Falling into Fall!

School starts in just over a week, and we're getting ready for a new school year. I really don't think I can handle more than 6 graduate hours per semester and work full-time, so I'm taking two classes: New Technologies of Instruction and Instructional Systems Design. I'm excited about taking my first ID class. I do instructional design work, of a sort, but I've never really learned much about techniques or processes. I do it all by instinct, and while that seems to work a good deal of the time, I'm sure it's not the best way. It's like a story I read about Tallulah Bankhead, who stormed the American and British stages (along with radio and a few films, including Hitchock's Lifeboat) with her vibrant personality. She was starring in a (then) brand new play written by Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes. She had never really trained much as an actress and had gotten by mostly on instinct and personality, but her director really bore down hard on her during rehearsals and forced her to learn technique so she would be good not only on opening night, but every night. I look forward to large, steaming helpings of learning this semester. It's hard to believe that I will graduate in a year!

Wiki, Schmiki!

My post title notwithstanding, we recently launched a corporate wiki and it's a good thing that we're embracing Web 2.0 tools. It has been online for not quite a month and we've been getting some good participation from our customers. However, since this is a corporate wiki being used by corporate employees, there is a great deal of concern in HR and Legal about possible inappropriate wiki postings. Ideally, a wiki is supposed to monitor itself and users would resolve inappropriate postings without having to get a moderator involved. I hope that we can get to that point, but for right now, we check the wiki several times a day to see if anything obscene or obviously against company policy has been posted. I think that once the wiki is more self-monitoring, we will see some more effective participation and get better results out of it.

We've also learned that we have to market the wiki so that people don't forget about it!

Articulate!

I've become fond of tools that can convert PowerPoint presentations to Flash files for distribution over the web. They have come in handy when a last-minute request for an online training course comes down the line. In the past, our department has used Breeze (which is now Adobe Presenter), but when it came time to renew our licenses, we took a look at Articulate and liked what we found. For what we were going to spend on a basic Breeze license, we got the Articulate studio, which comes with the presenter program (for converting the PowerPoint file), plus Articulate Engage and Articulate Quizmaker. We're diving in now to learn the new program and so far, the response has been positive.

Personally, I like the interactions that can be added to the presentations to make them look more like true online courses and less like a "page-turner" online presentation. The quizzes are sharp and easy to build.

I really didn't mean to make this post seem like a commercial, but I've just been given my first assignment with the new program and I can't wait to start.

I have a problem...

Not really, but I try to tie the title to the lesson. :-)

In this week's class, we discussed how to use e-Learning to promote problem solving skills. As always, I compare what our department produces with what I'm studying about in class, and we seem to do a good job of this. We include scenarios in our e-Learning courses and the scenarios are tied to the job. We don't follow some of the principles mentioned in this chapter, such as using job experts and seeing how they would solve a particular problem, or promoting learner awareness of problem solving actions and skills. The latter is done with some of our other training in which they are provided with flow charts to help document a process or procedure, but it doesn't exist in our e-Learning. I know that our audience typically doesn't have good metacognitive skills, but I think part of the reason is the rushed timeframe for our training. Sometimes, our team members are placed before a computer and told to complete x hours of training in a day. By flying through the course and skimming over the examples, learning isn't really taking place. I wonder if metacognitive skills on the job are influenced by the work culture. We can each have our own standards, but if they are met with apathy by coworkers and supervisors, do we still pursue them as strongly?

Collaborate... Moderate... Try Not to Hate

Remember the INXS song "Mediate" from their 1987 Kick album? That's one of the few remotely popular music references I can include, since my musical tastes are quite out of step with most music today. But that's a different story. As Sophia Petrillo always used to say when sharing a story about her past on The Golden Girls, "But, I digress."

This week, we discussed collaboration in e-Learning and how it improves the learning experience. I can attest to collaboration improving the distance learning experience, certainly. I'm in my second year of graduate school and most of my classes have been online. In most of those classes, we had to asynchronously collaborate with each other. We had to post responses to discussion questions to the class message board and we had to post responses to at least two other posts before we could consider our participation complete for that class week. Sometimes, I gritted my teeth when I did it, but ultimately I benefited from expanded viewpoints.

I am curious about collaboration in corporate e-Learning environments. I work in a retail training department and we have a very low degree of concurrency (except for when a new course launches) plus we have very low resources for monitoring such collaborative tools as message boards or forums. We tried to do a wiki and it sounded like the answer we had been seeking, but the project ultimately got canceled because there weren't enough resources for monitoring it to make sure that off-topic discussions didn't get started (which is a huge concern for management). Additionally, much of our audience consists of retail store employees who do not have a great deal of time for training. The vast majority of their time is spent selling or completing other tasks; they fit in learning when they get a chance. I'd love to try using collaborative tools, but I think we have to use it with certain segments of our learners and not use it across the board. I wonder if we could do a hosted blog or a wiki with just a select group and see how it goes. We're revamping some of our training efforts in 2008, so we'll see.

Feedback on Feedback

A consistent refrain in creating practice opportunities and assessments is the idea of feedback. Learners should have specific information about how well they did with the practice opportunities provide to them. Otherwise, they will not know whether or not they have enough of a grasp of the material to successfully retrieve it and use it at a later time. We have just studied a chapter on providing practice opportunities in e-Learning situations and the authors suggested that the feedback needs to tell the learner not only whether or not the practice was completed successfully (whether the answer was right or wrong, if appropriate) and why.

I agree completely that feedback is extremely important in both practice and assessment situations. I'm a bit perplexed on how much feedback to provide in an assessment situation. At that point, do you tell the user whether the question was answered incorrectly -- and do you provide the correct answer? Or do you direct the learner back to the instruction to find the correct answer? I've heard arguments for both sides. I am guessing that it depends on the audience and the purpose for the assessment.

Redundancy vs. Learning Styles: Mutually Exclusive or Possibly Compatible?

This week, we discussed the importance of avoiding redundancy in providing material to learners. Specifically, we discussed how providing the same material through a visual format (graphics), audio narration, and printed text can overwhelm learners and detract from learning. Presenting printed text and explanatory graphics can overload the learner's limited visual processing channel. The Redundancy Principle suggests that in most cases, it's better to show and tell, not to show, show, and tell. On-screen text or explanatory graphics can be paired with audio narration to appeal to both the visual and auditory channels.

This contrasts with the learning styles approach, which recommends that e-Learning designers include seemingly redundant methods of presenting materials to appeal to different learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic). I'm sure this has been a lively debate for many years, because it does seem true that we have different preferences for processing new information. My partner is like a human tape recorder; he can hear a conversation and repeat it almost verbatim later. He is a strong auditory learner. I have to use a combination of preferences. I do need to hear it, but I also need to process it visually and kinesthetically if possible. Most of us do use a combination of styles.

So, where do the approaches meet? I think they both have a place in e-Learning design and they are not mutually exclusive. Is this where truly blended learning plays more of a role? We can have audio and visual information, but perhaps we can provide a worksheet at the end for learners to download that sums up the main points of the lesson. Maybe the worksheet could contain a practice exercise or two. Yes, there would be some redundancy, but the learner would have the choice of whether or not to use the additional (possibly redundant) information.