Clive Shepherd – Page 18 – Onlignment Archive

Interaction in online media

Interaction is key to the online experience. With traditional offline media – print, TV, radio, tapes, CDs – we were never anything but passive consumers. Online we are active participants able to hunt down information, learn new skills, transact as buyers and sellers, form relationships, network with our peers and much more – all activities that we once had to carry out face-to-face or using much more primitive media such as the mail or telephone. To underline the importance of interaction, just imagine if our online tools allowed no interaction – we’d get no further than our browser’s home page or an email application full of nothing but spam.

There are some very good reasons why we need to interact online:

To navigate, e.g. to follow links on the World Wide Web, to select from menus in an online application, to move between pages in an e-learning module.
To configure, to set up the parameters of a particular decision or action, e.g. setting audio volume, determining how often we wish to receive email updates.
To explore, to move around a space such as a map or 3D world, to scroll a document or search within an audio-visual resource.
To converse with other humans, whether synchronously (live) or asynchronously (at our own pace), using text, audio or video.
To provide information, e.g. a survey or form.
To answer questions, in order to demonstrate learning.

There are essentially four mechanisms for interacting online:

selecting – picking from the options provided
supplying – coming up with our own responses
organising – matching and sequencing the options provided
exploring – finding what we want within a space or body of content

To explore the nature of interaction in more detail, with a special emphasis on learning, I’ll be taking each of these in turn in an occasional series of postings over the next month or so.

And here are the posts: selecting, supplying, organising, exploring

We do need some words on our slides

I remember two things from a one-day course that I attended in London on ‘how to create visual aids’, way back in the late 1970s, just weeks after I started as a trainer:

Every word on a slide (and by ‘slide’ then we meant 35mm or overhead projector transparencies) is an admission of defeat.
Don’t more words on a slide than you would on the front of a T shirt.

Wise words when you’re starting from the assumption that slides are primarily visual aids, although in recent years their purpose has been distorted somewhat by their use as presenters’ prompt cards and as as an alternative format for major consultancy reports. But the primary purpose of slides does remain, as visual aids or, to use another term that has disappeared from common parlance, ‘speaker support ‘.
The campaign against endless bullet points has gained ground in recent years and we are beginning at last to see a backlash. I have seen more great slide decks in the past year than in the past 10 put together and they have made a positive difference – more engaging, more informative, more memorable. But there’s always a danger that we go too far and regard words as an enemy, when used in moderation they can indeed be a friend.
Helping us to keep a sense of perspective is Olivia Mitchell, who has prepared her 9 reasons why you should put words on your slides. She’s done a fantastic job so, rather than paraphrase her work, I suggest you click on the link and take a look for yourselves.

Strategies for learning and performance support: a summary

To wrap up this series of posts on strategies for learning and performance support, here’s a summary of the characteristics of each. To see the original posts, click on the images above or the column headers below.

	*Exposition*	*Instruction*	*Guided discovery*	*Exploration*
Examples	Lectures, presentations, policy documents, all types of required reading / viewing / listening	Group instruction, on-job training, self-study materials	Simulations, scenarios, games, discussion, case studies, projects, action learning, coaching	Reading lists, links, online search, unconferences, social networking, social bookmarking, blogs;
Role of the teacher/trainer	Subject expert	Instructor	Facilitator	Curator
Nature of the learning experience	Learning material is delivered to the learner	From the general to the specific / theory to practice; questioning and practical exercises are used to check for learning at each stage	From the specific to the general; practical exercises and real-world experiences provide a basis for reflection and for the formulation of general principles	The learner uses their own initiative to satisfy their particular needs for information and understanding, making use of available resources
Outcomes	Communication of the material according to an established curriculum; no guarantee of the extent to which the material is retained	Knowledge and skills transfer, with relatively predictable results based on specific objectives	Development of insights and deeper levels of understanding; outcomes will vary from learner to learner	Learners access whatever expertise it is they need; outcomes are entirely unpredictable
Nature of the interaction	Minimal – perhaps just Q&A	Structured exercises, Q&A	Structured exercises	Ad-hoc, peer-to-peer
Who’s in control?	The teacher/trainer – this is a push process	The teacher/trainer – this is a push process	The teacher/trainer – this is a push process	The learner – this is a pull process
Suitable for what type of learner	Independent learners and those with more experience of the subject	Anyone, but particularly more dependent learners and relative novices	Anyone, as long as they are well supported and personal risk is minimised	Independent learners and those with more experience of the subject
Suitable for what type of learning	Familiarisation with a body of knowledge	All types of knowledge and skill, particularly those that really do have to be acquired	Understanding of principles and processes; attitude shifting; refinement of skills	Just-in-time information; knowledge updates; exploration beyond the curriculum; creating new knowledge

