Check Out the ATD Forum Sessions at ICE

Are you headed to the Association for Talent Development International Conference & Expo next week in Orlando?   If so, you may want to check out an ATD Forum session.

The ATD Forum is a networking group of senior learning and talent development professionals that share best practices and help each other problem-solve.  My company has been an ATD Forum member since 2011 and  I have been privileged to serve on the Forum's Advisory Group for the last two years.

Each year at ICE we offer a workshop series that provides conference attendees with an experience that is a little bit different than what you get in other sessions.   The Forum workshops are led by our members and are generally experiential in design.   So not only do you get to discuss the topic at hand with other session attendees, you also get to experience some techniques that might be helpful when you are looking for creative ways to facilitate back on the job.

Here are the dates and times for the ATD Forum sessions at this year's conference:

Click here to add any or all of these sessions to your schedule.   Or just stop by room W209C when you have some down time during the conference.  There is usually a Forum staffer or two and/or a few members in the room if you have any questions about what we do and how we work together.

Five Questions to Ask when Translating Learning Content

Are You Translating Learning Content?

Over the last two years, my company has evolved its operating structure from being a multinational corporation into a true global organization.   As a result of this, our L&D services have changed in scope and scale.   In addition to developing and delivering training for our employees in North America, we are now tasked with supporting all of the markets in which we do business.

Needless to say, we have developed our capability to deliver learning services in multiple languages.  In fact, our internal translation management group recently told us that we have pushed ahead of marketing and communications to become the number one consumer of translation services in the company.   We have now taken on somewhat of a spokesperson role inside the company to help other departments who have translation needs.

We have learned quite of few things along the way – some of them the hard way.   Now when faced with a learning project that has to be produced in multiple languages, here are a few questions we must get answered in order to move forward:

1. Who pays?   This is the biggest issue we face.   We do not carry a budget to cover the cost of translations as part of our learning design process.   We must ask this question to the project requester.   Most often the response is, “I hadn’t thought about that.”   We do our best to provide an estimated translation cost.  Then the project sponsor must decide how to proceed.  In most cases, the cost ends up being borne by whoever is trying to push the content out to a particular audience.  But in some cases, the costs are covered by the countries that require the translations.   Either way, we do not move forward until it is clear who will be paying the bill.
   
   
2. Who will review this?   We work with some wonderful translation vendors.  They are reputable and reliable, but they are not part of our company and don’t know our culture.  Before we can finalize any learning material, we require sign-off on the translation from someone inside the company.   It can really derail your project if you don’t have your reviewers lined up ahead of time and ready to go when needed.   Our L&D team doesn’t have the language skills or resources to evaluate the translations, so we require whoever is paying for the translations to identify who the reviewers will be.
   
   
3. What is unique about your content?  The world would be a great place if there was one translation vendor who could do everything we needed, but unfortunately, that is not the case.   Just as different vendors specialize in different languages, many of them specialize in different content types.  We provide learning services to all parts of the company.  This means that we deal with content that can sometimes be very technical in nature (such as product training), very nuanced (such as soft skills training), very marketing oriented (such as training aimed at external audiences), or very heavy with legal implications (such as compliance training).  Different vendors specialize in each of these areas.   It is good to have relationships with a few vendors to cover the whole content spectrum.
   
   
4. What is unique about the target audience?   Straight translation from one language to another can be a dangerous thing.  It is important to understand a little bit about a country and its culture before publishing translated learning content to them.   Some countries expect more formal language than others.   Idioms don’t translate well.   And there are host of other differences that need to be taken into consideration.   A good translation vendor can help with some of these issues, but it really falls on to your in-company language reviewers to let you know what will and will not work for their audience.   A few years back, I worked on a new orientation program that we titled, “Get Connected!”  It had to be translated into several languages.  One of my in-country reviewers told me that the way our vendor had translated the program title it came out as, “Let’s Hook Up!”  That is certainly not what we meant to convey.
   
   
5. What type of learning approach are you taking?   Different languages say things in different ways.  Some languages require more time and space to say something that may have been short and quick in the language of origin.  This has implications for text size, placement of graphics, synchronization of narration, and a number of other things.   It can create some complex problems for integrating translated content back into your source files.   Some translation vendors can do this for you, but they don’t do it for free.

Three Essential Workstreams for Deploying Mobile Learning

For years, corporate learning has been ramping up to go mobile.   At conferences such as ATD ICE, mLearnCon, DevLearn, and others, the concurrent sessions that feature mobile topics fill up with learning professionals anxiously awaiting a session leader who they hope will unlock the mysteries of mobile learning and show them the way to make it happen for their companies.   I’ve spent plenty of time sitting in those sessions myself.

Where has it gotten us?   Not very far.  According to the ATD 2014 State of the Industry Report, only 1.47% of learning content is made available to learners through mobile technology.   Yet we all carry around our mobile devices trying to puzzle this out like Rubik’s cube.

In 2013, my company decided to get serious about developing a mobile learning program.  We did some research, worked out our plan, and selected a vendor partner to help us run a pilot.  (You can read about our pilot here.)  Two years later, we are up and running but it has been a long journey.  Getting an experienced vendor with a ready-to-go platform and a track record of success in setting up mobile learning with other companies was critical for us.

As I think about it now, there were three key workstreams that we had to move through to get our mobile learning program up and running.

Learning Strategy workstream – This is the most important workstream.  We had to flesh out how we wanted to use mobile learning in my company and build a communication plan to manage expectations.   Our plan focuses on using mobile technology for supplemental learning and performance support.   At this stage of the game, we don’t see our mobile program as the way to address primary learning needs, but rather a way to reinforce and support what people are learning in the classroom or through self-paced eLearning.

