We need SMART eLearning - now! So picture the scene. A training manager sitting at his laptop on a Monday morning. He gets a request from one of his department heads, "I need a course for XYZ". "No problem",  he thinks.  "We’ve got that new LMS, with all those off-the-shelf titles." So he logs on, and searches, and searches, and…finds 500 titles to match the search for XYZ. Today’s blog comes from our co-founder, Peter Carlin. Peter aims to address the above scenario and more! (and there is more than one way to solve this challenge, AND more than one problem here!) Over to Peter… I love my job as a learning consultant.  I am blessed to be able to visit such a sizable and diverse array of clients, each with their own problems and levels of modern learning maturity.  Each and every L&D professional is at a different point on their journey to modernise services for their business needs and for their learners.  Over time and as I travel around to meet these clients, a set of common (and industry spanning) problems is becoming more and more apparent. Just navigating the maze of tools, technologies, processes and methodologies is overwhelming which to me is the most apparent common problem and a topic for another day. But one of the most common problems I see is how best to procure, manage and utilise libraries of off-the-shelf content.  Too often we have encountered L&D Professionals scratching their heads after a two year mega licence deal for vast libraries with little to show for their financial spend or efforts. Utilisation or realisation of any goals were just not attained, resulting in - well let’s take a moment to think about this as I feel the net results are quite profound. It is still about value-add The pressure on L&D professionals to deliver more with less, to add value to the business and to facilitate great learning experiences is greater than ever.  We need to be at the top of our game, with great commercial acumen, constantly evolving, measuring and evaluating and of course promoting our successes.  Scrutiny from the board on every penny spent is immense.  Off-the-shelf eLearning libraries are an important part of our modern learning toolkit just as other elements such as classroom training, blended programmes, virtual classrooms, video, mobile content, game elements and many more.  BUT as always with eLearning, there is a very fine line between great success and abject failure.  So let’s stay positive and figure out how to get this right. Here are five strategies you might consider to tame your vast eLearning libraries into a smart eLearning solution: Value eLearning as a vital business tool No matter what some pundits say, eLearning libraries can really support efforts for specific projects or for generic skills in many ways.  If used correctly and you take advice on which good quality content to buy, they provide the opportunity to build learning services for large and geographically dispersed audiences at a fraction of the alternative cost. If our approach to the overall solution at hand is forward thinking, then incorporating off-the-shelf eLearning content to a solution is a good thing. More often, it is the overall user experience and how we communicate with and motivate the learners to become involved in the process is the most important element yet so easily overlooked. Banish option paralysis The hoarders versus the minimalists: In my house, if something sits around for a few weeks or months then it is recycled, sold or moved on.  I take a practical approach to decluttering; it makes me feel good and I know where the important things are around me. Buying vast arrays of eLearning libraries is a bit like hoarding - we have all seen the TV shows.  Hoarding results in having lots of things ‘just in case’ you need them. But mostly they are not and will never be required. Also, it makes it much harder to find what you need in order to get benefit from it.  L&D people love hoarding content - there is almost a fear of not having something and an attitude of ‘it’s better looking at it than for it’ can persist.   Maybe this is too much of a sweeping statement and an alternative view is that we are forced to hoard content because it is pushed upon us.  Either way, you know who you are! Presenting vast catalogues of content to managers or staff for their self-service is fraught with danger and is a waste of very precious time.  In very simple terms, it produces cognitive overload. And for those who even dare try to navigate the library structures, option paralysis sets in.  When offering solutions, we must do our best to present the most pertinent information with the least amount of effort required by the user to navigate its use. It’s a shame that in the eLearning world, we haven’t quite got a proper ‘google’ search yet for our vast content libraries. The user experience is paramount and learners must feel comfortable in the environment as well as the content of the courses they choose.   We must shift away from pushing content to service facilitation. To facilitate a great service, it must be a great experience for the user and we must benchmark how best to do this.  Smaller more pertinent libraries, with granular intelligent search is the absolute starting point. Pre-match learning to business needs Content alignment to business needs is important.  "Content Alignment", I hear you say has a whiff of buzzword about it, so how can we make it practical?  I always start with the obvious, what is it we all have in common? Well, we all have a performance development cycle, usually starting with goal setting at the start of the year followed by formal 1-1’s, informal mentoring and coaching, probably a 360 & a rating thrown in and ending in final review.  There are a number of touch points between managers and individuals along that process so maybe one of our "Smart Libraries" is dedicated wholly to it -  a self-service catalogue for managers with content to help them prepare for the end-to-end process and another as a first line learner resource for discussion outcomes.   If these libraries are accessible, well thought out, marketed and communicated throughout the company then we have succeeded to provide a valuable resource with little maintenance or input required by L&D. And - more importantly, no more needles in haystacks! I can think of many such smart libraries and it occurs to me that the content should and probably could come from multiple sources.  There is of course a time intensive research element to this type of thinking and there will also be a trade-off between and increased cost per head with lower volumes.  I do believe, however, that good utilisation of the services you provide can fully outweigh a perceived increase in cost per person. Build demand and the obsession with utilisation Buying vast libraries and expecting our managers to adopt it and our learners to use it just does not work. Examples of good practice demonstrates that great communication can drive demand for the content thus transforming how we can go about procuring and negotiating a great deal for the business.  Imagine going into a vendor negotiation armed to the teeth with statistics, numbers and knowledge.  This is so important and there are a number of tactics to think about. So - build your ideal libraries and go on a road show.  If you truly believe that the service you are building is valuable, then go and sell it.  You will need to become a sales person, PR expert and marketing buff, but hey this stuff is fun!  It demonstrates to your organisation that you are putting science behind your process and that success is measured by collaboration and buy-in.  This is where true and organic utilisation will come from. I would suggest further that normal utilisation calculations are fundamentally flawed and we hide behind spurious figures without any sense of value.  Who cares how many people passed the assessment, or complete XYZ by a certain date? What we really want to know are things like: Did it help anyone get better at their job? Did it help solve an organisational challenge? Anyhow, during your road show, build support from managers and individuals and ask them to sign up to your service before your even build it.  These are the foundations for success. Find out the content vendors secrets As ever, practical application of these ideas is important and receiving good advice can really help. You can choose to work directly with vendors or indirectly through their resellers - each should have learning consultants that can help.  You should expect the same pricing from both sources. Do not be afraid to negotiate and to push hard for what you want.  Some will be more open than others, however there is a limited source of supply with too few large players in the market. Working with a reseller should provide additional benefits with extra layers of services, a knowledge of the wider supply base, a willingness to meet your preferred model and potentially a source of options. In the past we have seen too rigid a licencing model from the supply side and with the right approach, we should be able to challenge this to match the business need to the solution.  Ensure you understand the technical integration process. Summary It’s a new world out there with new ways, new generations, new methodologies and ever-evolving technologies. Our learners are learning in ways we haven’t thought of yet using technology we don’t use or don’t understand. Our L&D service solution set has to evolve and one element of that is external off-the-shelf content. We can all challenge this aspect of our toolkit by library planning, pre-aligning to business needs, internal demand gathering, marketing, building a great user experience and negotiating well with the suppliers. Your learning service provider should be able to help and many will offer some of this advice for free. The time for smart eLearning is now! So don’t be the hoarder next door, just pick up the phone and ask. You can learn more about our off-the-shelf learning services here. Would love to hear your comments. You can use the comment form below or jump on the chat tool for a quick conversation with one of our learning consultants at any time. Peter Carlin, Joint owner, Logicearth Learning Services. The post Transforming vast off-the-shelf content into SMART eLearning appeared first on Logicearth.

