Learning and Development

Wow, it wasn't until I had a look back at this that I realised that it was still up and running and getting hits. Here's a link to me newer, better blog: The Learning Revolution

So, for all my good intentions, I've still managed to let my blog slide after just a few days. The strange thing is that once I'd not posted for a few days, it felt more difficult to go back to it. I've had the time, the opportunity to post something before now, but have always found something to put it off. Note to self: it's ok to have a gap between posts, just don't let the gap become bigger than the age of the blog!

Eventually, a post about the elearning network conference on Informal Learning which I had promised to do in May.

There were three stand-out talks at the event; all of them before lunch, unfortunately. I was already looking forward to two of them but the third was a genuine and very pleasant surprise.

Barry Sampson gave a great talk about how online communities had developed at B&Q. His view was very much that it's got to be left to the staff themselves to come up with the content and the impetus for participating. In fact, he disagreed quite strongly with a couple of the earlier speakers who suggested that providing a kernel of content was a positive step. I'm all for user generated content - in fact, I agree that it's far more valuable than generic, professional content in some situations. However, it is the bain of many businesses that myths that build up when there is no authoritative source to refer to. It's essential therefore to ensure that Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are bought into the community in order for it to flourish.

Nick Shackleton Jones is Online and Informal Learning Manager at the BBC. He gave a wide-ranging talk about all the activities currently taking place at the BBC. As an organisation, it is far ahead of the curve in terms of using blogs (number of regular bloggers: 200; number of readers of the blogs: 8000), wikis and rapid development tools. They get SMEs to create online courses by showing them how to do so.

One of the most interesting things that Nick spoke about was a peice of research that was conducted while he was a Seimens. They ran an experiment to find out what people wanted when they needed to learn something. Not when they wanted to, or when the organisation wanted them to but when they needed to. They offered the subjects a range of materials from highly interactive e-learning materials through to plain text in folders. It turns out that what people want most at the point of need is something that they can use quickly - plain text won the day.

The revelation of the whole event was Anna McGrail from www.babycentre.co.uk. She delivered a talk about how new and prospective mothers (and fathers) use the babycentre community to support them through their pregnancy and beyond. It was the most wonderful example of informal learning and I thoroughly recommend that you have alook at how the community is built.

There have been a whole spate of conferences aimed at HR and L&D professionals over the last few years in the UK that have been regurgitating the same, tired old themes. These conferences (CIPD, HRD) have compared very poorly with some that have been taking place in North America which have been far more progressive and less backward looking.

The eLearning Network is about to change all that with the interestingly titled "Informal Learning, or ‘Learning despite the L&D Department'". There will be presentations from people at Johnson & Johnson, B&Q, the BBC and ING. The talk that caught my eye the most was from B&Q which will include their real life experiences of developing informal learning, including:

• How to build not one, but three online communities that no one used. At all.
• Forget 'If you build it, they'll come', and realise 'If you don't build it, they'll do it themselves'
• In the new world of learning, you need to stop building content and start building connections

It's refreshing that someone is willing to share their experience, warts and all, with the rest of their professional community. In the true spirit of collaboration and informal learning, sharing these experiences can only help us improve as a profession and improve the impact that learning and development has as a whole.

I'm hoping to attend this conference, providing I don;t have a scheduling clash, so I'll post my thoughts and experiences soon after.

[Disclosure: I work for one of the sponsors of this conference, although I had no part in organising it or the sponsorship of it]

The aim of any training event is for the participants to learn something, use it, and get positive results from using their new knowledge or skills. However, this is not always the case. Whenever I evaluate any learning experience I ask participants to indicate which of the following five statements most closely resembled their experience:

• I learned something new, used it, and it has led to some very positive results.
• I learned something new and tried it but can’t point to any positive results.
• I learned something new but have not been able to use it yet.
• I already knew about the things covered in the training and have been doing them.
• I don’t think I can use what I learned from the training in my job.

The answers to this question helps give an overall indication about the relative success of a training event. The key to improving a training event is to find out from all the participants who chose the bottom four statements what is preventing them from fully implementing the training back in the workplace effectively.

One of the major blocks to carrying out an effective evaluation is the time that it takes. Surveymonkey is a great tool that enables users to quickly create online questionnaires and send them out to people via e-mail. Surveymonkey collects the results for you and can present them in a range of useful formats. It's free to try out and set up a basic questionnaire and only $19.99 a month for the full works.

Questionnaires can be used to gather data on a huge range of training results, from Kirkpatrick's first level (reaction) through to monetary benefits (return on investment). I'll offer some hints on useful questionnaire questions shortly.

The Big Question on the Learning Circuits blog this month is ...

PowerPoint - What is Appropriate, When and Why?

Link to The Big Question

The question follows some research by Professor John Weller that has been recently discussed in the media. Professor Weller is an expert in cognitive load theory and has been quoted as saying "The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster". His reason being that "it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

So there was much talk in the press about 'the death of PowerPoint' and how the professor was suggesting that it wasn't an effective tool. However, as usual, the press leap to the most newsworthy headline, not necessarily the proper explanation. Professor Weller wasn't saying PowerPoint was bad, he was saying that it was badly used.

Over the years, PowerPoint has been horribly abused. Some of the reason for that is the user interface which makes it easy to create very poor, inneffective slides with lots of bullets, words and rubbish clip art. It isn't as easy to create powerfull visual aids using PowerPoint, but it is possible and is by no means difficult.