Conference call woes

David Grady’s highly amusing observations on the problems inherent in conference calls definitely grabbed my attention, not only because I can relate them to my experiences of running regular meetings on the phone, but also because of the similar issues that can be faced in online meetings.
Just as David’s meeting is constantly interrupted by new participants entering the conference, so many web conferences are thrown off by late-comers who (1) haven’t had a chance to introduce themselves, (2) are not sure what’s happened so far and (3) want to test that you can hear them. I’m not sure I’ve got a strategy to overcome this. In a face-to-face meeting, people can just sheepishly take a seat and hope no-one notices they’re late, but this doesn’t seem to happen online. Ideas?
By the way, if you’re looking for ways to overcome the conference call difficulties expressed in David’s video, you’ll find a wealth of tips at Michele Martin’s Bamboo Project Blog.

Strategies for learning and performance support 4: exploration

In this, the fourth in a series of four posts, we manage the seemingly impossible – we both break the mould and then find we have come full circle. The former is true because exploration, the fourth strategy, is by far the most learner-centred and the only strategy that concentrates on ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ (more on this in a minute). It also represents the closing of the circle, because as with exposition, the first strategy we looked at, the learning design is both simple and relatively unstructured, in stark contrast to instruction and guided discovery.
With the exploration strategy, each learner determines their own learning process, taking advantage of resources provided not only by teachers/trainers but also by peers. What they take out of this process is entirely individual and largely unpredictable. As such, exploration may seem a relatively informal strategy, but no less useful for that. In fact it’s probably the way that a great deal of learning takes place.
With exposition, instruction and even guided discovery, learning activities and resources are ‘pushed’ at the learner by the teacher/trainer. With the exploration strategy, activities and resources are ‘pulled’ by the learner according to need. Exploration may play a small part in a formal course, perhaps a list of books or links which learners can choose to dip into if they wish; but it could just as easily constitute the central plank in the provision of, say, just-in-time performance support in the workplace.
There’s no reason why exploration should stop at content. The same principles could be applied to live events such as unconferences, where participants determine what is delivered and by whom. It could also apply in an asynchronous context, in which learners collaborate with peers using social networks, social bookmarking or blogging.
The role of the teacher/trainer is clearly very different to the three previous strategies. With exploration, the emphasis shifts ‘from courses to resources’, so what is needed is no longer a lecturer, instructor or facilitator, more a curator or librarian. What’s important here is to smooth the way for learners to find resources and to locate like-minded peers; that means providing repositories, search engines and all manner of social media tools.
Exploration is not a universal strategy by any means. Novices and dependent learners will struggle with so little structure and direction. Important top-down initiatives can not rely on such woolly and inconsistent outcomes. But there’s no doubt that the trend is towards more learner-centred approaches: more pull less push, more just-in-time than just-in-case, more flexibility and less structure. The key, as ever, is not in following the fashion, but knowing when the time is right to use each of these strategies appropriately.

Strategies for learning and performance support 3: guided discovery

So far in this mini-series of posts we have looked at two very teacher/trainer-centred strategies: firstly exposition, which is the straightforward delivery of information from the teacher/trainer/expert to the learner; and then instruction, a more deliberate process based on very specific learning objectives, which by necessity includes carefully structured interaction and assessment. The third strategy, guided discovery, which we examine today, has many similarities with instruction in that it is very much a structured and facilitated process, but follows a very different sequence of events.

While instruction moves from theory to practice, from the general to the specific, guided discovery starts with the specific and moves to the general. It is an inductive process – it leads the learner towards insights and generalisations, rather than providing them on a plate. Because this process is much less certain and predictable, guided discovery rarely has specific learning objectives – every learner will take out of the process something unique and personal. What they take out will depend not only on the insights they gain from the particular learning experience, but also to a great deal on their prior knowledge and previous life experience.