Information Technology workstream – This is the most challenging workstream.  We had to establish a feed from our Human Resources database to the mobile platform and establish single sign-on to ensure a positive user experience.   Partnering with the IT team was critical for our mobile launch.   At first, our IT team didn’t understand what we were trying to do. We lost a lot of time on our implementation trying to get the right level of support, but once we finally did things went smoothly.

Content workstream – This is the most fun workstream.   I have a good team of Instructional Designers.   They are passionate about learning and they understand what it takes to create a meaningful, engaging and effective learning experience.  Once we were clear on our strategy and got over the IT hurdles, I was able to let my team do what they do best – build great learning solutions.   Although I must admit, there has been a learning curve.   Most of our mobile learning objects run about 1 to 4 minutes in duration.  Creating short burst learning nuggets and mini-courses that are being deployed over a hand-held device or tablet requires different thinking when it comes to design.   Our learning objects are continuing to evolve as we gain more experience and gather feedback from our learners.

I’m glad I can now count my Learning and Development team among the few who are actually offering mobile learning to their workforce.   It is so powerful for learners to be able to get what they need, right in their hands, right when they need it.

ASTD becomes ATD: It is more than just dropping the "S"

On Tuesday afternoon May 6, ASTD President and CEO Tony Bingham, announced the rebranding of ASTD to the Association for Talent Development (ATD).   An ASTD name change was not unexpected.  Everyone recognized for a long time that this was an international organization that continues to grow outside of the US.  So we all knew the "American" part of the American Society for Training and Development was done.   We also suspected that the word "Training" was likely over as well.   Many of us in the industry had stopped referring to ourselves as trainers long ago.  Our work has become much broader in scope and impact.   Yes, we provide training when needed, but it is just one element of what we do to help people learn, grow, and perform better at their jobs.

The new word added to the name is "Talent."  This was a surprise. Judging by the mixed reactions both at the conference immediately following the announcement and via social media this week, the jury is still out on this one.

Personally, I'm comfortable fitting the definition of the work that I do under the name "Talent Development" but it is not ideal.   I usually refer to myself as a "Workplace Learning Professional."   I see my job as helping people learn what they need to either perform better at what they are currently doing, or develop their skills to be able to take on new roles or tasks so they can grow in their careers.  This will still take some getting used to. There are connotations with "Talent" that don't quite feel like a fit to me.  "Talent Management" as a function inside a business often includes recruiting, which is not something that I do.   "Talent Development" can include many activities that are not specifically learning related, but in which learning takes place.   This could be things like 360 degree feedback, coaching, mentoring, performance management activities, etc.   My team gets involved in supporting this type of activity - usually by helping people learn how to do it - but it is most often led by people who are more likely be members of SHRM rather than what was ASTD.

Still, I feel it is close enough to call what I do Talent Development.  "Development" is a good word.  I do feel my work helps people develop and grow.  But "Performance" is a good word too.  I do help people perform well to succeed in their current jobs and to help my company ultimately be successful.   That would have been a nice word to bring into this change.  And of course "Learning" is my favorite word to use in describing what I do.  I help people learn no matter what their goal is.

#ASTD 2014: A Mix of Old and New

Embracing my new association.

Even as I was making my way up the escalator to Hall D in the Washington Convention Center on Tuesday to hear Tony Bingham deliver the Big Announcement, I had already decided that the theme for this blog post to summarize my experience at ASTD's 2014 International Conference and Exposition (ICE) was going to be: a mix of the old and new.  Tony himself had started me on this path with his introductory remarks about change before yielding the stage to Arianna Huffington for a poignant, humorous, and inspiring keynote address derived from her new book, Thrive. "Change is important," he said.  "L&D professionals must get more involved in change management."  He was setting the stage not just for Ms. Huffington, but also for the announcement he would deliver at the end of the second day.

Change would be a recurring theme throughout the conference.  We heard it in the excerpts from Thrive as we were asked to focus on well-being, wisdom, and wonder to prepare ourselves for success. We heard it again in Tuesday's keynote address from General Stan McChrystal.  He expressed it as "the need to adapt" which he clearly illustrated using examples such as the Jet Blue crew landing their plane safely in the Hudson River, and the completion of the raid on Osama Bin Laden's compound by the Navy Seals, even after one of their helicopters crash landed at the beginning of the mission.

Change links the old and the new.  If we do it right, we discard tools and behaviors we no longer need, in favor of new ones.  But we also carry forward experiences and wisdom that can still serve us well in the future we are trying to create.   So here are examples of the juxtapositions of old and new I experienced during this year's conference:

• I stopped by Ken Blanchard's booth in the Expo Hall on Tuesday.  It was his 75th birthday.  He was surrounded by many of the books he has published over the years.  They are those short, easy-to-read type books that seem commonplace nowadays.  But those of us from my generation remember them as groundbreaking alternatives to the large textbook-like business books of the time. It is the same way the session leaders at ICE were advocating the idea of short learning bursts as opposed to full-blown courses today.

   
• I attended a session on Designing Learning for a Global Audience.  Alongside new information about addressing language and cultural differences, the session leaders were presenting design principles from Clark & Mayer's e-Learning and the Science of Instruction (and I'm not entirely sure they knew that!)
   
• In another session I attended on Social Learning, I heard ideas presented that came right out of Gloria Gery's Electronic Performance Support presented while Jane Hart's Comet's Tail of Workplace Learning Trends was being shown on the screen.
   
• On my trip home from the conference, I posted a tweet to illustrate what I had learned in Jane Bozarth's  Show Your Work session.  Jane's recent and current work inspires me to think creatively about learning.  My tweet was favorited by the Bob Pike Group.  Bob's Creative Training Techniques course and handbook provided similar inspiration to me as a new trainer early in my career.

• Finally, in announcing that ASTD is changing its name to the Association for Talent Development, Tony Bingham talked about "where we've been" and "where we're going." That was clearly illustrated when we arrived at the conference center Wednesday morning to see all of the old ASTD banners and marketing collateral had already been replaced with new ATD branded material.