Why have explainer videos become so popular? First of all, let’s explain what an explainer video is! It is a short animation (usually between 30 seconds and 2 minutes), which explains a key concept or is focussed on a product or service demonstration/overview. They’ve been popular on startup company websites for the past couple of years. Research shows that an explainer video on a website can increase conversion from between 15 to 20%. You can see an example of an explainer video, providing an overview of one of our eLearning programmes, here. http://logicearth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ScreenVideo2.mp4   So today’s blog is about explainer videos. But it is about their application for learning. Just as a highly visual, short and focussed video can help your potential buyers to understand your products and services, so too can it help your learners. Logicearth’s multi-device eLearning content is characterised by judicious and pertinent use of explainer videos. Our lead Instructional Designer, Helen Cassidy presents today’s blog to give you an insight into what good explainer videos can do to support learning and what makes a good explainer video. Over to Helen… I worked on a project once where I had no idea about what I was doing. I asked my manager for an explanation of the project background but left his cubicle with diagrams that looked like a comic strip. I asked my colleagues for help on where my bit fitted into the process but my notes from their patchy ramblings - delivered with aplomb - were equally comical. What was I missing? All I wanted was the basics. Tip 1 - The BASICS What I was missing were some short building blocks of information that set a context, were easily understood, followed a logical process and paced me nicely through the information. The reason I like explainer animations so much - both as an ID and a learner - is that they present on a stage those basic nuggets of information, complete with pictures and sound. It’s easy to think that all an animation does is add a little bit of Hollywood sparkle to the dullest of content (they can certainly do this) but a good explainer video is much more than that. As an ID, an explainer animation isn’t a learning element that I can just throw into a course to jazz it up. A good one is a gem. A poor one leads to confusion and can make a learner distrust everything else you’re trying to say. Tips 2 to 5 are what I think about when designing good explainer videos for learning. Tip 2: The WORDS A good script is the backbone of an explainer video: Break up the explanation into short bite-sized chunks Ensure that the points follow a logical path Visualise the solution to make sure there are no gaps or ambiguities Take care to avoid introducing terminology that a learner might not yet understand Keep an eye on the pace of the explanation - don’t overload one section and trivialise another Every point should be meaningful and relevant Read through your script and have your peers review it - does it sound like a text book or can you imagine someone actually explaining the topic to you? Don’t forget to ask your subject matter expert (SME) to review your script. It might have taken you a week to get to grips with it but it needs to match your learners’ requirements. And graphic designers don’t usually take kindly to having to rework a complex animation because the script wasn’t signed off beforehand.  Tip 3: The IMAGES Having a team of graphic designers to accurately visualise every part of your subject is quite a luxury. An ID will have immersed him/herself in the subject and talked to the SMEs so should have a good conceptual picture of what the subject is all about. Therefore most IDs will want to give their graphic designers a steer as to the imagery that should accompany their script. Think of some overall imagery that correctly represents the base subject - e.g. is it a mechanical process or about people’s emotions? For each point or sentence in your script, think of a visual metaphor to represent it. Imagine each section of your animation running from one into the next - does it work? Is there too much happening in one particular section - should it be further broken down? Is there a large chunk of script where little information is actually being conveyed - can this be condensed? The animation should focus clearly on the key messages so try to avoid distractions or red herrings. Use highlights, colours and actions to flag up important points.   Tip 4: The AUDIO/SOUND An explainer video could have voiceover or music, or a bit of both. (Be careful with the music - see previous blog) Know the audio capabilities of your audience. A lovely flowing narrative may not suit learners who have audio restrictions It’s important to avoid cognitive overload by having all the text appearing on the screen when you need your learners to concentrate on the animation details, so decide early what text will be voiced over and what will be displayed You may need to include a transcript button containing the key points Ensure the client has signed off on the voiceover sample - accents and dialects can be sensitive things Give your voice over (VO) artist a clear brief - straight, quirky, slow, fast, deliberate, fun - the style of the voiceover will play a huge part in whether or not your learners will easily accept the information with which they are being presented Be careful with pronunciation - some words might need a specific intonation or emphasis - check this with your client   Tip 5 - The BUDGET Good explainer animations are effective, immersive and impactful. They can also use up a large amount of your designers’ time and efforts, so make sure you, and your clients, budget for this. Voiceover also carries a cost so build this in to the overall cost also. You can reduce costs by: Asking someone internal to do the VO - most organisations have people who have decent voices/accents - you may even have some part-time actors in your organisation! Consider just having music, words and images, instead of VO - that is the approach we used for the video at the top of this blog Re-using graphic design elements - build up a library of symbols, animation techniques and images for use in all of your animations and keep adding to it to share it among your design team You don’t always have to create animations from scratch - you can find stock video and music to pull ideas together (see mouse video below) When you get it right, explainer animations are key elements in a learning module. They are stand out, stand-alone and memorable components that can be easily referenced or shared. They have personality, flair and style - be it Hollywood, European art or Film Noir - and are usually always warmly received by learners just looking for that decent explanation. Here are a couple more examples of our good explainer videos: For an Energy and Sustainability eLearning programme http://logicearth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/p7s1_VO.mp4   Short demo video for causes of repetitive strain injury http://logicearth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/MouseClickIdea.mp4   So thanks to Helen for a great post. If you have any questions on explainer videos, please do get in touch. Our designers would love to hear from you. You can also read more about our eLearning content here. Logicearth Learning Services specialise in designing, delivering and supporting modern workplace learning solutions, which brings results for individuals and organisations. We are learning technology experts and along with specialist interactive multi-device content development skills, we can provide a complete service for all your organisation’s modern learning needs. Logicearth has offices in Belfast and Dublin but deliver services worldwide, including Ireland, UK, USA and throughout Europe. The post 5 tips to create good explainer videos appeared first on Logicearth.

How do we address unlearning in eLearning content design? At Logicearth, we’re really fascinated by the topic of unlearning. We first wrote about it here - unlearning is the new learning. Our view is that we are missing a trick in workplace learning by not considering what we need to help our staff unlearn. In our experience, once the baggage of unlearning is dropped, learning and performance improvement can be turbo-charged. Steve Wheeler, associate professor of Learning Technologies at Plymouth University, has an interesting perspective on this too. In a blog - Learning, unlearning and re-learning, he quotes: "Times are changing. Kathy Sierra features a timeline on her blog which suggests that the 1970s and 80s were about how well we could learn, the 1990s and 2000s focused on how fast and how much we could learn, whilst today’s education should be based on how much we can unlearn." Today, we revisit the topic from the point of view of addressing unlearning as part of the learning analysis phase of the eLearning design process. David Cameron, one of our experienced instructional designers explains how we do that. Over to David… ‘Don’t wanna learn from nobody what I gotta unlearn.’ So sang Bob Dylan, in a song from an album called Slow Train Coming (not, as you might expect from Dylan, Slow Train a-Comin’). This was another album which forced his many fans to unlearn some of their own learning about him. I should know, I got it for my 13th birthday. This nasally delivered born-again evangelism wasn’t what I thought I’d signed up for when, a year earlier, I fell under Dylan’s spell. So, I stopped buying - i.e. asking others to buy me - any new Dylan albums for a while, and listened only to the old ones. Given that much of the 1980s was a creative nadir for Dylan, this wasn’t such a bad idea. But it’s only in recent years that I’ve come to share Leonard Cohen’s assessment that this was great gospel music. I missed out at the time because I wasn’t willing to unlearn. Thankfully, I’m younger than that now. Unlearning and association The mind works by association - at least, mine does. So I often find this line of Dylan’s flitting through my head these days. Resistance to learning interests me: it’s the thing I have to devise ways of overcoming as I sit at my Logicearth desk, instructionally designing eLearning courses. As well as meetings with subject matter experts (SMEs), I will try to schedule a call with some of the learners I’m writing for. Usually they will be handpicked by the client, and so - in their eagerness to learn - not wholly representative of the wider learnership (a word I only wish I had made up). Still, these calls are vital. We all have an ideal learner in our head, and this easily-pleased and eager-to-please little head-occupant needs to be evicted. You are going to have to work harder than you think. As I’m finding out for myself … Right now, I’m in the middle of doing some unlearning, having agreed to go with a friend to guitar lessons for beginners. It’s teaching me about learning as well as guitar-playing (hence this blog). My guitar-wielding days actually began at age nine, and I’ve barely progressed since. Why? Mainly because my first learning experience was a bad one, and also because my desired learning outcome (to be - not just to be like - Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin) was a little unrealistic. And then, once the reality-penny dropped and I saw how slow my progress was going to be, I found a way of playing that was enough to get by on. Enough that, if someone asked ‘Do you play the guitar?’, I could answer ‘Yes’ - as long as there was no guitar around for me to (dis)prove this. If I can stand it, I’ll revisit that first learning experience. My teacher was a family friend (I’ll call him Mr D), a headmaster who was a reluctant teacher that day. He taught me, with some difficulty (the difficulty was mine), the chords E and A, and brought out The Beatles Songbook. With those two chords you can do a passable version of Get Back. A good start: I liked The Beatles and knew the song. When it comes to learning, the new is built on the familiar old - not everything has to be unlearned. But my interest in language, even at that age, was at least the equal of my love of music. And so I quizzed Mr D on the lyrics. Why did Loretta Martin think she was a woman when she was a man? Why did he have a woman’s name, then? In the line ‘But she gets it while she can’, what is ‘it’? Mr D shifted uncomfortably in his chair, and asked his son to take over. I was then treated to a display of Mr D’s son’s virtuosity with the instrument. Suddenly, air guitar seemed a better option. But worst of all was what followed next. When my mum picked me up and asked Mr D ‘So, is he going to be a great guitarist, then?’, there were some mumbled words of affirmation, but they were accompanied by a shaking of Mr D’s head, just caught out of the side of my eye. And so the pronouncement had been made: I would never be Jimmy Page. I wouldn’t even be Ritchie Blackmore. Unlearning in the eLearning content design process Here at Logicearth, we always enquire into the difficulties that learners might face by asking our SMEs: ‘What are the pain points?’ Well, my pain points when my mum picked me up were painful indeed. Looking back on the experience, what does it tell me about learning? It teaches me that learning requires: • Some initial willingness from the learner (even the horse that was reluctant to drink agreed to be led to the water) • A lot of effort to engage the learner (this effort can’t be deputised, e.g. to templates or technology) • Realism, but not discouragement (nod don’t shake your head) • No preconceived notions about ‘ability’ (skills can be learned, by anyone) • Demonstration of the required skill (but not ‘showing off’) • Acceptance that some Beatles lyrics are indecipherable (OK, strike this one) And now, since Monday, my unlearning (and new learning) process has begun. It was different this time. For a start, I was part of a group, and so the incompetence wasn’t uniquely mine. Even though eLearning can take someone out of the classroom and place them alone in front of a computer/tablet/mobile, there is a skill involved in making the learning seem both individually targeted and a shared experience. You can do this, for instance, by using scenarios involving the kind of characters the learner will recognise among his/her colleagues, while also addressing the learner directly as ‘you’ and leaving enough scope for personality (e.g. by asking questions that involve thoughtful, individual responses rather than right/wrong, true/false answers). The song we were learning was Neil Young’s Desert Highway. A good start: I like Neil Young and know the song. But just as I was getting comfortable, I was told to use my pinkie when playing G (the third chord I learned aged nine). It felt weird, awkward. And just right! I knew from the discomfort - a good discomfort - that I was both unlearning and learning. So, my advice is, don’t alienate the learner, but don’t make your courses too cosy either. Unlearnin’ through e-learnin’ is a-comin’. Soon. Thanks to David for a very interesting blog. Next in the series will be specific examples about how we design eLearning content to help with unlearning. Maybe you have already addressed unlearning in your workplace - if so, we’d love to hear from you. Please reply in the comments below. Logicearth Learning Services specialise in designing, delivering and supporting modern workplace learning solutions, which brings results for individuals and organisations. We are learning technology experts and along with specialist interactive multi-device content development skills, we can provide a complete service for all your organisation’s modern learning needs. Logicearth has offices in Belfast and Dublin but deliver services worldwide, including Ireland, UK, USA and throughout Europe.   The post The role of unlearning in eLearning content design appeared first on Logicearth.

