This year I completed 20 years in the learning and development industry. As I reflect back, some things just remain the same, especially in elearning. Even today when I tell someone that I develop elearning, I get the “Oh that’s an upcoming industry”. Even after 20 years, elearning is still an upcoming industry!!!
Elearning development continues to be riddled with the same questions over the years with no right answers. Many years ago, when I was learning Instructional Design (ID), one of the mentors said the full form of ID is actually “It Depends”. Seems like the same for elearning. “It Depends” on so many factors and even after so many years, it is still the same.
What is one hour of elearning? I explored this question a few years back on
eCube blog. I don’t think there’s still any right answer for this. Even when elearning was simplistic frame-based, it was hard to agree on what is one hour of elearning. Now with a host of interactivities, social learning, gamification of elearning, it is even harder to define what is one hour of elearning. And even if we take the simple calculation of frames per hour, there are ranges based on “levels” of elearning. Hopefully we will have new questions with the advent of social learning. Can it even be measured in hours?
What are different levels of elearning? While the amount of interactivity and media treatment in elearning is used to define “levels” of elearning, you also need to keep in mind what instructional objective the elearning is trying to achieve, and the complexity of content being delivered. Still no right answers here.
How long does it take to create one hour of elearning? This
question that is asked all the time but still really has no simple answer. “It Depends” on various factors. An interesting resource is a year
2009 ASTD article by Karl Kapp. Even this is not a good enough guideline and no two elearning experts will agree with these numbers.
How much does it cost? “It Depends”. But even after defining the cost affecting parameters, there are still no standard costs in the industry. In one competition analysis, we realized that for the same opportunity the customer got bids from 50K to 500K (INR) for the requirements they floated. Obviously it’s going to confuse the customers completely, especially the ones who are new at embarking on the elearning journey.
How many elearning hours will my existing ILT translate to? First, how many hours is one day of ILT? Is it 8 hours, 7 hours, 6 hours? And what’s the conversion to ILT to elearning? Is it 2:1, 1:1, 1.5:1? No consensus in the industry on that. And there continue to be wild expectations from elearning. One potential customer recently was expecting their 5 day ILT class to be converted into a couple of hours of elearning. Wouldn’t that be nice!
I have all the content. Why does it cost so much? All you are doing is putting it all together. I find this very similar to the question that photographers are asked. Why does it cost so much. All you are doing is pressing the shutter on the camera to take pictures.
Why does it take so long? Of course it can be done faster. But are the customers ready to respond with the speed at which they demand it to be done, and especially if they are attempting to do it the first time? This also will help understand why it costs so much. So are the management structures in place to approve the various stages during development? Even with rapid elearning development models, there’re always too many levels of management having views on what’s being developed and whether it works for the company or not. So while the pure elearning development can be quick, the deployment can take a long time.
How do I measure the effectiveness? The question continues to be asked over the years. While we have evolve from the simple ROI calculation (save travel costs through elearning), there are no right answers for measuring effectiveness of specific programs. Perhaps that’s not right for me to say. There are specific ways to measure effectiveness. However to implement these requires time, effort and more money. So while the customers are looking for effectiveness and ROI measures, they are unwilling to spend on actual implementation of practices to measure the effectiveness.
I need something different in elearning. Err, to be honest I still get away by impressing potential customers with elearning developed 7 to 10 years ago. The elearning content that I see is still the same as it was 15-20 years ago. So we moved from DOS and Video based learning to GUI based to Web based. But it’s pretty much the same stuff. There’re still the same learning paths or table of contents, learning objects that need to be tracked, still the same old next-previous button, still the same show-me/try-it simulations, still the same glossary button. And it’s not that these designs don’t work, they still do. And we continue our quest for finding the next best thing in elearning.
So even though a lot has changed in elearning in the last 20 years, the questions we ask pretty much remain the same.
