Nanette Miner 10/4/13 Nanette Miner 10/4/13

Madrid's photographer marathon

The term minimalism is also used to describe a trend in design and architecture where in the subject is reduced to its necessary elements. Minimalist design has been highly influenced by Japanese traditional design and architecture. In addition, the work of De Stijl artists is a major source of reference for this kind of work.

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Nanette Miner 10/4/13 Nanette Miner 10/4/13

Jeffrey Veen - About Design

Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary regelialia. It is a paradisematic country, in which roasted parts of sentences fly into your mouth. Even the all-powerful Pointing has no control about the blind texts it is an almost unorthographic life

One day however a small line of blind text by the name of Lorem Ipsum decided to leave for the far World of Grammar The Big Oxmox advised her not to do so, because there were thousands of bad Commas, wild Question Marks and devious Semikoli, but the Little Blind Text didn’t listen.

Nanette Miner 10/4/13 Nanette Miner 10/4/13

Josh Woodward – Already There Remix

Nanette Miner 10/4/13 Nanette Miner 10/4/13

A Look Inside the Protein Bar

Nanette Miner 10/4/13 Nanette Miner 10/4/13

Unlocking Hidden Brain Secrets

Nanette Miner 10/3/13 Nanette Miner 10/3/13

Iceland's volcano timelapse

Nanette Miner 6/28/13 Nanette Miner 6/28/13

Quotable: Ara Ohanian

2013 will see the emergence of L&D professionals who are truly focused on the effect they produce on business. I see the L&D professional progressing through three states of evolution. Yesterday’s professionals were concerned with pushing out information through courses. Today’s hybrid uses a blend of push techniques and technological pull techniques to share information and stimulate conversations.

Tomorrow’s L&D professionals will step back from full focus on content creation and delivery, seeing it as a single strand of responsibility. They will see their role expand to include building systems where employees learn from each other, and, crafting filtering systems for the best information for a particular need to be located as quickly as possible.

This new role will involve a combination of creative thinking, collaboration with the business, and focus on speed and delivery against business objectives.

Quotable: Ara Ohanian, Chief Happiness Officer and CEO, CERTPOINT Systems

Nanette Miner 6/14/13 Nanette Miner 6/14/13

June Training Doctor News Is Released!

Have you seen our June newsletter yet? Check it out - www.trainingdr.com/newsletter

Nanette Miner 6/13/13 Nanette Miner 6/13/13

You know that training program isn't going to work, right?

The greatest service L+D can provide to leaders is to let them know that a "learning program" by itself will likely not help them achieve the outcomes they seek.

Mike Hamilton; retiring CLO of Ernst & Young

Nanette Miner 6/12/13 Nanette Miner 6/12/13

Training Magazine's Top 125 Training Organizations (Many TD Clients on this list!)

Training Magazine recently announced its Top 125 workplace training organizations. If you'd like to see the list, visit: http://pubs.royle.com/publication/?i=146825

Nanette Miner 6/11/13 Nanette Miner 6/11/13

Do you think in a particular "style?"

Training Magazine and Pearson TalentLens recently conducted a "thinking styles" survey of 1200+ trainers and discovered that we have three quite dominant thinking styles (out of 7 possible styles):

Inquisitive
Open Minded
Systematic

You, too, can find out how you think - and how that thinking style applies to our field - by visiting www.ThinkWatson.com

Nanette Miner 6/10/13 Nanette Miner 6/10/13

Beware the "Great Crew Change"

Heard 'round the water cooler: The great crew change': Baby Boomers retiring and a lack of people coming into the industry

Nanette Miner 6/7/13 Nanette Miner 6/7/13

Interview with Learning Expert: Will Thalheimer

Measuring Learning Results

T/D: You've written a research in practice report called Measuring Learning Results which is an understanding of learning and focusing on measurement. Can you tell us more about that?

Thalheimer: Over the years I've been immersed in learning and looking at the research on learning. One of the things I noticed in our field is that there are some leverage points - things that affect the whole field, things that drive us to do what we do. One of those is measurement. How we measure affects how we practice instructional design. So I'll share with you a couple of things that I found. One thing is that smile sheets aren't good enough.

T/D: Right, don't we know that at a gut level?

Thalheimer: We may know it at a gut level, but we keep doing it. I did some research with the e-learning Guild and we looked at how it's the most popular method, after completion rate, for an e-learning program. So they've done like a research meta-analysis on this, and they found that smile sheet ratings don't even correlate with learning results.

T/D: Interesting.

Thalheimer: They correlated like 0.09 - which is…

T/D: Negligible.

Thalheimer: Negligible. Smile sheets don't correlate with on the job performance either.

T/D: What does your opinion have to do with your performance? Nothing.

Thalheimer: Right, so that's intriguing. So one of the things we're trying to do when we measure stuff is to get better. There are really three reasons that you might want to measure learning - one is to support learning, to give the learners feedback. The other thing is to improve the learning interventions we create. So improve our learning designs. The third thing is to prove our results to our organization; our certification, grading, that kind of thing. So three main reasons there. If we're going to improve our learning designs one of the things that we need to do is make sure that our learning metrics are predictive of people's actual performance. If our smile sheets aren’t predictive, then they're no good at doing that, they're no good at giving us good information.