Guided discovery can take many forms – experiments in a laboratory, simulations, scenarios, case studies or teambuilding activities. In each case, the learner is presented, alone or in a group, with a task to accomplish. Having undertaken the task, the learner is encouraged to reflect on the experience – what went well, what less well; how could the successes be repeated and the failures avoided? The conclusions can be taken forward to further exercises and then hopefully applied to real-world tasks.

In fact, guided discovery could be based on real-world tasks to begin with: coaching, for example, encourages the individual to reflect and learn from real-life task experience, as he or she pursues a clearly-articulated learning goal; action learning involves a group of peers working together to resolve real work problems.

Less confident, dependent learners should be comfortable with guided discovery, as long as the process is carefully structured and facilitated, and does not leave them floundering. What is more important is that the learner should have enough knowledge and experience of the subject matter or situations underlying the learning activity that they can make a reasonable attempt at it – you can’t build on prior knowledge if you don’t have any.

Guided discovery works best when the topic is less black and white, when you require more than a superficial commitment to a set of ideas. When poorly designed and facilitated, discovery learning will seem pointless, perhaps even manipulative. Well managed and the result could be much deeper learning: as Carl Rogers once warned us, “Nothing that can be taught is worth learning.”

Strategies for learning and performance support 2: instruction

In last week’s post I looked at the simple strategy of exposition. You will recall that this involved little more than the delivery of information from teacher or expert to the learner, perhaps with a little Q&A and discussion, but largely one-way. Exposition occurs live through lectures, presentations and webinars, but can also be packaged up in textual, audio, video or multimedia forms. Exposition can work well for independent and experienced learners, who will be happy to ‘get the information straight’, but is likely to be overwhelming for more dependent learners and novices, who are less familiar with what they know and what they need to know.

Instruction, the second strategy we are examining, is still a teacher/trainer-centred approach, but is much more carefully crafted to ensure that the learning outcomes are actually achieved, regardless of the learner’s ability. In this sense it is process rather than content driven. This process depends on the explicit and up-front definition of learning objectives and then the careful selection of appropriate activities and resources that will enable those objectives to be achieved. The process of ‘instructional design’ is teacher/trainer centred because it focuses on learning objectives rather than learmer goals; on the other hand, the fact that instruction is typically an interactive rather than a passive learner experience, means that the process can be adaptive to some degree to the individual differences of particular learners.

Instruction can be a live experience, whether in the workplace (‘on-job training’) or in a physical or virtual classroom; it can also be self-paced, through interactive materials delivered online or using offline media (workbooks, CDs, etc.). While learning at work occurs in many different ways, it would be fair to say that, for most workplace trainers and e-learning designers, formal instruction is what they do. Hopefully they will be doing it well, and that means the following:

being clear about outcomes;
concentrating on meeting a small number of key learning objectives thoroughly, rather than a large number only superficially;
following an instructional process which is appropriate for the objectives in question;
engaging the learner;
helping the learner to make new connections with prior knowledge;
presenting new material clearly and at an appropriate level, making use of demonstrations, stories, examples, visual aids and other tools to aid comprehension;
providing activities that allow new knowledge and understanding to be reinforced and consolidated;
allowing for plentiful opportunities to new skills to be practised, with the aid of timely and constructive feedback;
being responsive to the needs of individual learners;
providing support until all objectives are achieved.

Perhaps strangely, one of the key skills for instructional designers is to recognise when instruction is and is not an appropriate strategy. I’d say you’re likely to be safe going the instructional route when your target population consists of less confident learners, particularly those who are novices in the field in question, who need or want to be led step-by-step through the learning process, knowing they are capably supported. When these conditions are not met, instruction may still work, but you run the risk of ‘over-teaching’ and even patronising your population. Best to reserve your efforts for those who need them most.

Strategies for learning and performance support 1: exposition

Those who design learning interventions and performance support materials have big choices to make, not only in terms of the social context in which the learning or support will occur (self-directed, one-to-one or group) and the medium (face-to-face, online, offline), but also in terms of the underlying learning strategy. In this and three following posts, I’m going to explore four key strategies, to work out when they work best and for whom. The first of these is exposition.

Exposition is the delivery of information from teacher or subject expert to learner. The process is essentially one-way, although it may include some modest Q&A or discussion. The strategy is top-down and teacher-centred because it is person designing and/or delivering who determines what information is to be delivered and how (and sometimes also where and when).