It’s been a rather quiet 2011 on this blog. Thanks to a
couple of guest posts, there were 12 real posts in the whole year. As I reflect
on last year, the usual excuse of getting very little time was the first one
that sprung to mind. But in reality, I think I just didn't make enough effort. There
were many blog posts that crossed my mind that didn’t get written. Many reflections
that I wanted to share, many questions that I wanted to explore. Hopefully 2012
will be a better year for this blog. With renewed vigor in the New Year, I am
hoping that I will post a lot more frequently in 2012.
Here’s a summary of blog posts of 2011:
- I
explored the question of whether an organization/business unit should be delivery led or sales led. I am still struggling to find
the right balance.
- Taking
a stab at rants, I make a case that It's Not This Or That, It's This AND That.
- A
sponsored guest post by Ronnie Friedmann on Painless way to get and give employee feedback.
- Picking
up a question on Twitter, I share some of the lies I have heard by people while quiting their job.
- In
a guest post by Puja Anand, she shares her categorization of Clients from Hell.
- A
video presentation talk by Sir Ken Robinson triggered my thoughts on driving divergent thinking in our children.
- Rupa
Rajagopalan has been instrumental in running the Instructional Designers
Community of India for the last few years along with some other enthusiastic
members of the profession published my interview in their newsletter IDConnect.
- Another
guest post by Puja Anand in which she shares her experiences of dealing with clients from different cultures.
- An experience sharing event at work triggered this post in which I share my defining customer moments.
- I
explore the question Is changing jobs the best way of getting a raise.
- In
the quest for learning something “new” all the time, the younger people are
losing the quest to hone and improve what they know and keep struggling with “I am not learning anything new”.
- A
call from a recruiter who had not checked my LinkedIn public profile made me
wonder why recruiters aren’t using social networking to hire.
Came across a tweet by a respected TV journalist today:
r day should be a celebration of creative genius of india, not of armed forces might. fewer tanks, more music. gnight
I have heard people cribbing and providing their alternatives in the past also. “We should not spend money on games, the same could be used for the poor”, “why do film stars get awards, they should be given to intellectuals” and so on.
Mostly we rant about why we shouldn’t do the things that are happening and why we should shift our attention, money, focus to something else. It seems as though magically by doing that we would solve the seemingly bigger problems. How I wish it was so easy. How I wish that poverty would be eroded by not spending the money on games but by giving money to the poor.
Unfortunately it’s usually never a case of EITHER OR but almost always a case of AND. We must have games AND solve our poverty problems, the Republic Day must be a celebration of Armed forces might AND creative genius of India, awards must be given to intellectuals AND film stars.
Do you see yourself using Or in your workplace or are you using AND? Using AND can give shape to ideas and your suggestions stand a better chance of being accepted.
I am going through a leadership workshop and as part of that, we took the
MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) questionnaire. I have taken this questionnaire a few times before and have sat through sessions explaining the concept of physiological types. This time however our facilitator
Santosh Babu provided some interesting perspectives and insights into the test.
There’s a difference between type and trait. Type is who you really are. However trait is something that you demonstrate. I think when I filled the questionnaire, I answered questions according to the traits I demonstrate, or perhaps even the traits I want to/need to demonstrate. When our facilitator explained the different types, I felt I was quite different from type that the questionnaire identified for me.
The E-I Dichotomy
The Extraversion-Introversion dichotomy is primarily about how you use your energy. Extraversion people are people who can easily communicate with various people, communicating with others is energy generator for them. Introversion people are people who prefer to think deeply and prefer to have their own space. It is not that the Introversion people can’t communicate or generally display more “introvert” characteristics. It is just that they need to make the extra effort to communicate and then need some time alone to recuperate. Extroversion people typically have more breadth (multiple interests but not deeply into any) while Introversion people are people with more depth (fewer interest but with more focus). Introversion people act as extroversion people when they are with their close friends or if the topic of discussion is about their interest.
The S-N Dichotomy
The Sensing-Intuitive dichotomy is about how you communicate. The Sensing people tend to first identify the elements and then build a picture around those elements. The Intuitive people tend to create a big picture. Sensing people will first spot the small mistakes in documents/reports, while the Intuitive people will focus on what the document/report. The Intuitive people are more imaginative and verbally creative.
