in the organization is changing. There are great opportunities to assist in success than just offering courses.  The time is now for L&D to step up and become an ever-more valuable contributor. The nature of work is changing.  As things move faster, the ability to execute against known factors is dropping in importance.  The situations being seen in the workplace are increasingly ambiguous, unique, and changing.  What’s needed is an ability to adapt quickly, to innovate continually. This doesn’t come from courses alone. There are new developments on several fronts in how we think, work, and learn.  Our understanding of our own cognition has advanced, but unfortunately we are not seeing this reflected in workplace practices with sufficiency.  We need to account for these new realizations in our approaches. It used to be the model that all our thinking was done in the head.  We provided lots of knowledge and tested with ‘closed books’.  What’s now recognized by science, however, is that our cognition is distributed across our artifacts and representations as well as in our head.  Our thinking isn’t as formally logical as we’d like to believe, and external supports - checklists, lookup tables, wizards, etc. - are valuable complements in ensuring our outcomes excel. We’ve also recognized that creativity is not an independent activity. Innovation comes from creative friction, people working together with complementary skills. When properly facilitated, the room (as the saying goes) is smarter than the smartest person in the room.  Creating ways for people to work together is a new imperative. Finally, our learning isn’t best facilitated by content dump and knowledge test.  It’s hard to get rote and arbitrary information into our heads, and we’re better suited for decisions than remembering.  We should use the supports identified above to support remembering, and save our learning for better decisions. However, doing so implies a different form of pedagogy: meaningful and sufficient practice.  There is nothing inherently wrong with courses, but they need to be focused on business outcomes and provided with sufficient opportunity to develop the ability. Practice until they get it right won’t get it done; you need to practice until they can’t get it wrong. Further, we need to look at the bigger picture of learning.   Models such as the 70:20:10 Framework as touted by Charles Jennings or Jane Hart’s Modern Workplace Learning help us understand that learning doesn’t stop at the end of the course. Learners can and will continue to develop with mentoring and coaching, and by taking on challenging assignments. This is particularly true for the more complex decisions that we are increasingly seeing, and we should not only acknowledge this but design with it in mind and support the process. What do these realizations imply for the future of work?  It suggests that courses need to change the focus, and we need to supplement courses with a variety of other resources.   Our perspective has to shift to one of facilitating organizational outcomes, and that learning also includes research, problem-solving, design, and more.  Our tools will include performance support and social media. Our processes need to change as well.  We have to start looking at performance consulting before we start designing courses. We need to ask what the core gap in performance is, and then whether it’s a knowledge, skill, or motivation problem. If it’s not a skill problem, we need other solutions than courses.  If we do this, however, we’re now focusing on delivering a bigger solution to the organizational performance problem than just one component.   To complement the focus on performance, we also should consider how we develop the ability of the organization to learn beyond and outside of courses.   To support coaching and mentoring we need to ensure we have good practices and good tools. We also need meaningful work.   In addition, when we innovate, trouble-shoot, create, we don’t know the answer when we start, so that too is a form of learning. Here we need to facilitate people working well together, as well as learning on their own. These should not be assumed, but developed, and here too is a role for assessment and courses. With this perspective, we see courses as a rich component of a full suite of support for organizational learning. Formal learning provides not only the optimal execution for what is done by the individual, but serves as a channel for developing learning and social working skills.  Moreover, as courses begin to expand to a wider definition, incorporating "micro-learning" or small content chunks that can include ‘how-to’ videos and troubleshooting guides, these too need to be hosted and tracked.  The goal is to have resources that go beyond ‘just in case’ to include the ‘just in time’ needs that are increasingly seen. This can seem like an expanding role, and a consequent bandwidth challenge for already strapped resources.  Increasingly, organizations are finding two strategies help mitigate this problem. One includes being more opportunistic, and the other includes being more focused. Too often, it’s easy (particularly under the sway of the Subject Matter Expert or SME) to want to offer everything potentially relevant.  However, when you’ve got motivated workers focused on achieving outcomes, they really don’t want everything, and they’d prefer just the minimum necessary.  A useful approach is the Least Assistance Principle, where the realization is that "what’s the least I can do for you" isn’t a rude response.  Giving folks just enough to get back to performing is desirable for your resources and the audience.  This is a good principle in the design of solutions whether mobile or coursework, and also supports using other approaches such as performance support instead of creating a full course.  A mantra is ‘resources before courses’. An associated mantra is ‘curation over creation’.  Increasingly, materials can be found that meet an organizational need, and when so, they should be used.  In fact, a reasonable policy is not to create anything that isn’t proprietary; for general business needs a ‘buy not build’ approach should be chosen.  An alternative to ‘a course for everything’ is to have a course on how to learn from resources, and then pointers to books or outside courses rather than investing development resources internally. With policies like these, the organization can become more efficient and effective, while also becoming a more strategic contributor to the organization.  The opportunity exists for L&D to ‘go big’.  L&D can begin to grow to include a much more flexible definition of course, and perform against a richer in facilitating organizational success.     The post Integrating the Bigger Picture of Learning appeared first on Litmos.

In 2012 I was introduced to the Business Model Canvas at a gathering of creative design thinkers. Recently I discovered that a colleague in the corporate training community had modified the canvas slightly to be an effective for learning & development. And the Learning Model Canvas was born. The creative mind behind the LMC is John Delano, CEO of saltbox. He spent some time on skype with me recently to introduce the learning model canvas, explain how it benefits learning leaders, and share some of his professional experiences. If you work in corporate training in any capacity I think you will find the LMC quite useful. Rest assured this is not another ADDIE model or like any other design model in existence. The learning model canvas is a solid design thinking tool that will help you think strategically about ANY training issue you may be trying to solve. I recorded our skype conversation which you can see below. But before you watch the video you might want to download the Interactive Learning Model Canvas for free. John's team also offers an online course and onsite workshops. But honestly, I'm not blogging about this just to promote John's work...although I do think it's brilliant. I would encourage you to even start with the original Business Model Canvas and read the book: Business Model Generation. This will give you a much broader sense of how many different problems can be solved through the design thinking fostered by the canvas. After 20+ years in this industry I've seen tools and models come and go. I've succeeded and failed with most of them. There is no magic to the canvas itself. As a matter of fact there is nothing stopping you from just drawing the 9 quadrants yourself on a sheet of paper and digging in. The magic is in how you use it. At the very least you can use it as a sort of check list when creating a new training department or project. Its a gut check to make sure you haven't missed something. I can say with confidence that one of the greatest problems with most training professionals is their inability to "speak business". You may never get an MBA, but simply reviewing the LMC as it relates to your course, curriculum, or training department, will get you out of your ISD head and into your business head. And that's where you want to be. This is just another tool in the toolbox of providing business value instead of just being satisfied with "creating training". I hope you enjoy listening to my conversation with John. And if you find the video, and LMC, useful please let me know. I'd love to hear from you. The post A Design Thinking Tool for Learning and Development appeared first on Litmos.