As I stated earlier, if we go about change the right way, we bring a mix of old and new with us as we move forward.  For me, I find it easy to identify with being part of ATD.  The new name encompasses the work that I've done so far in my career and it embraces the wider possibilities of supporting global audiences with a broader range of services.  I think I can live with that.

Want to Learn Something at #ASTD2014? Attend a Forum Session

It is that time of year again.   Learning & Development professionals from all corners of the globe make their annual migration to attend the ASTD International Conference & Exposition (aka ICE; aka #ASTD2014).  This year's event is in Washington DC.   It offers a great line up of key note speakers,  hundreds of concurrent sessions to choose from, and more learning vendors assembled in one place than you can ever possibly want to see.

Like many of my industry colleagues, I'm looking forward to exhausting myself trying to get as much out of the event as I possibly can. (Here are my key takeaways from last year's conference.)   For many of us, that means spending a lot of time in rooms that have rows of chairs facing a dais with a jovial speaker presenting information using a PowerPoint presentation on a giant screen.  It is ironic, that this is the primary format for session delivery in a conference that is focused on learning.  Granted, this is a conference, not a learning event per se, but we do all go there to learn something.

If you are looking for a break from the rows of chairs, and you want to really learn something.  Check out one of the four sessions being hosted by the ASTD Forum.   The Forum is  a consortium of senior learning professionals from about 50+ member companies who connect to collaborate and share best practices on learning.   I'm in my third year of membership and it has been richly rewarding for my company and for me personally.

The Forum Sessions at ICE offer a true learning experience.  When you walk into the room, you will notice the difference immediately.  The Forum sessions are set up with round tables, not rows of chairs.  There is interaction and engagement between the participants and with the facilitators.  You'll leave with tangible takeaways.

Here are the topics that will be covered in this year's Forum sessions.  Each one is delivered in a unique format:

1. Monday, 1 PM - Selling Learning's Value Proposition (format: Whiteboarding with Visual Icons)
2. Monday, 3 PM - Building a Culture that Supports Learning Innovation in Your Organization (format: Force Field Analysis)
3. Tuesday, 10 AM - Onboarding - Practices that Get Results! (format: Zing Rounds with 4 member companies)
4. Tuesday, 1:30 PM - Creating a Global Mindset as a Leadership Competency (format: Creative Matrix)

They are all being held in room 101, so please come by and check one out. But you better get there early. Like all good learning events, we limit group size to ensure participants can maximize their learning experience.

Three Considerations for Global Learning

I have been working in Learning & Development for many years.  Until now, I have only occasionally had to support projects that were global in scope.   Most of the time, that meant creating something here in North America and then shipping it overseas to be translated.

But recently my company has been evolving from a multi-national operation to one that is truly globally integrated.   This has meant that my team has been asked to develop learning solutions to support our employees in all markets in which we do business, not just those here in the US.  So now we are working to scale up our operations.   We are trying to develop curriculum that is appropriate for broader audiences, and to create design processes that take into account that we need to work with stakeholders and subject matter experts that may be in other parts of the world.  We are clearly on a journey here.  We have a long way to go, but we are learning a lot along the way. 

Here are three observations so far about creating global learning solutions.   They may seem simple and obvious to those of you who have been operating this way for a long time, but for those of us who are in the early stages of our global journey, their implications are profound.

Culture is more important than language.   It isn't enough to do word-for-word translations of your learning content.  Localization is just as important.  You have to make sure that the context, style, and learning examples are consistent with the beliefs, values and expectations of your audiences. Also, people have different expectations about what constitutes a learning experience.  This impacts how they interact with instructors and peers in class settings.

Technology must be tested.  Technology is not the easy answer.   Technology deployment is uneven around the globe.  Bandwidth issues exist in many places.  If you plan to use virtual delivery tools or elearning, my advice is test and retest the technology before going live with it.

Local resource support is critical.   You can accomplish a lot more with active local support than you can on your own and at a distance.   We have engaged our  Human Resource Business Partners and key local business leaders to help us create the right conditions for learning and help us minimize the pitfalls. So far, this has proven to be the most critical factor in helping us to be successful.

There is certainly more to the story than these items, but they make a big difference for us.

Create Playful Characters for eLearning

Watch as @eLearningJeff (Jeff Kortenbosch from Serious Learning.) demonstrates how to create playful looking characters for your eLearning programs in PowerPoint, by using PowerPoint's drawing tool.

He uses basic circles for heads and bodies, and PowerPoint's freeform shape for hair, jewelry and other details.

If you can envision the shapes, it looks the freeform tool can be very helpful in creating a variety of characters to add a playful element to your eLearning courses.

Thanks Jeff!

Building Learning Solutions: Reuse vs. Rework

I haven't been writing in a while.  My last blog entry was made on August 25, 2013.  The topic was Contemplating Learning Content Reuse.   Believe it or not, all these months later this is still a topic that is very much on my mind.

If you were to talk to any of my team members or peers about me, they would tell you that my favorite word is reuse and the word I hate the most is rework.  The reasons for this are simple, but let me take a minute to state them here:

The reasons that reuse is my favorite word are speed, productivity, and cost.   When you increase your level of reuse, the time it takes to design and deliver a learning solution is shortened so you can help your business partners meet their objectives faster.   The shortened work cycle means higher productivity for the learning & development team as you can quickly move on to the next priority in the project pipeline.   And of course, any time you can use something more than once, you are saving money.

The reasons that rework is word I hate the most are speed, productivity and cost.   This is simply the other side of the coin.  Rework occurs when a learning solutions doesn't meet the need or isn't acceptable to the client for whom the project is being completed.  Any time you have to go back and rework something you are slowing down the process of meeting the need.   Besides lowering the productivity of the learning & development team, this can also prevent higher productivity for the target audience as they wait for the reworked solution to be released.  And again, of course, time is money so costs increase.

