Designing Learning for Any Style

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Learning styles are often used as a catch-phrase to say that the training will be suitable for different tastes and abilities. Clark Quinn has one word on learning styles – rubbish. I agree, noting that Will Thalheimer still hasn’t had to pay anyone on his challenge, “I will give $1000 (US dollars) to the first person or group who can prove that taking learning styles into account in designing instruction can produce meaningful learning benefits.”

Without citing more research (you can follow the links and comments on the above and find out more), here are three practical approaches that you can incorporate into any instruction:

Read Ruth Clark’s Six Principles of Effective e-Learning (PDF) from The E-Learning Guild

Buy the book, Learning to Solve Problems: An Instructional Design Guide by Dave Jonassen

Use CAST’s Universal Design Principles:

  • Multiple means of representation, to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge,
  • Multiple means of expression, to provide learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know,
  • Multiple means of engagement, to tap into learners’ interests, offer appropriate challenges, and increase motivation.

National Day of Action

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Last week was Canada’s National Aboriginal Day and today is the National Day of Action. You could say that we had the traditional conference last week followed by the unconference this week. Chris Corrigan does a lot of work with First Nations and has written a counter post to a recent article in the Globe & Mail by Margaret Wente. As someone who is close to the problem, but also has a systems view, this is worth reading, especially today:

Those of you that have read my ramblings over the years will know how I feel about education. Learning how to read is a good thing. Learning how to learn is a good thing. Education is another thing. It is the last sacred cow in Indigenous communities, the idea that the school system actually sustains the problems that our communities face. We could talk a lot about this, but I think schools in general don’t hold the solution to all the problems. Learning does though. That’s what the Elders say anyway, not that Margaret Wente puts much stock in them.

Job Aids & Performance Support

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I’m currently working on a project that requires me to get back to some performance and training analysis. Of course, my initial outlook is that training can often be a problem looking for a solution.

I had to review the basics and decided to read Rossett & Schaffer’s, Job Aids & Performance Support. This is a good introduction to performance support, and more up to date than Gery’s classic EPSS. The section on when performance support is appropriate is a good reminder for everyone in our field:

  • When performance is infrequent
  • When the situation is complex
  • When the consequence of errors is intolerable
  • When performance depends on a large body of information
  • When performance is dependent on knowledge or information that changes frequently
  • When performance can be improved through self-assessment
  • When there is a high turnover rate
  • When there is little time or money for training

Sound like any workplace you know?

There is an excellent sidebar in the book by Marc Rosenberg, author of Beyond e-Learning:

This is our challenge when we blend interventions to solve performance problems. We must recognize that relying solely on blending instructional solutions is not always the best way to meet the economic worth test for long-term, sustainable and valued performance improvement. Including performance support in the mix lowers overall investment, reduces time to competence, and makes the solution more durable over time …

I’m still amazed that performance support is not seen as a standard intervention for all training and learning organisations. The data are there; it works.

Sackville named cultural capital of Canada

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Our little town has been named one of the cultural capitals of Canada, winning $500,000 for the under 50,000 population category.  Culture is one of the pillars of our town commons project, along with environment and entrepreneurship. I hope that raising our profile as a town will enable us to secure some more funds for the building so that we can commence construction this year. If you’re thinking of moving to a small town, that still has lots to offer, drop by Sackville this Summer.

Learning 2.0 value chain

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I made my comments last week about R/WW’s All you need to know about e-learning 2.0, and the discussion has been picked up by several people in our community, most notably Tony Karrer. A recent comment on R/WW , #24, by Hank Horkoff of ChinesePod, is perhaps the most insightful on the real effects of “2.0”:

First, I want to second Tony’s assertion that the changes in learning are paralleling the impact of Web 2.0 on mass media. This fundamental shift, re-constructing the value chain around the needs of the end user/student, rather than the needs of producers of content or educational institutions, will reverberate through the learning industry for decades to come. I just wonder why the label isn’t a little more ‘digital native-esque’ as simply Learning 2.0.

Second, with ChinesePod we have been able to build a business model around a three-point strategy that provides a more integrated learning experience for students. One, provide an attraction (free daily podcast lessons, in our case) to compensate students for their attention. Two, facilitate community involvement through use of a variety of software tools and active human participation to build out a community of practice. Three, continually experiment with a number of paid services to generate the revenue necessary to sustain the service many years into the future. Even though Chinese-training for English-speaking markets is only a ‘small niche business’ in Richard’s words, ChinesePod will do more than a million dollars in revenue this year.

ChinesePod gets it right by understanding the user/learner. This three step model is one that any Web learning business should critically examine, so let me reiterate:

  1. Reward attention, because it’s everything on the Web
  2. Community (not content) is king
  3. Keep tweaking the business model

What do you want people to do?

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I’ve been looking at some training documentation and it seems that when we get into complicated (not complex) cases of lots of stuff to examine, we miss the forest for the trees. Dave sums it all up quite nicely:

Even if the client’s model of training involves only lectures and PowerPoint, “What do you want people to do?” shifts the focus to the reason they’re on the job – the results they’re supposed to accomplish. (If the client focuses only on how they perform, you can ask about the results they produce – whatever’s left over when the workers go home.)

There are lots of tools to help see the forest in my toolbox.