The T-F Dichotomy
The Thinking-Feeling dichotomy is about decision making style. Thinking people will collect data. They will create systems, processes and rules. They want to be fair using the data and rules around these. Thinking people want to be objective and fair. They are analytical and want to identify what’s wrong with something so they can solve the problem. They may appear to be tough minded. The Feeling people are more focused on being fair to the situation and the people involved. They use personal value to make decisions. They assess the impact of decisions on people and strive for harmony and positive interactions. They may appear soft hearted.
The J-P Dichotomy
The Judging-Perceiving dichotomy is about orientation to external world. The Judging people are more structure, organized and like to live in a planned and orderly way. Perceiving people tend to be more flexible and spontaneous in their ways. They prefer to stay open to last minute options and can adapt to change.
By the questionnaire, I am ENTJ personality type. However by explanations above, I am closer to ISFP or even ISFJ at times. The facilitator also suggested that you could take three inputs – the test, your own feel and what others might perceive you as to identify your personality type and traits you demonstrate.
Talking about innovation always opens Pandora’s box (see comments on my post Innovation in Indian Learning Industry).
Wikipedia defines innovation as:
a new way of doing something or "new stuff that is made useful". It may refer to incremental and emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations.
According to Merriam-Webster, innovation is:
Main Entry: in•no•va•tion
Pronunciation: "i-n&-'vA-sh&n
Function: noun
1 : the introduction of something new
2 : a new idea, method or device
Another site RealInnovation.com says:
An innovation can be big or small. Brand-new or just a bit different, it doesn't matter. An innovation can be clearly complex or seemingly simple. Innovations are often thought of in terms of technical achievement, but can also be a design.
An article on America.gov says:
Innovation is invention plus introduction.
Victoria Department of Education and Early Childhood Development describes innovation as:
means coming up with new ideas and approaches that break new ground, push the boundaries and open up new ways of doing things.
I am beginning to think that innovation is relative. Each person is probably innovating in their own ways, some more than others (they find a new way of doing something perhaps). Each organization is innovating (they must, to stay in the business) in different areas like better ways of doing things (process innovation) or just building new products (product innovation) or providing new services. Countries are probably considered to innovate probably when many companies from the country are seen to be innovating.
An important aspect of being innovative is to be seen doing innovation. The larger the scale of comparison, the more impact the innovation must have. As an individual in your organization, if you can get the work done in difficult circumstances, you might be considered innovative. Or if you keep generating ideas and dialog you can be considered innovative, even if the ideas don’t result in a final product. As an organization it is harder. You can start by winning awards in niche segment and be considered innovative in that niche. To be considered innovative globally, the organization needs to have achieved recognition from outside its niche area of operation.
Grand things won’t happen on their own. If I want the organization or the country to innovate, I will start small, start with myself. I will keep innovating in every small thing and won’t wait for the ultimate game-changing innovation to come to me as a spark of brilliance. And I won’t worry about the definitions.
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Amit Garg asks whether we learn more from successes than failure. He mentions an article on Science Daily that suggests brain cells learn more from successes than failures. Well, at least that’s how monkeys learn based on a research by scientists at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory according to the article. Do read the interesting conversation ongoing on his blog post.
Do organizations learn from successes? Do they even attempt at learning from successes? I don’t think organizations and managers do a good job at learning from successes. And I am as guilty as anyone else of this. The whole management review governance structures are built around learning from mistakes and ignoring successes. We have goals and measure progress against these. If our goals are consistently being met, there’s hardly any time spent on reviews. However if the goals aren’t met, or a perhaps a project has gone bad, we spend inordinate amount of time doing root cause analysis and identifying corrective actions. Of course root cause analysis and identify corrective actions are absolutely required and we really can’t afford not to do these. We do need to prevent problems from recurring and look for ways to continuously improve the process. However we hardly spend any time in learning what we might be doing right when goals are met, or from projects that went well.