Here are some the things my team does to increase reuse:

1. Use standard tools and templates.   We have an instructional design toolkit that we use when building learning solutions.   Since the work the team produces is in standardized formats, it makes it easier for one team member to pick up and reuse something that was created by another.
2. Share learning assets.   We have a digital asset management library that we use to store (and protect) course files, graphics, audio files, videos, animations, exercises and activities.  I encourage my team to share and reuse as much as possible.   And whenever new assets must be created, they get added to the library for potential future reuse.
3. Use modular design.   In recent years, our learning objects have gotten shorter and more focused.  When possible, we create objects around a single objective so that content that might be reusable, isn't embedded with content that is unnecessary or inappropriate for a learning need.
4.  Create "brand neutral" learning objects.   While it may seem cool to have programs that are branded to support a specific event or initiative, this limits reusability.  It can be distracting to a learner who comes across branding associated with last year's kick-off meeting theme in a program that what would otherwise be valuable to them.   The only branding we use for our learning objects is our company logo.  We do not use sub-brands.  When we do need to brand something, we try to do it through the marketing and promotional materials rather than in the learning object itself.
5. Create "stand alone" learning objects.   Avoid referring to specific dates or mentioning key contacts' phone numbers or email addresses inside a learning object.  As soon as you turn the page on the calendar or the key contact person moves on, your learning object becomes out of date.   Keep date-specific or person-specific information separate from learning content.  If you want to have a module introduced by a senior executive to give it context or heightened importance, create a video of the executive delivering the introductory message as its own learning object. Then offer both introduction and the learning module together as a curriculum. If that executive changes jobs or moves on, the video can be retired, but the learning module can continue to be used. 

Here are some things my team does to decrease rework:

1. Conduct peer reviews.   It is always helpful to have a second set of eyes look at your work.  Particularly when working under deadline pressure (as we all do).   Our instructional designers conduct peer reviews for each other to provide feedback on design elements and look for glitches, errors and typos.  An added benefit to this process is that the designers build off each others ideas in future projects.
2. Conduct walk throughs.   While it is standard practice for us to conduct design reviews with our internal clients, sometimes they don't give their full attention to the documents or prototypes they are sent for review.   In order to get them to focus on key elements of a design, we will schedule walk throughs with them.   This way the designer can lead the reviewer through a script, a storyboard, beta version, or draft, making sure that appropriate focus is given to every element that needs to be reviewed.

Contemplating Learning Content Reuse

In the last few weeks of July, our department worked on pulling together information to prepare our submission for the 2013 ASTD State of the Industry Survey.  Each year through this survey, the ASTD research team captures and compiles information on industry trends and prepares a report that gets published in November.   The report includes information in categories such as learning costs, hours, staffing ratios, content distribution and delivery methods.    All of this information is valuable, but there is one section of the report that has been occupying my mind quite a bit lately.   It is the section on the Reuse Ratio.

The Reuse Ratio is defined as the ratio of learning hours used to learning hours available, or if you prefer, learning hours consumed to learning hours provided.  Either way, this is an efficiency measure that has direct impact on learning costs.   In the 2012 State of the Industry Report, the Reuse Ratio for all respondents was reported as 53:1.  The trend has shown that the reuse ratio has fallen over the last four years while the cost per learning hours used has increased.   In preparing our data for the survey submission this year, we calculated our reuse ratio to be a little more than 8:1, which is alarmingly below the Industry benchmarks.

So what does it mean?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the context of the work that our Learning & Development team does and the state of affairs in my company.   We have gone through a tremendous amount of change over the last few years necessitating the creation of a lot of new, targeted learning.  So far in 2013, my instructional design team has already outpaced the number of new courses and learning objects created in all of 2012 – and 2012 was a very busy year!  We expect the level of change to continue for quite some time in the foreseeable future.   It will be important for us to increase our content reuse ratio as I see this as an indication that we are using our budget and human resources as efficiently as possible.

So what do we do?

There are three key actions that we are undertaking:

Retire unused learning objects in our learning management system – We have a lot of old, outdated content in our learning management system that has not sustained its relevance.   Getting rid of these items will reduce the “hours provided” part of the equation to give us a more realistic picture of our ratio based on content that is actually important to our business needs.   Granted, this doesn’t save us on cost or development time, but it will add clarity to the picture.

Increase reuse of key learning content – Rather than approach every learning need as a new instructional design project, we have a team of Curriculum Managers who are curating content.  They have created curriculum maps for key subject areas that are important to supporting successful employee and business performance.   The maps outline a general progression through the content areas to help employees take accountability for their own development.

Increase reuse of learning assets – Because the high rate of change is expected to continue in our business, we recognize that the curriculum maps won’t be able to address every learning need.   We will still have an active pipeline of learning projects that will require some form of instructional design.  To that end, we have instituted a Digital Asset Management Library so we can capture and share assets such as activities and scenarios that go into the creation of learning solutions.   This won’t directly impact our content reuse ratio, but it will help us to be more efficient and cost effective in design.  And if we reuse our best assets to create learning objects that are relevant and useful, they will get used.  This will increase the “hours used” part of the equation, which will improve our overall ratio.

Service Recovery: It Shouldn't Be This Hard

Over the years, I have had many opportunities to design, deliver, and measure the impact of customer service training. Whether the audience was frontline service associates, client relationship managers, call center employees, or any other group, there were two universal messages I always tried to get across through training:

1.  It is important to deliver a client experience that reflects appropriately on your brand.

2.  Despite your best efforts, when dealing with people, there will inevitably be times when your service delivery fails to meet expectations, making it necessary to have a planned approach for service recovery.

The key to the first point is consistency. When clients do business with you, they should know what to expect and their experiences should not vary by large degrees.