PowerPoint should be used just like any other visual aid. I very often hear people talking about putting a presentation together when all they are doing is creating the PowerPoint slides. They miss the point: the slides aren't the presentation, they're to support the presentation. A visual aid doesn't have masses of writing, and it isn't the main focus of attention. It merely helps the audience to understand the main points better and retain informaltion more effectively.

So, some general rules for any visual aid (please note that I'm not a fan of hard and fast rules so these are more like guidelines):

• Images, graphs and photo's should be relevant and help the audience to
  understand the message. If they don't do that, they shouldn't be in the
  visual aid.
• Images, graphs and photo's should look professional or, at the very
  least, bespoke (it's sometimes nice to have a photo you've taken yourself
  or a diagram you've created
• No clip art.
• Keep the word count to a minimum, any more than six and you should
  seriously consider whether you need them all. Words are for handouts.
• If there are any animations, fancy transitions or sound effects
  ask yourself: does this help get my message across. If it doesn't
  exemplify a point, don't use it.

One more though on PowerPoint. Many news stories have predicted the death of PowerPoint for a wide range of reasons. Recently, Google announced that it was launching a web based presentation application to join its Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets applications. If it's any good, it really could be the death of PowerPoint.

Informal Learning is one of the hot topics in the learning and development community at the moment, although some have been talking about it for much longer. Informal learning itself is as old as work but how it happens is going through a transformation as a result of new technology, especially recent developments in internet based applications.

What is informal learning?
Informal learning is the way most of us learn to do our jobs: talking to colleagues, observing experts, asking questions, reading documents or manuals, trial and error, searching the internet. It's not following an agenda set by someone else, attending a workshop, watching a presentation or doing a role-play on a training course.

When you learn informally, you decide what you want/need to learn and how you're going to learn it.

The role of the learning and development professional
Until recently, the role of the learning and development professional has been solely focussed on formal learning activities. There will always be a place for formal learning but on many training courses the participants get the most value from the discussions that they have with each other and the contacts they make.

With new technologies such as online discussion forums, wikis, blogs and other social networking tools, a learning and development professional can help to create frameworks for informal learning to take place more effectively. By helping people to connect with each other and work in more collaborative ways, it is possible to improve the flow of knowledge and ideas, creating a learning culture.

To get a real handle on what informal learning is, and how you can improve it, I would thoroughly recommend Jay Cross' book and his blog:

Link to Jay Cross' book on Amazon

Informal Learning Blog

I future posts, I'll be including a list of sites and applications that can help improve the effectiveness of informal learning in organisations.

Training evaluation is one of those subjects that is always on the radar of a learning and development professional. It's constantly talked about at conferences, surveys consistently show that we think it's important but don't or can't carry it out.

There are three people who have written about training evaluation whose work will help any learning and development professional:

Donald Kirkpatrick's four level model of evaluation has dominated the training landscape for over 40 years but most learning and development professionals miss the most important aspect of it: it's not a model of how to carry out evaluation, it's a taxonomy. It helps in deciding what you want to evaluation but doesn't help you actually carry it out.

Knowing about Kirkpatrick's model is important to understand how most people view evaluation.

Link to Kirkpatrick's latest book on Amazon

Link to a description of Kirkpatrick's Model on Businessballs

Link to a rather tough but amusing disection of Kirkpatrick's model by Donald Clark

Jack Phillips has written several books on the subject of evaluations and specifically about calculating the Return On Investment (ROI) of training. ROI is often held out as the ultimate goal of any training evaluation but Phillips is quite clear that it should only be attempted in a small set of circumstances.

What Phillips does well is describe a wide variety of methods that can be used to measure Kirkpatrick's four levels and also ROI. However, the time, effort and level of expertise required to carry out many of these techniques isn't often available to a learning and development professional.

Link to one of Jack Phillips' books on Amazon

Link to the ROI Institute

Robert Brinkerhoff has written the best book about evaluation that I have ever read. It's clearly reasoned, pragmatic and offers a method that can be implemented by just about anyone for just about any learning programme. His Success Case Method should be as well known as Kirkpatrick's four levels.

Link to Brinkerhoff's Book 'Telling Training's Story' on Amazon

A thorough and credible evaluation exercise throws up two useful benefits. Firstly, it gives you a chance to learn lessons for the future. Secondly, it helps to confirm the value of a training or learning event in the eyes of skeptics - despite what anyone says, there will always be one or two senior people in an organisation that think any 'soft' training is a waste of time and/or money.

I'll be exploring this topic in more detail in later posts.

For me, this is the start of an experiment. I've never kept a blog before but, as an ardent admirer of web 2.0 technologies, I'm a great believer that it's something worth doing. However, it's difficult to be certain without blogging myself so this is the first in what I hope will be many posts.

Why blog?
The greatest benefit of blogging that I hear people talking about is all to do with forcing you to crystalise your thoughts. Opinions are easy to express in conversation, but much harder to portray accurately when you have to write them down. This in itself is a great learning experience. In later posts, I'll highlight a few areas where I think that blogging can help to reinforce the learning gained from a formal learning experience such as a lecture or training course.

The other great benefit of blogging is the opening up of discussion and debate to the widest possible range of people. There's no better way of helping to refine a thought than to have it scrutinised, criticised, complimented or built upon by other people. I hope that anyone who might visit this post will feel free to add comments as they see fit.

Topics that I'll write about in this blog:

• general learning and development
• learning and training needs analysis
• technology/web 2.0 and L&D
• learning/training evaluation
• informal learning
• other things that I find interesting

Since this is only the beginning, I've no idea how often I'll post or how long this experiment will last. I'm determined to find out though!