Do we truly embrace modern learning? I love learning new things. I love the buzz that it gives me to finally master a complex topic and make progress. Over the last six months, I have been immersed in a personal learning journey. I’ve taken on a new role in Logicearth; alongside my learning innovation role, I am also responsible for driving our content marketing efforts. This has involved unlearning a few things and also learning some new things. My biggest learning challenge? It has been a change in identity. For the past 10 years, I have been focussing on all things learning design. I have managed teams of IDs and designer/developers, I have managed eLearning projects and I have trained and coached new designers. From learning design to marketing The content marketing role was a natural transition. It still involves some core learning design and communication skills, but other new skills were needed. These skills were a combination of business and technical. Instead of working with internal design teams, I would be working with the sales team and would take over the re-development of our Website. Do you understand SEO? Me either - well I do a bit more now! By new identity, I mean I now had to consider my job from a completely different angle. With learning design, it is easy for me to get to know the target audience - it was generally very narrow and well defined. When learners were working through my content, I had their attention - and mostly they had to complete the content. Marketing is a very different proposition. We live in what is called an attention economy. In a global market there are millions of customers and millions of companies competing for that business. Type "eLearning content" into google (UK) and it yields around 24 million results. How do buyers find us? How do we know what buyers want and need? Supporting the learning journey Marketing in Logicearth is about trying to understand the needs of our potential customers in the sector we operate in, and how we can meet those needs better than some other companies. It is about articulating what is called a value proposition and identifying our unique selling point(s). Lots of buzzwords in this learning journey! What does Logicearth do that is different or better than the competition? How do we package that value in a way that makes sense to a huge potential target audience? And most importantly for us - how do we ensure our customers have the best experience possible with us? So how did I learn? "It is not so much a learning curve - more a learning maze; often you don’t know what is around the next corner until you bang your head getting out of a dead-end." Well I truly embraced modern learning philosophy and used a combination of the 70:20:10 model and performance support. Today’s post is about 5 things that inspired and supported me to learn on this journey of transition. Sometimes in the workplace, I think we take for granted the scaffolding that needs to be in place to support people when they learn, change, grow and develop. We forget sometimes that learning is an on-going journey, with plenty of bumps and challenges along the way. As I said, learning is more maze-like, than curve-like! Learning culture We have a very open learning culture here at Logicearth. We are encouraged to try things, to experiment. If you fail, that is ok - as long as you learn from your mistakes. Failure isn’t a disaster and there is little naming and shaming. That is not to say that we inflict our failures on our customers - it is more about the approach to learning something new, before it gets prepared for the customer. It is one of the few companies that I’ve worked where you can really see the company values being lived every day. Coaching/mentoring I was assigned an external mentor on SEO as part taking over co-ordinating the new Website build. This was one of the key skills I had identified where I’d need the most support as it was the furthest from the current skillset. What was important from my point of view is that I was able to request this support, make a case for why it was needed and had a company leadership who listened and responded. An external coach/mentor also brings a much needed reality check when sometimes internal initiatives can get caught up in too many assumptions and narrow view points. Fast-tracking learning by having regular contact with someone who has been there, done it and got the t-shirt, is in-valuable? Leadership support Following on from #2, your senior leaders must be aware and be supportive of how people learn and develop. They at least need to share the vision of what changes will happen as a result of that learning. You need your leaders to be supportive and encouraging. When you come across barriers and challenges, good leadership can help you think through your options and pick a better route through the maze. I’ve lost count the number of times I have been able to say to one of our co-founders - I’ve hit a brick wall here and not sure where to go, or I know I am missing something, but I’m not sure what. Once again, I’ve worked in very few companies that have provided this leadership support. Mix of learning opportunities and tools The 70:20:10 models proposes that 70% of workplace learning likely happens on the job, 20% from peers/managers and 10% from formal learning. In this journey, I would say that is about right. I found the need for formal learning in two areas: When I was completely new to a subject When I needed to meet others So it is important to really think through the skills you need to learn. Novice learners need to need more formal structures, but once you get a bit of momentum going there are lots of different learning techniques and tools that you can use. For example - I spent a bit of time using tools like Twitter and LinkedIn. I followed expert Content Marketers, talked with them, asked them questions and subscribed to their blogs. I was able to immerse myself in the new identity. I also attended free webinars on content marketing and marketing in general. There are lots of free learning resources out there if you spend time looking for them. Specific projects - short-term, medium term, long term As the core scaffold to all this learning I was doing, I obviously had a day job to do. I had to start delivering on new marketing efforts. This gave me the necessary structure to drive meaning in my learning and keep me motivated when I encountered any obstacles With the company leadership, I agreed a few short-term, medium-term and long term projects and goals. Short-term Start a company blog and blog regularly Be more pro-active on social media Research SEO and improve our SEO efforts Medium-term Set targets for blog and content marketing - numbers, engagements etc Set targets for SEO Set targets for social media engagement Long-term Re-design our website based on new marketing insights Why structure workplace learning in this way? It is important to keep recognising the learning journey. Breaking goals down like this helps with immediate focus and means you are less likely to be overwhelmed. It also allows you to pace your learning, meeting key business targets when priorities arise or if they change. So that’s the learning journey. There is certainly more to it than ‘going on a course’. Have you had any similar learning journeys? How do you support staff in their development within your workplace learning framework? What has supported you in the workplace? We’d love to hear from you. The post 5 ways to turbo-boost workplace learning appeared first on Logicearth.