The key to the second point is to recognize that when service delivery fails, both the relationship and the service being provided need to be repaired.

I had the opportunity to reflect on this through my experiences with an airline while traveling to mLearnCon this week. (The airline shall remain nameless, but let’s just say the letter A is prominent in their name…twice!). I was flying from Hartford to San Jose with a scheduled connection through Chicago. Due to weather my first flight was delayed, jeopardizing my chances of making my connection. I scrambled to get on an earlier flight to Chicago that would give me a bigger window of opportunity to make my connection. Fortunately, I was able to do so, but as with many cross-country flights, I arrived late at night at my destination. Unfortunately, my bags did not arrive with me. This leads me to the description of the treatment I received from the airline as they were trying to handle my service recovery issue. In short, through five separate interactions with airline employees, here is how each one impacted me:

I was disappointed – after being promised by the gate agent in Hartford that he would hand carry my checked bag over to my changed flight, it ended up that my bag never left the airport that day.

I was misinformed – when I landed in San Jose I was told that my bag would be placed on the next available flight and that it would be rushed to my hotel so I would have it by lunch time tomorrow. Since I was only wearing a pair of cargo shorts and a black tee-shirt, I decided to skip the first morning of the conference to wait until I had suitable clothes to wear.

I was lied to – after my bag failed to arrive as promised, I was informed by a call center agent that it would now arrive at 10.55 PM and that once it arrived, it would be scanned in at the airport. She went on to say that the scan would automatically generate a robocall letting me know it arrived. I was told that I would have my bag by midnight. By the time I got this information I had already missed most of the first day of the conference so I decided to write it off and join the conference on day two.

I was hung up on – no robocall ever came and I fell asleep without my bag having been delivered to me. I woke up at 4 AM and called the airline again to get an update. Another call center agent informed me that my bag would not arrive in San Jose until 7:30 AM and that after it arrived, it would be delivered to me within six hours. I told him this was not acceptable. He offered me several alternatives, none of which would meet my need of not missing any more of the conference. This had been my fifth business trip within the last seven weeks (no others with this airline). It was late, I was tired, and of course naked, and so at this point I lost my temper. I was upset that I might have to miss even more of the conference. I raised my voice and probably even dropped and f-bomb which caused the agent to hang up on me.

I was shocked by their lack of their concern – I tried to calm down and go back to sleep, but I really couldn’t. I called back about an hour later and calmly asked for an update. I got the same information from yet another agent, and the same set of unacceptable alternatives from which I was asked to choose one. I told the agent this was more than an inconvenience. It was costing time and money to attend this conference and I was missing a large part of it, thereby missing the value I expected to get. I asked him, “Does that matter to anyone at your airline?” To my surprise he responded by saying, “we can’t be sympathetic because this happens all the time.”

My bag arrived at 9 AM the next day, nearly 36 hours after I landed in San Jose, and I was finally able to join the conference. Later, I examined my experience against the customer service training that I have provided throughout my career. Here is how I would score the airline against the key customer service elements:

On client experience – they certainly were consistent in the way they represented their brand. Each employee that I encountered reacted coolly. It was as if they had been inoculated against being impacted by their customers’ emotions. Nothing I said or did garnered anything more than a “sorry for the inconvenience.” They never once indicated genuine concern for my situation or recognized the need to escalate my problem to a higher level.

On service recovery – to succeed here they would have needed to deal with my feelings and solve my problem. No one ever acknowledged my right to be upset with this situation. They never treated this as anything more than a minor inconvenience. They did offer me alternatives, but these came too late and none of them were acceptable to me because all would have caused me to lose more time at the conference. Rationally, I know that the alternatives they offered were really all they could do, but they presented them to me with a “pick your poison” attitude. If any one of them had displayed any empathy for me, it would have made it easier for me to choose one of their options.

I recognize the challenges the airlines are up against, many of us travel from city to city these days as if we were commuting from the suburbs to the city for work. My admiration for the flight crews’ ability to get me from point A to point B safely is second to none (that includes my experience on this trip). As a frequent traveler, I’ve experienced every possible delay imaginable. And yes, my bags have been lost once or twice before. But in my previous experiences with other airlines I always felt like we were all in this together. This time I felt like I was being written off, and worse, that what I experienced happens routinely.

The ultimate irony in this is that no one even offered to waive my $25 baggage fee.

Five Themes Heard Loudly and Clearly at #ASTD2013

This week was the learning industry’s premiere event:  The ASTD International Conference and Exposition (aka ICE) in Dallas.   Estimated attendance was upwards of 9000 learning geeks from over 70 countries.  I was proud to be among them.

At an event this large, it is impossible to experience it all.  It is like visiting the Louvre or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is just too much to see and do.  The best way to approach it is to focus on a theme or a track, and create your own personal conference experience.  Two colleagues from my company attended the conference this year along with me.  One of them followed the Sales Enablement track and the other followed the Measurement, Evaluation and ROI track.  My approach was different.  Our company is a member of the ASTD Forum (a benchmarking group of about 50 companies that help each other out on workplace learning issues and share best practices).   The Forum members put on a series of workshops at ICE each year.  This year we offered four sessions.  I volunteered to co-facilitate one of them and I decided to attend the other three to support my colleagues during their facilitation.   It made for a great experience but it limited the number of sessions outside of the Forum offerings that I could attend.

Despite not getting around as much as I have at previous conferences, several themes reached me through the sessions I did attend, through the twitterverse, and through casual conversations with other conference goers in the expo, at lunch, and during my favorite event: the ice cream social!

Here are five themes I heard repeatedly during my conference experience:

Passion – Sir Ken Robinson kicked of the passion craze during his keynote address on Monday morning.  In discussing his new book, Finding Your Element, he reminded us all that we are happiest and most successful in our careers when we are able to perform work that marries up our aptitudes with our passions.   This seemingly simple point, made quite an impact.  It was cited during several other sessions during the week and was often part of the conversation in between sessions.