I've been playing with trying to improve my own smile sheet so I'm going to recommend a couple of things. One - let's not ask people just overall questions. Let's put in some real learning points that we wanted to get across, because people aren't very good at remembering everything after a session, right? So if you ask them in general did you like it you're going to get general responses. Instead; this is one of the learning points that we talked about, how valuable was that to you?

Then I ask them - what's the likelihood that you're going to use this within the next two weeks? I have from a zero to 100% in 10% increments.

T/D: That's brilliant.

Thalheimer: I also ask them - what's the probability in the next two weeks that you'll share this with one of your co-workers? I also really focus on the open ended comments. I find that those are really some of the most valuable feedback that you can get to improve your course. I've gotten a lot of bad feedback too, but I've gotten some really good feedback on smile sheets that has told me - you really need to improve that exercise. Or, have more stuff going on in the afternoon that's fun because people were tired - stuff like that. Okay, you hear that over and over - you better change it.

Thalheimer: Another thing I do with smile sheets is I also like to follow up two weeks later. I follow up and I do a couple of interesting things. One is I ask the same question on the same six point scale about how valuable you thought the training was. Now they've gone back to the work place. They now really know how valuable it is. So it gives a better anchoring.

I’ve learned a couple of other things from looking at measurement from a learning fundamental standpoint. One thing is, if we measure learning right at the end of learning, what is it we are measuring? We're measuring the learning intervention’s ability to create understanding. Which is fine, that's good, but we're not measuring the learning intervention’s ability to minimize forgetting. You have a full day session or you have an e-learning program and you measure people right away - everything is top of mind.

T/D: You should be able to recall it.

Thalheimer: You can easily recall it and not only that, but you feel confident that you can recall it. So that's a really biased way to get information. That's one of the reasons that make it a bad proxy for your ability to remember it on the job.The final mistake we make is to measure something in the same context that people learned it. That context is going to remind them of what they learned and because of that they're going to get better results than if we measured them in a different context. So we need to do one of two things - we either need to know that our results are biased because we're in the same context that they learned in. Or we need to change the context and make it more like the real world context so that it's more realistic. It's more predictive of that real world environment.

T/D: Great points! Thank you Will.

Will Thalheimer founded Work-Learning Research which is a consulting practice that helps clients build more effective learning interventions. He’s been in the learning and performance field since 1985. His professional focus is on bridging the gap between the research side and the practice side

Nanette Miner 6/5/13 Nanette Miner 6/5/13

Online Collaboration MUST be Designed

One of the most wonderful things about the online classroom is the ability to bring learners together who may otherwise be geographically separated. If one individual in New York and one individual in Arizona need the same training, the virtual classroom not only allows them to partake in that training without travel, but also to take that training with fellow learners.

Too often, however, the virtual classroom is used in presentation-mode rather than in collaborative-mode.

All virtual classroom platforms pledge that their product enables your organization and your learners to work collaboratively. And it is true. All virtual classroom platforms allow for learners to interact verbally, via chat or instant messenger, through the use of feedback symbols or emoticons, and often through breakout rooms which enable smaller discussions and group activities to occur.

This doesn't just happen spontaneously, however. It is imperative that the training be designed to be collaborative.

One of the basic tenets of adult learning is that adults prefer to learn collaboratively; in other words adults prefer to learn with others. Therefore, it is imperative that the focus of the learning process is on the learners working together, discussing, questioning, problem solving, and in general, contributing to the learning process and the learning content.

As Instructional Designers, we must put quite a bit of thought into how we can ensure the learners work together to achieve the learning outcome, rather than sitting at their individual sites being passive recipients of a presentation.

Nanette Miner 6/3/13 Nanette Miner 6/3/13

The "Problem" With Virtual Learning

We recently read this blog post which really made our blood to boil!

In a nutshell, the writer, a college professor, finds himself stranded at the airport and decides his situation should not impede his regularly scheduled class. He can simply use the virtual technology his college supplies, to fulfill his teaching obligations.

After experiencing an unsuccessful "class," he wrote a lengthy diatribe about how virtual technology will never replace face-to-face teaching. Here are some things he failed to consider (and, quite frankly, most people who are new to virtual technology or use it occasionally, also fail to consider):

1. Choose the right technology for the job and be sure you know how to use it. We recently received a directive from a client telling us to not use the highlighter tool to highlight text on the slide because "it doesn't work, it scribbles all over the slide." In fact, the "breakdown" was with the Bamboo tablet in our office.

2. You cannot decide, on the spur of the moment, that you will teach using virtual technology. A delivery of this type must be planned for (see next article). The writer bemoans: Tonight was going to involve role playing, discussions, presentations, and even interactive trivia.

3. If you have a limiting belief that you can only "lecture" while using virtual teaching platforms, and that cannot be as successful as you would have been in the classroom - you will be correct. His sentiments exactly: Tonight I am subjecting my students to this hollowed-out lesson. I do so out of necessity. I know it is not the best experience for my students, or for myself..

The server and the virtual platform have little to do with one another other than being the "power cord;" would you say that your electric company was horrible if your lamp shorted out? We'd be frustrated too: I am now on my third attempt at uploading the lecture. During the two previous attempts a prompt came up, saying "server failure." The program crashed and nothing was recorded or could be recovered. An hour lecture up in smoke - three times over, but it has nothing to do with the virtual classroom.

Virtual classrooms ARE the training room of the future. We recognize that not everyone will be comfortable there, and that's ok (not everyone is comfortable standing in front of a room speaking, either); but don't blame the technology for a lack of forethought, planning, or skill on the part of the human.