Training and Learning
I recently got back into doing some instructional design and teaching that is more closely related to workforce training than to traditional college coursework. Sometimes the line is very clear between the two - credits, degrees, prerequisites on the course side and certificates, promotions, and licensing being on the training side. Many colleges deliberately blur the line. They develop certificate programs with perhaps 15 credits of coursework and then offer students the opportunity to move that into a degree program.
Jane Hart has done three posts recently about training the "smart worker." She talks about these workers needing job aids rather than courses, continuous learning using social media and how these workers need immediate access to solutions.
Is this also useful to more traditional courses?
Are schools moving from their traditional role of creating, delivering and managing formal learning to another model?
Hart proposes "liberating courses from the LMS and making them available on the intranet where they were more likely to be accessed and used." Will we see courses moving out of the LMS to an intranet or the Internet (as in open courseware)?
But I also mentioned that the materials would need to be provided in a format that was easily searchable so that relevant content was immediately accessible without having to work through the whole course.
She references a piece by Marc Rosenberg that is also concerned with situations when training is not the answer.
“Too often, there’s more talk about performance than action. Too often, we offer training solutions (including eLearning) for problems that we know are not training related. We know better, but for reasons that are often, but not always, out of our control, we revert to what’s comfortable and what’s expected.“
How often in your classroom is a student having a performance problem rather than a learning problem?
Hart offers several suggestions for developing content in those situations.
A well-designed and simple cheat sheet/quickstart/job aid/web page of textual instructions or a short visual video is certainly something we sometimes use in courses and should probably be using more frequently, especially with adult learners and for performance support.
Jane Hart has done three posts recently about training the "smart worker." She talks about these workers needing job aids rather than courses, continuous learning using social media and how these workers need immediate access to solutions.
Is this also useful to more traditional courses?
Are schools moving from their traditional role of creating, delivering and managing formal learning to another model?
Hart proposes "liberating courses from the LMS and making them available on the intranet where they were more likely to be accessed and used." Will we see courses moving out of the LMS to an intranet or the Internet (as in open courseware)?
But I also mentioned that the materials would need to be provided in a format that was easily searchable so that relevant content was immediately accessible without having to work through the whole course.
She references a piece by Marc Rosenberg that is also concerned with situations when training is not the answer.
“Too often, there’s more talk about performance than action. Too often, we offer training solutions (including eLearning) for problems that we know are not training related. We know better, but for reasons that are often, but not always, out of our control, we revert to what’s comfortable and what’s expected.“
How often in your classroom is a student having a performance problem rather than a learning problem?
Hart offers several suggestions for developing content in those situations.
- Consider how people are going to use that content - dipping in and out of the materials to get what they need or taking a linear path through them. I like Jane's thought that, "People no longer want just-in-case learning, but just-in-time learning; when they need it. They don’t want or need to have to memorize information just in case they need it; they only need to know where to find it, when they need it.
- Focus on performance outcomes rather than learning outcomes that measure what they “know”
- Keep the materials short and as simple
- Ensure resources are readable in mobile devices
A well-designed and simple cheat sheet/quickstart/job aid/web page of textual instructions or a short visual video is certainly something we sometimes use in courses and should probably be using more frequently, especially with adult learners and for performance support.
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