Millennials – It was fascinating to me to see how many times the millennial generation was discussed during this conference.  But what truly surprised me was the way it was discussed: “Millenials are coming!”  “They are going to be in leadership positions!”   “We must prepare!”  It was as if a plague or a hostile army was descending on us.   In my humble opinion, we were going a little overboard on this one.  Yes, every generation has different life experiences that shape their expectations, but isn’t that just part of diversity?  Embrace it and let it enrich us.   Let’s focus more on what we can learn from them and less about how they might react to “old school training approaches” that we should be retiring anyway.

Brain Science – I haven’t heard this much talk about the brain since the educational psychology courses I attended in graduate school.   But it is a welcome line of conversation.   Brain research is about memory and recall.  It confirms all of the things we know we should be doing to enable effective learning:  get people’s attention, stimulate their thinking, appeal to their emotions, and give them time to digest and reflect on what they have learned.   The latest research is being presented in easily digestible formats.   That is good news.  It gives us something to work with when we are trying to convince our business partners why we are advocating short bursts of learning spaced out over time instead of cramming everything into a three-day event.

Mobile as Performance Support - As it was with last year’s conference, Mobile Learning was a very hot topic.  But whereas last year’s discussion centered on how to get mobile learning off the ground, this year’s theme was how to do it right: getting mobile learning into the workflow and using it for just-in-time performance support.  Shame on anyone who still thinks they might be able to take an existing e-learning course and reconfigure it for a mobile device.   That is not the way to go.

Curation – As the learning industry embraces mobile, social, and self-managed learning as opportunities, we find ourselves needing to play a new role in relation to our learners: content curator.  With the overwhelming amount of information our learners have at their disposal, and the wide variety of sources from which to get that information, we can help them by sorting it out in ways that makes it easier for them to get their hands on content that will be most useful to them.  This year the ASTD published a conference backchannel resource page.   And of course, David Kelly, who has become one of the most influential leaders on this topic, posts his own curated resources from the conference.

Creating WOW Learning Experiences

Last week I held a meeting with my full team of Instructional Designers and Curriculum Managers. Since we are a virtual team that is scattered to all corners of the country, we rarely have the opportunity to all be in the same place at the same time. I have such a talented team of learning professionals.  It was wonderful to take advantage of our collective thinking to discuss how we can improve the way we work, and the actions we could be taking to ensure we deliver on our objectives for this year.

 

As part of these discussions, we tackled the topic of creating WOW learning experiences. This is something that is important to us as we want to continuously improve what we do while helping our learners to grow, develop and perform better at work. We did some creative exercises to get our juices flowing, and then worked to define what we meant by WOW learning and what the elements of WOW learning would look like. So here is what we came up with:

 

WOW Learning Definition: Learning experiences that are self-directed, engaging, and hands-on. They provide methods, ways or platforms for learners to modify, enhance, or change behaviors in ways that successfully transfer to the work that they do and lead to improved performance.

 

Okay, this probably sounds like a definition that was created by committee. Well it was. But it has all the important elements that we talked about and it recognizes the importance of the learner in the experience.

WOW Learning Elements: Leading up to the creation of this definition, we discussed what WOW learning would look like. From our point-of-view, it would include the following:

•  Engages learners
• Leaves them wanting more; or to repeat the experience
• Addresses needs and provides value
• Enables them to change behavior, do something new, or do something better than they did before the experience
• Grabs their attention
• Allows them to control the path of the experience 
• Invests them emotionally (which we saw being accomplished through stories - that create human interest - and/or games – that challenge our competitive natures)

One of the models that came to mind and was discussed as we were creating this list was John Keller’s ARCS model (Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction) which describes how to create and sustain motivation through the learning process.

 

I was proud of my team for arriving where we did through this discussion. Now our challenge is to put this into practice in the learning experiences we design and deliver.

Mobile Pilot Scorecard




As described in my March 9 blog entry, Yes, You Can Deliver Mobile Learning, we recently completed our first mobile learning pilot with the gracious assistance of our vendor partner OnPoint Digital, using their CellCast platform.   The results are in:   as is typical of pilots we had some successes (hooray!) and we learned a few things (which always reminds us why we do pilots in the first place).

In terms of our success criteria, we fully achieved three out of four goals. Not too bad for a pilot.  We were even partially successful with our fourth goal.   So here is a look at our mlearning pilot scorecard:

1. Producing and converting content for mobile delivery: Success! - we were able to successfully deploy audio, video, .pdf documents, tests and surveys, and an interactive product placement map to our pilot audience.  Producing the learning content was the easy part.  After all, that is what my team is already good at.  For the pilot, we relied on OnPoint to convert the content to the format required mlearning.
2. Deploying content using a mobile platform - Success! - as previously stated, we used the CellCast app from OnPoint Digital.   It worked very well for us.  We had a few technical glitches that required some troubleshooting in the first few days of the pilot.  But doesn't that happen with all roll-outs that involve technology?   Once we got those glitches ironed out, it was pretty smooth sailing for the rest of the way.
3. Deploying content to a variety of mobile devices - Partial Success - We were able to successfully deploy to Android and iOS devices.  However, the majority of our pilot audience was equipped with older model Blackberries.  We knew going into the pilot that we were likely to hear grumblings from this group about the user experience. We were prepared to get that feedback, but there were two communication issues that made this a bigger challenge than I would have liked:  (1) Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) software - this had to be unlocked so our users could download the app to their devices.  Nothing like this was required for either the Android or iOS devices.  (2) Lack of SD Cards - many of the users had never installed SD cards in their devices, so there was no place for their downloads to land.  This effectively put a good chunk of the pilot audience out of the game.   Many of the users without the SD cards, used personal devices to complete their training.  A handful of people went out and bought new SD cards and installed them so they could participate, but most just missed the opportunity.
4. Testing and recording participant completion results - Success! - one of the advantages of mobile devices that should not be overlooked is that they can be used for two-way communication.  Since this was our first pass at mlearning, we didn't go beyond receiving test scores and survey data back from our participants through their mobile devices, but it was encouraging to see the amount and type of data we could capture.   For example,  the image accompanying this blog entry is of a data processing unit.  It is a still capture from one of our videos that was viewed on average over six times by the pilot participants.  Most of the other videos averaged slightly less than three views each.  I'm interpreting that as telling us we need to beef up the DPU segment of our initial classroom training.  Great information, don't you think?