How important are eLearning requirements? The most important, but often least rigorous phase of an eLearning/training project is scoping and eLearning requirements gathering. We’ve all been there - and this post is as much for my fellow eLearning vendors as it is for clients. Picture the scene… Client: We have this $£XYZ budget we need to spend before end of March. We need something on health and safety - can you help? Vendor: Of course. We have a great eLearning team…. Growing into the learning architect role Of course, said no client or vendor ever! But, hypothetically, let’s think through this worst case scenario. No matter what project you are involved with, it can be tempting just to get ‘stuck in’ and start designing/building. After all, no-one wants endless questions, especially a client who has a tight deadline. Clients want to see ‘product’ as soon as possible - and who can blame them? It is analogous to an architect building a house. If designing and building a house was like designing an eLearning course, then the poor buyers would lose interest before the house was built! But if you think of the role of the architect in house building, they are very good at communicating and agreeing the scope of the build before money is committed. They can do calculations from detailed plans, offer clients choices and present a clear vision. So how do we as an eLearning community get closer to this more structured and scientific approach? Today’s post comes from one of our experienced Instructional Design team, Niamh Williams. I asked Niamh to come up with at least 10 questions we should ask clients before any design work undertaken. I was inspired by this brochure from the Royal Institute of British Architects. "The first thing a good architect will do is ask questions, listen and understand what you are trying to achieve." Over to Niamh… WHY do you need it? A client may commission a piece of training content for a number of reasons; there may be an on-going or new regulatory requirement; they may want to replace existing face-to-face training, there may have been an incident in the workplace that highlighted a need for training, for example, a serious accident might lead a company to want new or improved Health and Safety training. Whatever the reasons, it’s important that you understand them and ensure that the outcomes of the training meet the business needs. Return on Investment (ROI) is often another important factor for clients. If this is the case, you could work with the client to design a test or survey to establish the current level of knowledge and/or satisfaction on the subject to be taught, then compare that to the scores and/or satisfaction ratings after learners have completed the course. For example, the baseline survey may show that prior to taking the course, "53% of respondents were confident or very confident that they would know what to do in case of fire at work" but, after taking the training, that number rose to 87% of respondents. WHAT problems will it solve? The challenge for the learning designer is to prise out why this training is needed. Ask SMEs ‘What are the pain points?’ and ‘What do learners find confusing or difficult to understand currently? Sometimes you need to dig down to find the route of the problem. For instance, you may be told that departments within the company don’t communicate well with each other. There could be various reasons for this but it could be something as simple as terminology differences. Confusion can arise if different departments refer to things in different ways. Sometimes half the battle is getting the SMEs to agree on key terms, concepts and priorities. WHO is it for, specifically? This may seem like an obvious question but it’s very important to ask it. It often sparks a discussion within the client’s team about different groups who might potentially use the training. For example, the course might primarily be used by new starters but might also have a secondary use as refresher or top-up training for more experienced workers. If so, you may want to provide a pre-test to allow that audience to be able to ‘test out’ of content they already know and focus on what they don’t. Parent companies sometimes have subsidiaries or offices in other regions. If this is the case, you should discuss with the client if they need the content to be localised, or customisable (logos, local policy differences etc) or split into separate sections allowing the L&D manager to assign sections of the course to certain audiences as appropriate. Get as much information as possible on the learners’ job role(s) so you can make the learning scenarios as realistic and relevant as possible. Have you done this BEFORE? Some companies repeat training programmes often - especially if it is compliance training. New recruits will need trained and the mandatory once a year training on key compliance topics is common in regulated industries. It is worth asking the questions: How have you delivered this before? What results did you get? What worked well, what didn’t? WHAT will happen if you DON’T do it? Here again there could be implications both for the business and for the learner. Where there is a legal obligation on the company to be able to prove that compliance training has happened, the company could suffer legal and/or financial sanctions if learners do not complete the training. For the learner, failure to complete compulsory training may result in a reprimand or even dismissal. Even for non-compliance subjects, it’s important that you, and the learner, understand how the learner is worse off for not-knowing this subject. For example, if the learner knows that, by taking the training on the new ordering system they will be able to raise an order in half the time, they will see the benefit to them and will most likely want to take the training. With compliance training, for instance, it’s often thought of as a box-ticking exercise to satisfy the regulators, with little or no benefit for the learner - but it doesn’t have to be like that. Well-designed eLearning programmes can help with learner motivation. And the benefits of asking these 10 questions is that you’ll gather better learning requirements to match the needs of the learner. With Health and Safety training for instance, the learner needs to be reminded that this knowledge could help them avoid serious injury to themselves or others. What do staff need to KNOW after they’ve taken the course? What are the knowledge outcomes? Work out with the client what the key focus of the training needs to be. For example, the client may want to rollout training to explain the new company values, so a key outcome might be to ‘Understand the company values’. If it’s process training, they may need to be able to ‘List the steps in process x.’   For Sales training, an objective might be to be able to ‘Identify the differences between product x and product y.’ What do staff need DO differently? Similar to the last question but this one is more task-focussed. Learners will respond better to training that is practical and useful to them in their everyday working life. So, as well as understanding the company values, how can learners use those values to improve the workplace? This could be explaining how to support company initiatives, for example, how to vote in the company’s, ‘Values Employee of the Month ‘ competition. Or, for Managers, the focus might be to provide practical tools and advice on how to train and support employees to better demonstrate the values. How often are the different types of knowledge and skills used? Sometimes training programmes focus too much on teaching seldom used skills, while not spending time on the more common skills. How do the best performers do this? It is good practice to seek out high performers in this area. Ask them how they learned, how they overcame challenges and who/what helped them. You could even record their ‘learning story’ and make it available as part of the eLearning programme. In fact, any information that you obtain from a high performer could be used in your eLearning programme - for examples, scenarios and test questions. 10. How will you know you’ve been successful? This is often the most important question that isn’t asked - what will success look like for you. Worst case scenario are things like - we want XX% of our users to have completed the course by….or everyone should have passed the assessment. Try to tie success to specific business metrics or key performance indicators. Knowing these from the beginning of the design process will help you choose better content and interactive ideas. So that’s a list of 10 from us - what about you? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Thanks to Niamh for parking some great initial thoughts! The post 10 questions we all should ask - eLearning requirements appeared first on Logicearth.

