Your birthday is great, right? Everyone wants to see you and wish you well. You speak to friends and family you haven’t spoken to for too long. There’s good food and tasty drinks. And presents! For you! Presents for you!
Ever had a birthday present you didn’t like?
I love the presents I get and am so grateful that people have thought of me. But I’m guessing that (like me) you’ve had some presents that you’d rather not have had. Kitchen gadgets that stay in a drawer for years. Alcohol when you don’t drink. Clothes you’ll never wear.
Who doesn’t love surprises?
I love surprises, and I don’t want to know what people are getting me for my birthday. But if you’re starting a learning project, and thinking about online learning, you probably don’t want to get a surprise. What if it’s like that cardigan your auntie got for you when you were 8?
You’re unique and so are the challenges that you’re facing. There’s no one-size fits all approach (maybe that was the problem with that cardigan?). But if you’re starting a project with me, you probably want to know where we’re likely to end up. If so, read on.
There’s a lot that you’ll see in our project that is like what you’d get with others.
We’ll talk about what you’ve done already, what’s worked for you and so on. We’ll look through any existing materials. And we’ll talk about what you’re trying to achieve.
And that’s where things might start to look a little different.
First, we find the root cause.
Lots of learning consultants will take you at your word, and get moving with a project based on your analysis of what’s happening and what people need to be trained on. It’s not that I don’t trust you, but that’s not the way I do things. We’ll have a long conversation and work out what is the pain driving you to do this project, rather than the dozens of other important things you could be doing. And then we’ll explore it some more and get to an idea of why that’s happening – what is the root cause?
But analysis without action is like a jigsaw puzzle without the box.
It will take you forever to do anything with it. Actually, it might be more like the box without the puzzle – you can see what you want to get to, but you’ve got no way to get there. You want to do something about it. Together we work out what people need to do differently to address that cause and really change things. And we’ll work out whether they need new skills, or whether you want to fix it another way (like incentives or manager guidance or job aids).
That’s where practice comes in.
No-one ever got better at playing the piano by reading about it. You have to sit down at the piano and play. Badly at first. But it won’t change unless you press those keys. There are better and worse ways to practice. Some ways will have you banging out the Blue Danube in a couple of years. Others will leave you playing Chopsticks after the same time.
Once we know what your people need to be able to do, then we create ways for them to practice it. That’s one place where every learning programme becomes unique. With different skills, the ways to practice them are different and often very specific. And it’s the skills practice which is the centrepiece of the programme. If the learners can do those skills, then the rest is kind of irrelevant. They can make that change happen, by doing things that new way.
Resources and information support the practice, not the other way round.
Because we focus in on the critical things people have to do, we can build the rest of the programme around that. What we have depends on the situation, but it might be webinars or videos or written materials or audio or scenarios or anything really. The point is that the information is not the programme. There is “scaffolding” to help people practice the skill they need. But the skills practice is the centre of what they’re doing. In terms of the online learning design, that’s the main thing we will focus on.
Most of the time, it’s an individual skill we’re practicing.
It’s not an absolute rule and we do sometimes include group projects. One of the things that really hit me when I started working more on online learning, though, was how much more online courses tell you about what everyone can do. In lots of face-to-face workshops, working in break-out groups is the way that skills get practiced (if they are practiced at all). Partly that’s because it’s important to learn to work well in groups, and you can learn from your colleagues. It’s also just a matter of practicality. There’s not time and space for each individual to practice that skill by themselves. Online, it’s different. It’s a lot easier to construct tasks that people do by themselves and then get feedback on. That gives you much more insight into what all your learners actually did. You don’t have group work being done by one person who really gets it, whilst everyone else is mystified.
But real life isn’t easy, and neither is practice.
Learner “satisfaction” is the bread and butter of trainers. Especially consultants, who don’t know where the next cheque is coming from. They’re almost forced to put on a show that the learners love.
Do you remember a birthday party where you ate too much cake?
What you want, and what’s good for you are not the same thing. That doesn’t mean things should be boring and miserable (and I don’t create boring, miserable programmes). But they can be hard work! And whilst we support the learners, they do have to jump in and do something difficult pretty quickly. They have to try, fail and learn from that. It’s not something that is carefully constructed so they never make a mistake. It’s carefully constructed so they make mistakes in helpful ways that they learn from. It’s likely that there will be comments from learners about feeling a little lost, not having all the information they think they needed, and so on. That’s all important, and of course we’ll listen to it and evaluate whether there’s a problem. But learners being uncomfortable isn’t a problem in itself. It’s a problem if they don’t get the skills they need.
You get the skills through feedback.
Feedback is central to learning. When you’re hammering the piano keys, your ears give you the feedback when it sounds bad. But if you’re getting the notes right, you might not pick up on how your tempo is all over the place. That’s where feedback from others really helps. They can see things that you can’t, because you’re too close to it. You’re too focused on what you’re trying to do. How that feedback works will look different in different programmes. Sometimes, with just a few people, expert feedback might be the way to go. For other things, I love short online scenarios with well-designed choices, that give you feedback. Lots of what I recommend is based on peer-learning as an approach, with peers providing each other feedback. That means there are more opportunities to learn (as you learn when you review others work too), and the programmes can scale – up and up. Point and click e-learning gets so much interest because it promises almost infinite scalability. Sadly, it tends to fall down on the actual skills practice and learning, even though it does scale!
Peer review can give you the best of both worlds.
It’s a challenge to the ways we’ve got used to learning though – a challenge for organisations and for learners. Learners can be unsure about whether the peer review is giving them the same feedback as they would get from an expert, and organisations wonder whether their learners are really being assessed properly. There are ways to mitigate those concerns. But for me the most important is that neither is getting anything like this from current learning approaches. How many face-to-face workshops give learners individual feedback from the facilitator? Almost none. How much e-learning gives organisations insight into how learners are performing a realistic task? Almost none. So structured peer review is a massive leap forward over what’s happening at the moment.
And all of this matches with the science of learning.
You learn all the time. And your mind has evolved to learn all the time. Where would our ancestors have got to if they kept forgetting where that new water hole was? Real life matches with the way we learn. And the closer we get to real life in a learning programme, the more it matches with how we naturally learn. Learning science has found many principles for better learning. They’re not that fancy. They’re things like repetition, spacing practice, stretching learners so it’s difficult, and mixing up topics as you learn. And focusing on realistic skills practice pulls us towards these principles. Other approaches drive us away from them.
That’s what you can expect. No baggy cardigans at all!
Your project is unique. There might be specific reasons why we take different approaches in your case. And there isn’t a single tool or platform or approach – I find the right tools and approaches for your specific case. But if this way of working, this perspective, doesn’t sound like what you’re after, then it’s probably better that we don’t work together. There are lots of learning consultants and I’m sure you’ll be able to find one that has the same perspective as you.
If it does sound interesting to you, then reach out on email: greg@gregorjack.com.