Disorientation in Learning

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A model I’ve used several times is Marilyn Taylor’s learning cycle. Her work is not widely published but there is a reference in this PDF on Adult Learning (see page 51). You can also read about the model in Making Sense of Adult Learning.

Taylor observed university students in classrooms, and saw a pattern of Disorientation, Exploration, Reorientation, Equilibrium. Each stage took different periods of time with each student, and not all students completed a full cycle during a formal course. The successful students were the ones who could work through the entire process and continue into another cycle. When students are shown the cycle, many get an “ah ha ” moment and realise that their confusion (disorientation) is quite normal.

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According to Taylor, disorientation is a natural state in formal education:

Stage 1 – Disorientation: The learner is presented with an unfamiliar experience or idea which involves new ideas that challenge the student to think critically about his/her beliefs and values. The learner reacts by becoming confused and anxious. Support from the educator at this point is crucial to the learner’s motivation, participation and self-esteem.

Working and learning in our information-rich environments with constantly changing tools and business rules presents us with frequent periods of disorientation. As learning specialists, one of our roles should be to help people with their disorientation and exploration. Our first step should be to communicate that disorientation is quite normal. This may be a greater task than it appears because even acknowledging personal disorientation could be professional suicide in certain organisational cultures.

I think that we should be helping people adapt to life in perpetual Beta.

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In information intensive work environments (which are almost everywhere), there will be longer, and more frequent, periods between disorientation and reorientation. That means that we have to be comfortable exploring options and possibilities, even though we lack a solid mental framework or easy solutions. Artists do this all the time and now it’s necessary for all of us.

Higher Education Funding & Economic Productivity – Negative Correlation

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Stephen noted this study on Higher Education Facts and Fiction by Prof. Richard Vedder, distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University. Inside Higher Ed provides an overview of the report and some of the controversy around statements that higher education may not be such a boon to the economy:

Looking at all 50 states over more than 20 years and using at least 1,000 data points, the study found that more state funding to higher education doesn’t necessarily lead to higher growth, and in fact correlates negatively with high growth rates. Building on previous research – which Vedder has done over the years on the topic – the study operates under the theory that students will take some time between the years they enroll and the moment they contribute fully to the economic growth of society. The study looks at three intervals – 5, 10 and 15 years – between the “input” of state funding levels in a particular year and the economic output that comes as a result of students’ education and development later on in life. And instead of finding the kind of positive correlation between increases in state funds and economic impact that colleges like to talk about, he found the opposite.

Higher education is not the engine of economic growth as some would have us believe. For instance, Canadians have the highest rates of formal education in the world, but most studies do not show us as the most productive.  Many more Canadians feel that a university education is not necessary to succeed at work than those who do.

Universities may not be the best organisations for us to entrust our economic future. Here’s Chris Sessum’s view of the ivory tower:

The more I think about it, the more I come to see universities as the last place to change what they do. Academics are mostly a reactionary, turf-protective bunch that really don’t like change. When I give talks and demonstrations to colleagues in higher education re: the power of the Read/Write Web, I often feel like Plato’s allegorical friend who shows others that they are looking at shadows on the cave wall and not what’s really going on outside. They laugh and tut-tut and a few approach me when no one is looking (usually via email) and ask if I could come over and show them more in the privacy of their office or home.

All you need to know about elearning?

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Read/Write Web (an excellent source of information on all web 2.0 tools) has its latest piece on e-learning, with e-Learning 2.0: All You Need to Know. One thing I like about these articles is that they don’t come from the e-learning profession, so they really represent client or learner opinions. The article itself covers a few tools, like Elgg, ChinesePod and Google Apps for Education, as well as the more traditional Blackboard LMS.

It’s a good overview and asks for more feedback from readers. I find the ensuing comments more interesting than the article.

For instance, “One common denominator of these e-learning apps is the inordinate focus on the ‘e’ and not so much on the ‘learning.’ ELGG, Sakai, and others are outstanding products to be sure, but they only provide a framework — so where does the learning take place?”

If this question appeared on one of several edublogs, there would be lots of opinions expressed, as well as helpful pointers. My own response is that any technology that we use for learning is a framework and that learning occurs within individuals and often as a result of social interactions between people. Learning does not happen inside the technology.

Another comment, “What we need now are the tools to join up the wikis, blogs, podcasts, etc in a way that the old LMS systems would.” I’m sure that many in our field (including me) would suggest that “small pieces loosely joined” is a good thing and that we already have the glue that can join the tools – RSS.

And another comment, “Personalized learning is a wonderful idea, but what we need are clear standards that will enable all of us who have laboriously built learning management systems to integrate content from publishers.” I am sure that this could fill a few pages of commentary from my colleagues around the world. We could always discuss the history and details of SCORM to cure anyone of insomnia.

My final comment on all of this is that almost any technology can be a learning technology. It’s how it’s used, not what is used. What’s the difference between a conference room and a classroom? What is the difference between a CMS and an LCMS? Mostly branding, I would say. This is one reason that I’m keen on non-educational tools (SNS, wikis, blogs, social bookmarks) in that they are not constrained by some pre-conceived notions about learning. I can use these tools for instruction or for guided study or for discovery learning, just as the same physical classroom can be alternately an exciting learning environment or a prison cell.