What is an epic explainer animation? We think this is… http://logicearth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/p7s1_VO.mp4 This blog is a follow-on from our previous blog on creating explainer videos. That blog focussed on the instructional design techniques for creating epic explainer animations. This post focusses on the design and technical considerations. Darren Rooney, our design lead runs through his top 5 tips. Over to Darren… Animations are a useful device for eLearning. Using video as an introduction can be a bright way to kick start your courses. Video can also be used to break up complex content into a more visual, engaging format. Here are 5 tips which we have found useful when creating animated content. 1. Prepare, prepare, prepare! You should fully prepare your script and visuals before you start to produce your animation. This will help dictate the pace and ensure a consistent look and feel throughout your video. We use Adobe After Effects to create our animations and using this approach makes your workflow more efficient - you can import your finished visuals directly from Adobe Illustrator into After Effects. For every scene we create the illustrations first and then assign each animation element to a named layer before we import into After Effects: 2. Make sure your audio is excellent Poor audio will ruin your animation - so make sure you do it right! Where possible you should use a professional voiceover artist and only use music that compliments the messages in your video. If you cannot get a professional voiceover you should record your voice using the best microphone possible and in a quiet room. We get good results from this microphone. A room with carpet and many items of furniture will reduce unwanted echoes and give you a better result. Check out our infographic below to learn a quick way to remove unwanted background noise from your voiceover using Adobe Audition. 3. Keep it short! People are used to being bombarded with information online through websites and social media. As a result they have short attention spans. Studies suggest that the ideal length for explainer animations is 60 seconds or less. Any longer than this and viewers tend to get bored and click away. 4. Get to the point You need to get to your key message quickly. Don’t waste time with introductions, show your audience something interesting straight away to capture their attention! Make your key messages as clear as possible and get to them quickly. Your key or most important message should be presented in the first 30 seconds. 5. Make it fun and personal Nobody wants to see a boring powerpoint presentation with voiceover added. Make your videos entertaining and customise the look and feel for your target audience. Characters can be a good way to make a personal connection with viewers and we often try to incorporate some humour into videos (where appropriate) to engage people. Tell stories, offer people insights, help them to think about the topic differently. The holy grail of any explainer video is to guide your viewers to say: "I thought it was only me who felt like that" 6. Understand the principles of multimedia learning (an extra one for reading this far - here comes the science!) Be sure to familiarise yourself with the principles of multimedia learning. These principles will help you better understand how we take in information, try to make sense of it and remember it, without feeling too overwhelmed. For example - it is difficult to listen to audio, read from a screen and watch animation all at once. This leads to information (cognitive) overload, which means your viewer will likely stop watching - the opposite of what you want. The well-researched principles of multimedia learning will help you to plan better explainer animations and avoid common novice mistakes. This is a useful introduction to the principles. The complete list of multimedia learning principles is here: 1. Multimedia, 2. Redundancy, 3. Coherence, 4. Signalling/cuing, 5. Spatial continuity 6. Temporal contiguity, 7. Modality, 8. Segmenting, 9. Pre-training, 10. Personalization, 11. Voice, 12. Embodiment, 13. Image If you want a deeper look at these principles (from the author) take a look at Richard E. Mayer’s Harvard lecture here. Supporting resources Finally, if you are new to creating explainer videos and would like to learn more, here are a few online resources you might want to explore: The 10 best startup explainer videos ever How to write a killer explainer video script How to make your own explainer video The best stock music for multimedia projects We’ll be writing a more in-depth blog post on the principles of multimedia learning soon - in the meantime, we’d love to hear from you if you have any great examples of explainer videos to share. Logicearth Learning Services specialise in designing, delivering and supporting modern workplace learning solutions, which brings results for individuals and organisations. We are learning technology experts and along with specialist interactive multi-device content development skills, we can provide a complete service for all your organisation’s modern learning needs. Logicearth has offices in Belfast and Dublin but deliver services worldwide, including Ireland, UK, USA and throughout Europe. The post The science of epic explainer animations - 5 tips appeared first on Logicearth.

What does a new Instructional Designer do? Today’s blog post is a new feature for Logicearth. Kate Middleton has just started with us as a new Instructional Designer. She is embarking on a journey that many of us have been on and she has kindly agreed to share some of her learning and insights as she goes. Over to Kate…I asked Kate to share her learning at the end of her first week. 1. I am a ‘new start’ and I am being ‘onboarded’ Listening to conversations in the office there’s a lot of foreign terminology to get my head around. Phrases like storyboarding, gamification and hinge questions are second nature here, it will likely take some time for them to roll off the tongue. Similar to moving to rural Spain forcing a foreigner to pick up some Spanish quickly, diving into the development of eLearning projects definitely seems the best way to get familiar with all the acronyms and terms that are tools of the trade. 2. Starting the design isn’t the start of the job A lot of work needs to go into deciding with the client what it is that they want in their eLearning content and what they want the outcomes of the course to be. As keen as I may be about my own ideas they may not always fit. It seems this job is as much about communication as it is about creativity. 3. Ideas are precious, but don’t be precious about them Thinking of metaphors and interesting ways to visualise concepts is an enjoyable challenge. However, there are a great amount of other brains who will be taking your course and not all of them will process information in the same way as your own. You may think the building of a suspension bridge perfectly epitomizes the improvement of office relations, you may be wrong, if it doesn’t work you can save it and apply it to something else. 4. The milk is universal It’s a bad idea to assume anything about the office protocol without asking. On my first day I went without my afternoon cup of tea as I was sure someone owned the milk and didn’t want to be labelled a thief, a disastrous and unnecessary sacrifice. I’ve also discovered that not making any assumptions is good practice when it comes to learning… 5. Being a novice might not be the worst thing ‘Unlearning’ is another term that has perplexed me in my first week. While there is still a mountain to climb in terms of getting to grips with instructional designing, eLearning lingo and tasks, at least I can check something off my list, I am already thoroughly unlearnt. Being new means that I can look at everything with fresh eyes, and may even have some ideas that haven’t cropped up before. It’ll be important to keep this perspective while I learn to make sure that I’m still open to new ways of thinking. So that’s Kate’s first diary as a new Instructional Designer. If any of you have any tips or advice you’d like to share with Kate, please reply in the comments below. The post Diary of a new Instructional Designer: 1 appeared first on Logicearth.

This challenge is to create your own pictogram characters. Mine came out ready to perform. Read more...

This week's challenge is to come up with some ways to survive the holidays. I grabbed some cookies and a toy soldier and went to work. Read more...

This week's challenge is to do an interactive video conversation. Who you gonna call? Read more...

This week’s challenge is to create an e-learning-themed cereal, so I channeled a bit of Toucan Sam and made some loops. Read more...

This week's challenge is to put together an e-learning voiceover portfolio, so I rounded up some of my greatest hits and hit "play". Read more...

Research shows that when we are happy and having fun, we are more productive. You’ve probably noticed it yourself, too. If you’re feeling down in the dumps you’re more likely to drag your feet, half-heartedly complete your tasks and leave the washing up to fester by the sink for yet another day. On the other hand, if we are happy and feeling good (i.e. have a ‘positive affect’, to get a bit technical), then we’ll have a spring in our step and be able to power on through difficult tasks - and be spurred on to give the house a thorough clean! What is Happiness? When we say we are happy, we mean that we have a positive affect. We are feeling positive, rather than negative, emotions; our state of mind is positive. Of course, the definition of happiness varies as we all experience it differently. A sense of joy; a feeling of contentedness; the desire to jump about; that smile we just can’t keep off our face. There’s lots of research into how our jobs influence happiness. If we enjoy what we do, get paid what we think we should and find it rewarding, we’ll be happier. In fact, a quick Google search returns millions of hits all about how to important it is to find a job that makes you happy, how a job you enjoy means more than one with a huge pay packet, and how to find that elusive job that will cure your unhappiness. But what about the link between happiness and productivity? We know as employees how important it is that our jobs make us happy. But as an employer or a Learning and Development professional, how does employee happiness impact the business? Research In 2010, Andrew Oswald, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi published a research paper, Happiness and Productivity, which explored the link between (as you may guess from the name!) happiness and productivity. Of the 700 participants, some were shown a comedy movie clip or treated to chocolate, drinks and fruit, while others were asked about negative life events, like bereavements. This put some participants in positive mood and meant the researchers could assess whether lower levels of happiness were later associated with lower levels of productivity. They found that individuals with a positive affect - i.e. those that were happy - were 12% more productive and managed to correctly complete more sums than those individuals who did not have such a positive affect. This suggests that the happier an employee is, the more productive they will be. Applications Clearly, this has implications for work environments. It becomes more important than ever to ensure your employees are happy at work - if they’re not, their productivity and therefore business success will fall. But it also highlights the importance of making sure training programmes are enjoyable. Learning and Development roll-outs which put fear into the hearts of employees and make them curse the day they signed their job contracts won’t be conducive to productivity. More enjoyable training programmes which boost learner happiness, on the other hand, will be more likely to succeed as learner productivity will increase. Learners will be motivated and engaged in their training and therefore work harder, do better and learn more. Want to find out more about how to make learners happy in their training programmes? Fill out the form below to download our free research paper!  

A lot of the time, it’s easier to talk about why gamification engages learners by using examples, case studies and theoretical scenarios. But sometimes it’s important to flex our intellectual muscles and get down and dirty into the technicalities of engagement and how gamification puts the ‘F’ in fun! That’s Dope! On a neuropsychological level, fun, learning and knowledge retention all relate to dopamine signalling in the brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is released whenever we experience something pleasurable and has often been linked to things like sex, drugs, gambling and partying - which doesn’t necessarily give it a good reputation. But it’s also associated with doing something as simple as eating a cake, riding a rollercoaster or falling in love (aww). Let’s Get Technical Let’s get a wee bit technical for a moment: for our purposes, we need to think about the mesolimbic or ‘reward’ pathway in the brain, which begins in the midbrain (one of the oldest parts of the brain!) and links to the prefrontal cortex. When dopamine is released in this pathway, it affects things like motivation, addiction and lust. Whilst it’s easy to see how this could be a bad thing when it comes to drugs, gambling, or even cupcakes, it’s this reaction that gives ‘fun’ its pleasurable and addictive qualities and makes us want to repeat the experience which triggered it. If we take advantage of this reward pathway and make learning fun, learning becomes almost like a drug: we’re suddenly motivated to learn, addicted to furthering our knowledge and even a little bit in love with the learning process! The great thing about learning is that it already releases dopamine in small amounts. You’re probably familiar with the flush of euphoria when we finally figure out the solution to a tricky equation or suddenly work out how to put a piece of flat-pack furniture together. Adding fun to this process is like sprinkling lighter fluid on a smouldering barbeque: WHOOSH! The effect is intensified 100-fold. How to Release Dopamine When it comes to learning, how can we release dopamine and get these reward paths working? Well, gamification is the obvious answer as it is all about making learning more fun and enjoyable! In a nutshell, gamification involves using gaming mechanics like points, badges and leaderboards to: Change company culture Encourage collaboration and healthy competition Change behaviours Build team cohesion Produce an incredible ROI Keep a geographically disperse workforce on track Encourage people to take a starring role on their LMS Want to find out more about gamification and how it gets learners engaged and having fun? Read the Business Case for Gamification by clicking the button below!  

