More on "On Demand."

I'm still spending some time thinking about "on demand" as it might apply in a large organization and in a job skill training setting.  I've also been thinking about the ideas in my November post below regarding the need to be a heretic if innovation is what you seek. Those who subscribe to the doctrine of whatever it is they are working with are not likely to lead a breakthrough.

What are the training truths about skills-based training that we all know to be true that, in fact, might be holding us back? The ones related to on demand training include some of these...

·         Skill training is best done in groups. You gain economies of scale and interactions within a group are more meaningful and add to the training experience.

·         One-on-one training is too expensive to be feasible.

·         The social experience of the learner is critical to the development of the learner as a new employee.

·         A trained instructor or trainer is critical to the effective transference of skills.

Well, that is a start. How does the heretic respond? Let's look at each one for a moment. 

Is a group necessary? Is the reason we use groups because it is the most effective training venue or is it because it is what we're used to and what we believe we understand?  Do we really gain efficiencies by having a class member who comes to us with some experience "throttle back" to allow the total newbie to catch up?  What are the opportunity costs lost for the one who could be producing but isn't because the group can't keep up? Are the conversations and instructor interactions so important that they can't happen in some other way?  Can pod casts on various topics or recorded interactions or session snippets not accomplish much of the same thing?  Are there really that many unique questions that come up class after class or are they simply variations on a theme that can be captured? Do we like to rely on the instructor as a crutch to cove "the unknowns" regarding the training, only to discover the unknowns are really just the "I'm too busy to plan fors?"  Do we insist on groups because it is most effective or because we have to justify the expensive training facilities we've invested in?

Is training an individual too expensive or is it too expensive when we try to train individuals the same way we train groups? Is the expense inherent in the concept or simply in the way we chose to execute it. Does focus on the content prevent focus on the learning thus blinding us to other alternatives? Does the need to control the experience drive processes or procedures that unnecessarily drive up cost?

What is the real value of the social component of group-based learning. Do we know?  Can we accomplish that goal some other way?  Does the group have to be other students?  Do the social components have to occur within the context of the curriculum?  Can planned interactions with incumbent employee groups meet that need.  Are we fearful of those because we might "lose control."  Do the single learners get bored because they are working alone or because we have boring instruction? Do we know how to design individual learning activities?  Would we have to learn how to do something differently?

Is a trained instructor really critical to the transference of skills?  Is the answer "yes" because we are or manage trained instructors? Was your dad or mom a trained instructor when you learned to ride a bike or drive the family car? Is the best place for the learning professional in the front of the class or involved some other way in the learning process?

Blasphemy!  Blasphemy!  Heretic! Heretic!  Or, maybe just crackpot.  Hmmmm....

Tech and On-Demand

There have been a couple of things that have happened over the last few months that have gotten me thinking more about the structure of learning activities and the how we’ll eventually end up using learning technologies to our best advantage.  The first is a concerted effort on my part to become more familiar with the tools and applications of technology to learning. That really doesn’t mean reading more about it, although I have, but actually embedding some of the tools and techniques into programs I work with to see the results first hand.

One of the items I dealt more with was Podcasts.  I was working on an instructor development program that has sporadic throughput as we tend to hire an instructor here and there, never in groups. There are a number of key messages we wanted every instructor to hear, thus the podcasts. I reviewed the Podcasting for Dummies book and recorded several using available free tools – in this case, Audacity. The result was about a dozen 3 – 5 minute messages about things I think new instructors need to know.  The plan is for the new instructor to listen to the podcast and then discuss the topic with their “big buddy” or mentor instructor. Seems to be working well.

Another item was using SharePoint in multi-week new-hire job skill classes. Early this year we set up a SharePoint Webpart page for each class. It consisted of several webparts including Announcements, Document Libraries, Calendars and Discussion Boards, among others. This allowed instructors to list the daily class agenda, make announcements, link to related company resources and the like.  The discussion board was our early attempt at the social side of learning.  Both instructors and students could make comments or ask questions for others to respond. The instructors developed a wide assortment of class-related questions to solicit responses from the students. This allowed for more meaningful activities for folks who got ahead or perhaps used break time to respond or just read what their classmates were saying. By engaging in a dialog with the discussion board, students could respond using a different medium and at a time of their choosing on both narrow and wide-open questions.

The other item was more personal.  I chose to attend the virtual version of the ASTD Techknowledge conference for 2010.  This was set up as moderated playbacks of the live sessions at specific times in addition to open access.  The chat window was open during the specified replay times with one of the presenters available online, as I recall. I missed many of those, but did catch the recorded sessions that were available anytime during the window specified in the registration. There were dozens of topics available and I found I bailed out of only a couple that weren’t what I was expecting.  Unlike attending live, I could simply exit and click on another presentation and start from the beginning rather than enter another live session after it had started or find myself locked out until the next round of concurrent sessions.

You may have noticed that each of these items has a common thread that I think will become more and more important going forward. That is the POD part of podcasting – programming on demand.

While distance learning on the learners’ schedules has become commonplace in online education, my discussions with peers in corporate skill-based training arenas makes me believe in our area of practice, that is not the case. We tend to hire in groups, keep people in a lockstep program and move through a distinct series of steps. Having been part of some excursions into more individualized solutions, I well understand the drawbacks and costs of individual paths through the training but I wonder whether if the drawbacks are inherent in on-demand training or just fallout from trying to make on-demand learning work with the old group paradigm underpinning the curricula.

Sir Kenneth Robinson has both a TED talk and a YouTube video (different but related topics) on education that have me thinking.  His comments are mostly directed at K-12 education but some of the concepts are transferable to the workforce, I think.  Here are links to the videos I’m referring to. http://bit.ly/bxn4uf  and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U  Start a conversation with yourself or a colleague. Where can we go “on-demand?”  I'm still noodling.