Exposition can take place in the context of an event, such as a lecture, a seminar or a presentation, and both face-to-face and online, using web, video or tele- conferencing software. Exposition can also take the form of content, using text, images, animation, audio and video. Historically this content was delivered using offline media, such as books, tapes, CDs and DVDs, although now it is as likely to be consumed online or downloaded for delivery on portable platforms such as iPods and e-book readers.

For exposition to work as a strategy, the student must be a relatively independent learner, with a good awareness of what they do and do not know about the subject in question. That way they will be able to determine what is most relevant and therefore most important to focus on and process further, whereas the dependent or novice learner could easily be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of undifferentiated information.

Because of the risk of cognitive overload, it is common for teachers, trainers and learning designers to opt for more interactive strategies such as instruction or guided discovery (which are coming up in the next two posts). This is fine where the target audience really needs support and structure to help them learn, but a major irritation to those who can cope by themselves (particularly senior professionals, such as hospital consultants, lawyers, accountants, executives, academics, etc.).

Because of the absence of interaction, exposition requires less design than, say, highly-participative face-to-face workshops and self-paced learning materials. However, careful planning is still going to be a great help to the reader, listener or viewer:

Making clear what is the most important information and what is just nice to know.
Using story-telling and anecdotes to bring abstract concepts to life.
Making the most appropriate use of media elements – text, images, animation, audio and video.
Paring down the volume of content to reduce wasted time and minimise the risk of overload.
Modularising the content so it can be easily random-accessed and reviewed.

Exposition can also play a supporting role in other strategies:

As background material to be accessed before or after an instructional session.
As content for learners wishing to formalise their understanding of a subject that is primarily being tackled through a process of guided discovery.
As material that can be accessed on-demand from a supporting content library.

In summary, I’d choose exposition as a strategy when I need to control what information is delivered and to whom, and when I feel confident that the target audience will happily be able to work with this information without a great deal of support. If I judge the situation right, then I’ll save an awful lot of money not having to run workshops or create interactive online materials.

Blackboard lit up by Elluminate

Last week, Blackboard, the largest commercial provider of learning management systems to the education sector, purchased not one but two web conferencing providers that also have a strong educational heritage – Elluminate and Wimba. Now, although I have used Blackboard for five years or more now to deliver an online certificate for one of my clients, I certainly have no warm feelings for the company; firstly because I actually prefer Moodle, even though it’s essentially free, but even more because of Blackboard’s outrageous behaviour a year or two back in claiming it invented the LMS and going after its main competitors for extravagent royalties. It failed, I’m glad to say, and it will take Blackboard years of being terribly nice to repair its stinking reputation.
I don’t know Wimba, but I have an affinity for Elluminate, which the eLearning Network and ALT uses to run its joint public webinars. It is a capable web conferencing platform, with a number of features which make it especially suited to use as a virtual classroom (Onlignment’s Phil Green is a big fan). It’s possible that both Elluminate and Wimba would find it hard to survive on their own in the long run against the competition faced by the big IT and telecoms operators that are beginning to dominate web conferencing (Cisco, Microsoft, Adobe, AT&T, etc.). Whether Blackboard provides it with much protection is dubious. After all when Saba bought Centra, which was at the time one of the major corporate web conferencing platforms, its profile dropped enormously and now it is a speck in the market compared to WebEx.
In George Siemens’ posting about the takeover, he takes the position that Blackboard is making a sensible move because “synchronous tools represent the fastest growing technology segment in education, and the one with the greatest prospect for future growth.” At Onlignment, we like to think so. But I’m not sure that it really helps to integrate the LMS with web conferencing, particularly in the workplace, where the decisions to purchase these platforms are likely to originate from different places in the organisation: HR look after the LMS, and IT look after business communications, which includes web conferencing. And a good LMS should be able to integrate seamlessly with any web conferencing platform, just like it should do with any authoring tool or HR system.

Rhyming couplets the key to Pecha Kucha success

Onlignment’s Phil Green looks pretty pleased with himself having won the Pecha Kucha competition at the eLearning Network’s annual Members’ Showcase in London on Friday. Phil’s script consisted of 20 rhyming couplets – one for each slide. Phil’s presentation will be available as an online video soon.