We’re really happy to be able to tell you lovely readers that we’ve just been selected as a 2014 Gamification Watch List Company by Training Industry! This great accolade is given to just 8 up-and-coming companies who provide gamification products and services geared towards increasing the effectiveness of corporate training. Growth Engineering were among the eight selected, as we demonstrate excellence in many areas: Features and capabilities of the gamification products/services Company size and growth potential Quality and number of clients/users Geographic reach Awards, recognition, and competitive differentiation For those that don’t already know, we were also selected as a 2014 Learning Portal Watch List Company for smashing the following criteria: New and innovative service offerings Unique approach to delivering learning solutions Commitment to improving learning through technology Quality of initial clients Pretty impressive, right? We’re chuffed to bits to have been selected, and we’re confident that next year we’ll be sitting comfortably in the Top 20 Lists, having graduated from the Watch lists! Want to find out more about what we do and why we’re creating such a name for ourselves? Sign up to tour our award-winning Academy Learning Management System by clicking the button below!  

You may have heard the term ‘gamification’ already. It’s the latest buzz word in the realm of engagement, and it’s migrating to take up home in all things learning and development. Gamification can be defined as ‘the application of gaming mechanics and gaming metaphors to non-gaming scenarios to make difficult tasks more palatable’. Essentially, organisations can take ‘game’ elements like badges, points, levels and leaderboards and apply them to the situations where they would like to see behavioural changes. In fact, you’ve probably encountered gamification yourself - your supermarket reward card is a ‘light’ form of gamification, where the more you shop, the more points you get. The points accumulate until you gain enough to ‘level up’ and get a reward, like money off or a freebie. When it comes to education, securing learner engagement is always a struggle. Whether you’re training schoolchildren in the classroom or upskilling a workforce online, making sure your learners are actually, you know, learning is an uphill struggle. That’s where gamification comes in. Like a snake charmer uses the power of music to lure their slithery friend from its confines, so an educator can use gamification to charm learners into putting their all into their training and development. Here’s how gamification lights a fire under learners and gets them engaged with their learning, particularly in online environments: Enchantment Cast your mind back to the last incredible game you played. What made it so? Over and above obvious enjoyment, I’m betting you felt a sense of wonder. You probably felt completely captivated while playing it. The minutes passed by in a blur; you were utterly absorbed in what you were doing. This sense of wonderment and enchantment is what gamification aims to create. When online learning platforms are gamified, like our Academy LMS, learners aren’t simply logging on and consuming learning materials. Instead, they enter into a whole new world where their behaviours are rewarded with badges and points; their progress is tracked and their achievements accumulate to let them ‘level up’ and unlock new learning content; and their dedication is clear for all to see on the company-wide ‘leaderboard’. Soon, learners realise that the more they do and the more they interact with their Learning Management System, the more rewarding their learning environment becomes. Competition Creating a sense of competition can be enough to kick-start learner engagement, and leaderboards are a great way to do this. If learners can see how their learning journeys are progressing in comparison to their colleagues, they’ll be invigorated and motivated to push on through the difficult times. They’ll want to rise to the top of the leaderboard and claim the crown - and if they know they are only three badges behind the current leader, they’ll pull out all the stops to make it happen. And besides… a little competition never killed anyone. Surprises Everyone loves a surprise, and what better way to engage learners in their training than surprising them with virtual rewards for their actions? Gamifying online learning means that learners can receive badges and achievements for doing all sorts of things. Importantly, these are not always ‘expected’ behaviours. For instance, learners can be rewarded when they change their profile picture (the ‘Vanity’ badge), log on to their online learning portal after 11pm (‘Night Owl’) and use the online platform’s search functionality (the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ badge). Organisations and educators can even turn these virtual rewards into real-life gains by awarding prizes to whoever holds the top spot on the leaderboard. Sociability Contrary to popular opinion - and traditional teaching methods - learning should not be a solo affair! 90% of our knowledge is gained during ‘informal’ learning which happens after the formal training (which contributes 10%) has finished. And the informal learning is all sociable - it’s a mix of on-the-job training (70%) and observation of others (20%). So clearly, anything which encourages learners to get their hands dirty and get communicating and exchanging knowledge will benefit learners. Gamified learning environments encourage this social learning by pitting learners against one another and rewarding them for contributing to discussions, sharing their knowledge with others and helping each other get the most out of the learning content. Proof There is some tremendous evidence out there to support the use of gamification in learning. Bensons for Beds, a leading UK retailer of beds and bedroom furniture, rolled out training on a gamified Learning Management System and quickly went from making a double-digit million pound loss to a double-digit million pound profit. Azlan Tech Data’s gamified LMS helped to upskill an entire workforce on selling HP systems. One learner even managed to increase her sales across six customer accounts by a mammoth 678%. Find out more about what these companies achieved with their Gamified Academies by watching the interviews here! Clearly, gamification is an excellent addition to the arsenal of any educator or Learning and Development professional. If you’re an educator and you’ve not tried gamification for yourself, now is the time. Your learners deserve to be delighted and excited by their training. Don’t you agree? Want to find out more about how to use gamification in businesses? Click the button below to download our new research paper!  