All in all, I would call our pilot a success.  We learned a few things about how to present our content, how to make downloading easier, and about what will work and what won't in terms of mobile learning.   And as far as our Blackberry device issue, well that has now been solved.  Reporting the results of our pilot to senior leaders gave them the last piece of information they needed to justify a device upgrade for our users.   How is that for a nice unintended outcome?

Creating WOW Learning Experiences in Compliance Training

One of the goals I share with my instructional design team this year is "to create WOW learning experiences." It is part of our 2013 continuous improvement effort.  Last year was our first year operating as an Enterprise Learning and Development group.   We spent most of the year building the team, introducing tools, and developing the processes we need to support the lines of business with learning services.  This year, we want to make the most of the capability we have created.  

An area in which it is especially challenging to find ways to create WOW learning experiences is in compliance training.   This is often considered the "necessary evil" of the learning world.  It poses the instructional designer with an uphill battle in that the content is usually not core to the target audience's work, and it is not generally compelling by nature.  It is certainly not easy to make "lock out, tag out procedures" or "record retention policies" come to life in an eLearning module, but there are ways to do it.   I have challenged my team to look for more opportunities to use story-based or game-like approaches, and to take advantage of our in-house graphic designer to include images, animations, or videos that can add visual interest and make learning points clearer.

I just came across this slideshare presentation from Cammy Bean at Kineo: Cammy Bean's Learning Visions: Compliance Makeover!   In this presentation, Cammy provides 10 tips for giving compliance training a makeover.  These tips represent the kind of things I'm asking my team to do to create WOW learning experiences.  Thanks Cammy!

Yes, You Can Deliver Mobile Learning

After sitting through so many mobile learning sessions at industry events, I got tired of being among the puzzled masses who couldn't figure out how to launch a mobile learning solution. I was determined to unravel this mystery and begin offering mobile learning in my company.   I started by asking myself, "What makes this so hard to do?"  I'm a reasonably intelligent guy.  I've got an iPad and an Android Smartphone.   I download apps.  I play Words with Friends on occasion.  This shouldn't be so hard for me and my team to figure out.  Then it hit me.   My team is made up of highly talented instructional designers.   We understand how to build learning solutions, but we aren't programmers or app developers.  We could design and develop learning content for mobile delivery, but we needed some help on the technology side.   Rather than try to create our own apps, we decided to find a partner that had a ready made platform we could use to help us get started.    Now, we are just finishing up our first mobile learning pilot.   We will be summarizing the completion and evaluation data next week.    It took a lot of research, self-education, and just plain work for us to get to this point.   But if I were to simplify it down to the key things that helped us move forward, it would be these five things:

1. Read Designing mLearning by Clark Quinn - If you do a literature search on mobile learning, all roads lead back to this book, so you might as well start here.   It covers mobile learning in a very comprehensive way.    As you read it, think about it in the context of your own situation so you can identify and plan how to overcome your own hurdles.
2. Form a Mobile Team - This is clearly a case where more heads are better than one.  The easy part of the work for us was designing and developing the content, but there are a lot of decisions to be made regarding network protocols, mobile security, audience analysis, and interface design before you can get to that point.
3. Partner with Your Information Technology Team -  You cannot do this without having IT support at the right level in your organization.   There are device, policy, security and protocol issues that have to be addressed.  These cannot be resolved by Learning & Development alone. 
4. Choose a Vendor Partner - This is the real jump starter.   We will likely get to a point where we are developing our own learning app, but that day is not here yet.  We chose to start by using a mobile platform that already exists and a partner who has done this before.  OnPoint Digital helped us conduct our pilot using their Cellcast App.  We also got great support and advice from the folks at Float Learning.
5. Choose the Right Pilot Project - Keep in mind, this is about learning, not just using a new medium.   It is important to choose a project that matters.  In our mobile learning pilot,  we delivered update training to a group of service technicians who had previously attended an installation  and repair class on a piece of equipment they must service.  There have been some hardware updates and changes to electrical specs on that equipment since the technicians completed their initial training.   Rather than bring them back into the classroom, or have them interrupt their work day to take time out for eLearning, we chose to prepare them to handle the differences they would encounter on service calls using mobile learning.  Their training consisted of twelve brief video segments focusing on the hardware differences (only the introductory video clip ran longer than one minute), three electrical diagrams for review, and an interactive map showing where the newer models had been placed.   We included a brief quiz asking a few key questions to check knowledge of the differences, but for the most part, what we really supplied them with were some brief, handy performance support tools they could use at the point of need.

This is just the beginning for us, but I feel great having done this pilot. Our goal was to test the end-to-end process.  Having done this, I feel I'm in a better position to garner stakeholder support for a longer term mobile learning strategy.   Best of all, the next time I attend a mobile session at a learning conference, and the speaker asks the audience, "How many of you are using mobile learning?"  I can raise my hand.   