We celebrate successes but don’t necessarily attempt to learn from them formally as much as we attempt to learn from mistakes. Our former Creative Director would go sore screaming at managers including me, (not literally, don’t get me wrong now) on why we weren’t looking at the 9 projects that went well instead of trying to find out why 1 project went bad.
Why don’t we learn from successes? Could it because it is harder to learn from successes? Or perhaps successes are expected from each of us and we are just doing our job when we succeed. And if we are already doing our job well, what’s to learn?
It would be interesting to know if there are any formal methods of learning from successes, like there are for learning from failures. Any best practices from organizations out there?
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Last month this blog completed two years. It’s been an interesting journey of self discovery with 3 name changes, 116 posts, 263 comments, nearly 20,000 page views and most importantly 200 RSS and email subscribers.
THANK YOU for reading and contributing to my learning.
Do drop a line about how this blog has been able to contribute in your learning and how I can make this blog better.
Last year I wrote a brief post about tech support meme and posted a hilarious video. I recently came across a whole book about, well not exactly tech support memes though some of stories are about tech support, Indian BPO stories. BPO-Sutra is compiled and edited by Sudhindra Mokhasi and he is already calling for more stories for a volume II.
So do instructional designers have any stories to build the elearning or instructional design meme? Here are two to start with. Would love to hear more from you. Either leave your story as a comment or post a link to your blog post with the story.
ID Meme #1
This was way back sometime in the mid-nineties. We had received a huge contract to develop elearning courses from probably the largest catalog content provider at that time. So we ramped up quickly going from a team of 15 to 200 very quickly. Instructional Design was still new to India and getting good writers was hard. But we had a strong training program and very good reviewers to parse every document. During a team meeting, one of the senior reviewers very seriously suggested that we need to include geography lessons in our refresher course on writing scenarios for the American audience. Curious we asked what prompted her to suggest that. Seriously she took out a script and read out the scenario. I don’t remember the exact words but it went something like this. “You are working as a system administrator in an NGO dedicated to the cause of tiger preservation in Alaska.” We all cried laughing that day.
ID Meme #2
This is a more recent one. One of the courses was returned by an American trainer saying that he can’t teach the course as he feared he might get sued because of the examples used in the course. The course was on using SQL in relational databases. The much feared example was a SQL query to identify employees above the age or 60 years in the employee master table. Both the instructional designer and the subject matter expert were wondering what the fuss was all about. It is only an example to demonstrate conditions in an SQL query, not realizing that while in India we can get away with seeking almost any info about the employees, sensitivities in the USA is a lot different.
So what’s your elearning / instructional design meme? Share your story here.
It’s happened to me a few times now. We are going somewhere and I am asked to follow someone else’s car. I observed three types of leaders:
1. The Highly skilled but somewhat Self-Centred Leader: The driver in the car ahead of me just zooms past leaving me to figure out the way myself. They are usually very skilled at manoeuvring through the traffic themselves. You will usually lose them at a traffic signal that they go past leaving you stranded waiting for the light to turn. They are nowhere to be found after the light turns green for you and you are left to find your own way.
2. The Spoon-feeding, Risk-Averse Leader: The driver in the car ahead of me treats me like a first time driver. They don’t realize the driving skills I already have. They go very slowly and cautiously so as to not lose me but in the process make me lose interest and want me to overtake them. Their slow pace could also be because they themselves don’t know the way or are new drivers themselves.
3. The Leader who you gets you to destination smoothly: The driver in the car ahead of me defines the pace I go at. They always keep an eye on me in the rear view mirror and make sure they don’t lose me. At the same time they don’t let me slow down too much, pushing me to speed up when they do. They are always waiting for me to catch up in case they lose me on a traffic signal.
So what do you do when you have someone following you, in a car or otherwise at work? Do you show off your skills and leave the followers behind to catch up? Do you consider their prior experience and leverage that or challenge them with a faster pace? Do you make sure you don’t leave anyone behind while ensuring that you maintain speed to reach your goals?
Here's a 'Wordle' of titles of blog posts in year 2008.