There’s lots of evidence that gamification - the application of gaming mechanics and metaphors to non-gaming scenarios - is useful in securing employee engagement and getting learners motivated and invested in their online learning programmes. That’s what we use gamification for, anyway. Our Gamified Social Learning Management System, the Academy LMS, uses gamification to supercharge learner engagement and enjoyment. Find out more about what our Academy can do by taking a tour - just click the link below! But, in addition to creating online learning that knocks socks off, gamification can also be used in many other ways, from encouraging repeat business for supermarkets to boosting workout success. Let’s focus on one aspect of our lives that I’m sure we can all use a bit of help with: setting and achieving goals. We were luckily enough recently to listen to An Coppens - Chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation - speak at the E-Learning 20-20 Seminar. She gave us some excellent ideas on how to gamify goals that we’re going to use here and expand upon. You can check out An’s presentation here, or click here to visit her personal website. Anyway. An explained that one of the reasons gamification helps to get us motivated and engaged is that so many of us are interested in games and play them regularly - in other words, many of us are ‘gamers’. 53% of gamers are aged between 18 and 49, while only 18% are under 18 (proving the ‘gamers are mostly teenagers’ misconception is just that!) and 29% are aged over 50. Clearly, age is no barrier when it comes to enjoying games and the gaming mechanics like badges, points and achievements that come with them. So it stands to reason that the effect gamification has on our motivation and engagement will apply no matter our age, situation or the application. Let’s find out more: Using Gamification to Achieve Goals An Coppens suggests that when we want to achieve something specific, we should frame the activities in terms of ‘missions’. These missions help to guide us along the correct path, and they shouldn’t be too long, tricky or complicated. Small missions will add up to big goals, after all. For example, say you wanted to improve your fitness (who doesn’t!?). One mission could be: "Run 3 times in the next 10 days." Once this mission has been won, you can move on: "Run 3 times in the next 7 days" and "Run one 11-minute mile." From there, your missions could cycle between length of run ("Run for 30 minutes" or "Run for 1.5 hours total this week"), speed ("All runs under 12-minute miles") or number ("Run four times in 7 days"). Can you see how setting little missions help us to move forward towards our overarching goal? These missions are achievable, simple, straightforward and quantifiable. You either achieve them or you do not. Once you can see what you need to achieve and how you can do it, it’s easier to stick to the goal and change your behaviours accordingly. You also need to implement some kind of reward or recognition system for when you achieve your ‘mission’ to keep you going. Some people will reward themselves with a fancy coffee when they hit their fitness goal, a meal out, or even put a £5 in a piggy bank when they hit a new personal best. Alternatively, you can hand over the tracking and rewarding of your goals to an app or webpage, such as HabitRPG to track daily activities, Fitocracy to monitor fitness gains or ChoreWars to make sure everyone at home is pulling their weight to keep the house tidy. Once ‘boring’ goals are turned into smaller missions and gamified, they’ll seem a lot more achievable. Nothing is beyond your reach when you can break it down into smaller elements to tackle one by one. What will you pick as your next mission? Read more about gamification by downloading our research paper below!  The post Applying Gamification to Daily Life Goals appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Long-term Engagement The aim of Learning and Development is to roll out training that knocks socks off and secures long-term learner engagement. But what it often achieves is a fleeting interest in the learning process that dissipates all too quickly, leaving a bunch of disinterested, disengaged and demotivated zombie learners in its wake. When we talk about engagement, we’re thinking about desire and behaviour. Do learners want to learn? Are learners making the effort to learn? Are they enjoying the process and doing well? Another way of looking at this is to consider motivation: are your learners motivated to learn or are they dragging their heels? Different Kinds of Motivation Generally speaking, there are two types of human motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Extrinsic motivation involves doing something for its external rewards, like money, praise or something else tangible. For extrinsically-motivated people, it is not the action or behaviour itself which they like, but the outcome. In the learning sphere, this means that learners may not enjoy learning new things, yet they are motivated to continue doing so because of the promise of a payrise at the end of the process. Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, drives behaviours that result in internal rewards, like enjoyment, positive feelings and happiness. It’s a drive to complete an action - in our case, learning - because of the effect it has on us internally. Therefore when people are intrinsically motivated, they have a genuine desire for the activity itself and enjoy it tremendously. When it comes to learning, it’s pretty clear that we’re all aiming to get our learners intrinsically motivated. Yet - you may see where this is going - we tend to extrinsically reward our learners (with remuneration, badges, kudos and promotions), which has been found to have a negative impact on intrinsic motivation. In an experiment to test motivation, psychologist Edward Deci monitored two groups of students playing a game called Soma. One group was paid for each puzzle they solved, while the other group played for no monetary reward. What Deci found is that Group A participants stopped completing the puzzles as soon as the experiment ended and there was no more money to be had. Group B, on the other hand, kept solving the puzzles even after the experiment was over. This is because they found the puzzles intrinsically interesting - the other group may have also thought this, but the extrinsic reward reduced their intrinsic motivation to continue. Click here to read part 2, or download our white paper on the secret of engagement! Parts of this article were previously published on eLearning Industry. Click here to read that article!  The post Gamification: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Last time we wrote about the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and how extrinsic rewards can actually have a negative impact on intrinsic motivation. Here’s the second part of the story - how the extrinsic rewards of gamification can actually be harnessed to increase intrinsic motivation. Gamification: Extrinsic Rewards Gamification, as you may know, is the application of gaming mechanics and gaming metaphors to non-gaming scenarios. You can find out more about how to use gamification to delight and excite your learners here. When it comes to extrinsic rewards, gamification has it covered: badges, trophies, awards, levels, scores, points, missions, quizzes, leaderboards, ranking and rating… There is a cornucopia of extrinsically motivating rewards to be found on a gamified Learning Management System! And the evidence is there that gamification engages learners and motivates them to push on in their learning and development. But if Gamification is Extrinsic, What About Intrinsic Motivation? Those sat in the ‘gamification is bad’ camp say that gamification only creates extrinsic motivation, not intrinsic. That is, the learners focus on completing the task to gain the reward, rather than being creative to discover solutions. They say that employees that learn on a gamified Learning Management System will not be truly engaged, at least not in the long term, because they are only working hard to gain badges, points and achievements - and as soon as the novelty wears off, so will their engagement and good work ethic. Ultimately this means that the learners will not fully understand the learning content. A very serious criticism of gamification, no doubt. The people that believe this consider extrinsic and intrinsic motivators to be polar opposites, but really, they are co-dependent on each other - luckily, this means that gamification can indeed help to motivate learners intrinsically, thus securing long-term learner engagement. Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivators are Linked! In order for gamification to truly motivate learners, it has to target correct, intrinsically-motivated behaviours. The elements that are missing from most gamified Learning Management Systems are meaningful feedback and reinforcement for learners. Rewarding a learner with a badge for every little thing they do on their Learning Management System will not motivate them to continue once the novelty wears off (since in this case the rewards are only extrinsic). But rewarding a learner for achieving specific goal-orientated learning objectives will boost these behaviours. Want to find out more about gamification in online learning? Download our white paper below!  The post Gamification Increases Intrinsic Motivation appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Here’s an excerpt from our excellent new white paper, ‘Common Objections to Online Learning,’ which we wrote to eradicate any doubts you may have about taking your workplace training online! Grumpy Greta says: "Online sucks! It’s boring! I hate it!" Oh Greta. We’re sorry that you’ve had such bad experiences of online learning in the past. It’s truly sad that you’ve had to put up with dull eLearning modules, faulty technology and lonely learning. But don’t worry - that is now a thing of the past! We use a nifty thing called ‘gamification’ to make online learning much more fun and enjoyable. Here’s what this involves: we add gaming mechanics and metaphors to our Academy LMS to encourage certain behaviours. So when a learner opens an eLearning module, they get some points and a badge; when they finish it with flying colours, they get even more points! If learners share their knowledge and ideas with fellow learners, they’ll receive Achievement badges and a smattering of points. And sharing their progress on Twitter and Facebook? That’ll gain them a special badge! See? By gamifying the learning process, we make learning fun again. Forget what you think you know about online learning. The ‘Next Generation’ of online learning technologies has arrived to eradicate dull eLearning, and we’re leading the strike force! Grumpy Greta asks: "I heard that gamification doesn’t work with my employee demographics! Is that true?" Don’t panic, Greta! Research shows that 70% of senior executives play games (during work hours, no less!), 53% of gamers are aged between 18 and 49 and 20% are over 50. So where’s the evidence that gamification doesn’t appeal to your employees? When we gamify Academies we see a significant uplift (over 50%!) in learner activity and engagement. It’s impossible to prejudge who will be motivated by gamification - there are no barriers when it comes to age, gender, role or experience. If you’ve heard that gamification doesn’t work, it’s probably from companies that were using it incorrectly. Gamification for gamification’s sake - showering learners with badges for doing nothing much at all - won’t work. But aligning the gamification to the kinds of behaviours you want to see most certainly will result in more of those behaviours. If you want employees to work through eLearning modules more quickly, a ‘Speedy Reader’ or ‘Fast Learner’ badge might help. Or what about telling learners that they start the module with 1,000 points, and the longer they take to progress through it, the more points disappear from the total? That might help to get them motivated! You can download the white paper to read the rest of the objections by clicking here, or find out more about how gamification can be used in online learning to change behaviours and boost business success by clicking the button below!    