Maintaining Relevance in Workplace Learning

Workplace Learning Professionals: join us today for a discussion of #relevance in an #astd_forum vSession today at 12:00 PM eastern time: http://tinyurl.com/ayra9qw

DevLearn 2012 Resources

Sadly,  I was not able to make it to DevLearn this year.   Like many others, I was sidelined by Hurricane Sandy.   Fortunately for me, I was able to send several of my team members, so we had good coverage at the conference.   When they returned they were excited by the greater understanding they gained on issues such as HTML5, Mobile Learning, Tin Can API and the latest trends in learning analytics.  They also met some great people through networking.   Now they face the daunting task of educating me!

But to aid in the process, once again we have the great treasure trove of resources from conference curator David Kelly aka @LnDDave.

The Perfect Storm: HTML5, Tin Can API and Mobile

Having just endured the powerful forces of Hurricane Sandy here in the northeastern United States, my heart goes out to the people who lost homes and loved ones during the storm. Meanwhile in the learning industry, another storm is brewing. If you haven’t been paying attention to topics such as HTML5, Tin Can API, Learning Records Stores, and developments on the mobile front, then you better batten down the hatches. These things are upon us now. They represent a climate change that can create super storms, ones that have ability to disrupt daily life for those of us in the workplace learning industry if we aren't prepared for them.

I work in a corporate learning department for a relatively large global company. We have been providing high quality learning services to our employees for years. I’m proud of the work my team does and the impact we have had on our organization’s success, particularly during the tough economic times of the last few years. We have never been what I would consider “cutting edge” but we have always managed to be creative and innovative in our approaches to learning. We have not only embraced change, but we have driven it through our organization. We are doing this once again as we have launched a project to introduce mobile learning as part of our mix. While I am excited by the possibilities, I feel like I’m walking through a storm. We seem to be in a time and place where so many things are swirling around us at once, so it is hard to know where to step next. Here are some of the challenges that we need to weather over the next few months:

Everybody’s Going Mobile – Smartphones and tablets are wonderful productivity tools, aren’t they? These days everyone has one…or two… or three. But they are all different. Yes, we have some company issued devices, but our learners are going to expect to be able to access learning content from their device of choice. This means designing and publishing multiple ways.

Gone in a Flash – I’m talking about Flash output. Up until now, all of the e-learning content we have produced has been published as Flash output. Of course we all know that that is coming to an end. To be able to publish engaging learning that can be accessed on a mobile device, we are going to have to produce HTML5 output now. Of course HTML5 Standards aren’t finalized yet, and none of our current course development software tools publish to HTML5, so there are those little things to deal with.

I’ll trade you an “M” for an “R” - That is as in LMS vs. LRS. We have thousands of learning objects on our Learning Management System (LMS). But of course, our LMS can’t handle content published for mobile devices (Yeah, I know that capability will be coming out in a future release of our LMS software… Q1 of 20xx). Our LMS is looking for SCORM standards, whereas mobile learning will mean using Tin Can API. (Yes, we are all learning about Tin Can.) If we want to record and track mobile learning, we’ll need a Learning Record Store (LRS).

As I said, I’m excited by this new direction we are taking. Mobile learning will be a real game changer for us. But I have to admit, figuring out how to fit all these things together is keeping me up at night almost as much as Hurricane Sandy did.

Capitalizing on 7 Learning Modalities

Last week I had the opportunity to get into a dialog with my company's learning council about the future direction of our approach to workplace learning.  My goal was to get them to support the idea of using tools and technologies to foster more informal learning opportunities. Our learning council is made up of a group of senior leaders from each of our business units and some key functional areas.  They are all savvy, successful business men and women in their areas of expertise, but their knowledge of what makes learning effective is uneven.   My approach was to write and present a white paper to them on how to capitalize on the learning modalities that are currently available for use in our organization - including mobile learning and learning through social media.

I wasn't sure how they would react to this.  Like many companies, our approach to workplace learning has mainly been focused on using traditional delivery methods such as classroom training, webinars, and self-paced elearning. To set the stage in the paper and in our discussion, I started by talking about the 70:20:10 Learning Framework.   This was a good choice as it comes across as rational, logical, and easy to understand.  Next, we talked about the proliferation of mobile devices and the explosion social media usage over the last few years, drawing the conclusion that our employees are already engaged in these arenas and that to provide effective learning support, we need to be in there with them.

After setting the stage, we moved the dialog into discussing how we would use each of the seven learning modalities I included in the paper.  I arranged them along a continuum from most formal to least formal (as shown in the image above).  You could argue with my sequencing, but this worked for the purposes of my discussion.  In the paper, I covered each modality by describing its current use, benefits, drawbacks, and recommendations for usage in our future learning offerings.

Here are the seven modalities we discussed, with a brief line about how we plan to optimize each:

Instructor-led training (ILT) - to optimize ILT we need to make sure our courses are learner-centered and discussion-oriented, offering ample opportunities for practice and feedback.

Virtual Instructor-led training (VILT) - to optimize VILT we need to design full, facilitated learning experiences that may include multiple sessions, pre-work, assessments, interactive exercises and post work (not just have a subject matter expert talking over PowerPoint slides).

eLearning (CBT or WBT) - to optimize elearning we need to use story-based, character-driven, and game-based approaches that are interactive and engaging to motivate our learners to stay with them through to completion.

Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) - to optimize EPSS we need to provide relevant tools and place them (physically and contextually) where our learners are most likely going to look for them.

Podcasts and Videos - to optimize our use of podcasts and video we need to create short burst learning objects that address a single topic or specific objective.

Mobile Learning - to optimize mobile learning in the short term we need to post .pdf, audio and video files and take advantage of two-way communication opportunities; longer term we will work with an external partner and our IT team to create and support a mobile learning app.

Social Learning - to optimize social learning we need to create groups and/or topic archives based on areas of interest to our learners, focusing on information sharing, collaboration, and content co-creation.

All-in-all we had a great dialog.  Our learning council members were excited about the possibilities of mobile and social learning.   They recognize the power of embedding learning directly into the workstream: minimizing disruptions to productivity while our employees grow and develop their skills.