Gamification is the hottest trend to hit the online learning world in recent years - in fact, it’s also popular in a whole host of industries, from marketing and recruitment to fitness and financial goal tracking. Indeed, in 2011 Gartner predicted that by 2015, 50% of organisations involved in innovation will have gamified those processes. So the adoption of gamification and extrapolation of its uses into different industries shouldn’t been regarded as unexpected. What is unexpected, though, is how some organisations are failing to really utilise gamification in ways that will make the most difference to the company. Let’s look at some (fictional, so as to not hurt anyone’s feelings) examples: A supermarket has a bright idea to offer a reward card to regular shoppers. The more often they shop, they’re told, the more points they get. Each time they shop they swipe their card and some points are added to their running total. Sounds good so far, right? It must be motivational to know that for each pound they spend, they’ll get some points back. Except… It turns out, when they try to redeem the points, that they’re not worth very much. In fact, for each £1 they spend, they get 100 points - but when it comes to spending their points, £1 is worth 10,000 points. In order to gain £1, they have to spend £100! Any consumer can work out that isn’t the best deal available - not when other supermarkets offer better, clearer points and rewards. ISSUE: be clear about what points are really worth. They don’t even have to be worth anything physical - on our Academy LMS, points accrue to bring learners up to the next ‘Level’ (from ‘Sales Newbie’ to ‘Sales Star’, for instance). Being able to see how many points they need to make the grade - and how many they’ll get for performing each action - motivates and engages them to do so. Here’s another example. You’re told when you go to book a holiday with a travel agent that, oh wow, you’re her 1,000th customer! That means you’re entitled to a special offer: for £2,000, you can have everything in the £2,300 deal, plus free transfers from the airport to your hotel. Nice! You were going to book the £1,700 deal, but this one is too good to be true… Until you get on the plane and realise everyone was offered the same ‘exclusive deal’. ISSUE: when you’re using gamification, the rewards have to be worthwhile. They have to mean something - you can’t give every learner a ‘Happy Monday!’ badge every week, or a ‘Merry Christmas!’ badge simply for being registered on the Learning Management System. Rewards need to be specific, deserved and desirable. Who’d try hard to gain a badge that was basically being given out for free? Clearly, if you want gamification to work in your organisation or industry, you need to make sure it is tied to certain behaviours and is a reward for certain actions. Otherwise you’ll simply do more harm than good, turn away your customers and lose the attention of your learners. Don’t make the mistake that a lot of companies do who try to apply gamification functionality to their situation willy-nilly, with no real thought. Spend a bit more time on it, give it a bit more thought and you’ll reap the rewards. Want to find out more about using gamification in your organisation? Click the button below to access our white paper!  

We’re happy to say that we at Growth Engineering have had only good results from utilising gamification in our online learning. Our Gamified Learning Management System (the #1 in the world!) captures our learners’ attention and gets them loving the learning process once again. But, we’re afraid, not all organisations can pull off gamification quite so well… Here’s our light-hearted rundown of the best (worst!) offenders: Zappos: The shoe retailer thought it was on to a winner when it decided to gamify the review functionality on its website. Customers who left a review would gain a badge… which had no purpose. Honestly. Apart from maybe looking cool, it had no use - it conferred that the customer had bought a lot of shoes and left a lot of reviews, but apart from that it was useless. So what’s the answer? Well, if Zappos had aligned the gamification to a proper reward, their gamified review system might have worked. For instance, they could have said that 5 badges equals 10% off one pair of shoes, and 10 badges will give 20% off. Easy, right? Not only will they get more reviews on their website, but they’ll be more likely to get repeat business from these customers: they can’t give up the opportunity to get 10% off a pair of shoes - they’ve ‘earned’ that 10%, after all! Marriott: The Marriott Hotel Group did something… strange… on Facebook in 2013. In order to attract new recruits, Marriott created a game, much like Farmville. Users had to help their character run a hotel kitchen. They’d have to buy lettuce, make sure the chef had the order, and juggle all other kinds of responsibilities of hotel managers. It sounds like fun, except… it wasn’t. How exciting is ordering lettuce? Inspecting food to make sure it met the hotel’s standards? What a huge, costly mistake! Apparently, Marriott had intended to roll out more chapters of the game to focus on different areas of running a hotel business, but that never materialised - not surprising, really. Getting gamification right isn’t as simple as awarding points and badges for activities, or trying to create a game that revolves around a certain topic. There’s so much more to consider when it comes to adding gamification to an organisation’s strategy - whether it’s consumer, recruitment, marketing or learning. Find out more about how to get gamification right by reading our white paper below!  The post When Gamification Goes Bad… appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Gamification is the application of gaming mechanics and metaphors to non-gaming scenarios to make difficult tasks more palatable. Well, that’s our definition of it, anyway. But we realise that it doesn’t mean much to you as a definition if you don’t know exactly how it’s used, what it can do and why we think it’s the best thing since sliced bread. We figured that to help you understand why gamification rocks, we should tell you why we love it - and hopefully you’ll start to think that it’s pretty nifty, too! 1. Gamification makes learning fun That’s basically the crux of our argument to using gamification in online learning. When learners are awarded badges for completing eLearning modules and achievements for interacting with their Learning Management System, they feel happy. Rewards trigger the release of dopamine in the brain, which is the feel-good neurotransmitter that makes us feel, well, good! When dopamine is doing its thing we feel unstoppable, on top of the world and goshdarn delighted. 2. If learners are happy, they’re more likely to engage with their learning Rather than dragging their heels and rushing through eLearning modules as fast as their fingers can tap the ‘Next’ arrow, learners will take time to savour the information. They’ll be more likely to concentrate; to focus on what they’re reading, watching or doing and will be likely to actually learn more. 3. But they don’t just learn more - they remember more Our brains are much more active when we’re happy and engaged. As such, the information we’re learning about will become much more ‘sticky’ in our minds (rather than falling out like jelly through a sieve). The ‘forgetting curve’ theory states that if we don’t work to recall information, we’ll forget over half of it after just a few days. But with gamification, this isn’t so: the draw of gaining more badges, achievements and points (and thus reaching the top of the ‘leaderboard’) encourages learners to continue learning for longer, to go over the learning content more often and to share ideas with their fellow learners, thus reinforcing the knowledge. You could say that gamification is the glue that holds a learner’s newfound knowledge where it belongs: in their noggin. 4. Gamification is light-hearted Training, particularly corporate training, can be tough, dull and may seem like a chore. Even if we know that it will help us in the long run - such as set us up for a promotion or a pay rise - it can still be hard to find the motivation. Luckily, gamification adds a spin to traditional learning to make it more interesting. Picture this: the dreaded Compulsory Compliance Training email hits your inbox. You groan. You sigh. You beg, you plead, you cry. But there’s nothing you can do: you need to take the training. You set aside two hours to take the eLearning module and, with a heavy heart (and heavy eyelids) you begin, dreading the worst. But hang on… This isn’t actually that bad! Your little character is picking up points every time you answer a question correctly, and you just got surprised with a badge for sharing your progress on LinkedIn! You think to yourself, ‘I guess I was wrong about online learning. It’s not boring at all!’ These gamification ‘surprises’ make the learner experience a whole lot more enjoyable, which is good for the employee, good for the L&D department and great for the business. This was just a whistlestop tour of why we love gamification. If we’ve not quite convinced you that gamification is flippin’ awesome, check out the much more in-depth white paper we wrote all about gamification and what it can do for online learning within your organisation: Enjoy!  The post 4 Reasons Why We Love Gamification (And You Should Too!) appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Gamification is becoming quite a common term in marketing, eLearning, applications and even in the workplace. It’s one of those ‘simple once you know’ things - when you understand exactly how gamification works and how it is used, you’ll be able to explain it to anyone who’ll listen. But you know, they do say: "If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it." One way we test our knowledge is to make sure we pass the ‘Granny Test’. If you can get your grandparents - we’re talking 80+-year-olds, not spritely, techno-savvy 60-year-olds, by the way - then you’ll have grasped the idea completely. So here’s how we would explain gamification to our grandparents (or anyone not familiar with technology): Gamification Gamification involves taking the things that make games fun and enjoyable and using them in situations that wouldn’t usually be all that fun or enjoyable. So what makes games fun? It’s things like points, badges and achievements. The more badges you get, the further up the ‘leaderboard’ you climb, showing that you’re either doing better or worse than the other people playing the ‘game’. And the more points you get, the more of an expert you become. Here are the kinds of things that gamification can be applied to: Shopping You get points when you shop at the supermarket and scan your card. These points then tally up until you have enough for a reward - a free product or money off your shop. Sports day at school Children get points for coming 1st, 2nd or 3rd in a variety of different sports and games - whoever has the most points is the overall winner. This is more engaging and motivating for children than making each individual race or sport stand-alone. Hitting targets at work Gaining a monetary reward for hitting your targets is a kind of ‘gamification of work’. Leaderboards can show who is selling the most, making the most calls or has the highest customer satisfaction rating. This is motivating to continue working hard. Improving knowledge When it comes to gamification in learning, learners are awarded with badges, points and achievements when they go on courses, get good marks in their tests and pass with flying colours. The more badges they get, the higher they climb on the leaderboard, showing that they know the most. And these badges can even be gathered and exchanged for real-life rewards, should the teacher/tutor/Learning and Development manager wish to do so. See? When you think about it in these terms, gamification is actually quite simple! Want to find out more about gamification, particularly in learning? We wrote a white paper explaining all you need to know about gamification:  The post How to Explain Gamification to your Grandparents! appeared first on Growth Engineering.