Tag: subject experts

It is not that unusual for the content designer also to be the subject expert. After all, many teachers and trainers started their careers by practising what they now preach. If not, then they certainly will have picked up a lot of expert knowledge over years of teaching. Being your own SME has one major benefit and one big drawback.
The benefit is that you have no-one to create a relationship with (assuming you’re feeling OK about yourself) and no-one to question. You can get straight on with the job of design.
The problem is that even teachers (some might say especially) suffer from the curse of knowledge. This means you have to display more than a little self-awareness and exercise a great deal of self-control.
A few years back, an informal community of instructional designers set about developing a guide for those people who were asked to get involved in design but for whom design was certainly not their principle activity (SMEs for example). The project was called The 30-minute masters, on the basis that 30 minutes was all the time a non-specialist would want to spend learning about design. By the time all the ideas were gathered and the curriculum finalised the project had to be renamed The 60-minute masters. So, even design experts find it hard knowing when to stop.
Perhaps it would be better if we left subject experts out of the equation altogether. As Jane Bozarth commented in her post Nuts and Bolts: Working With Subject Matter Experts: “The better choice isn’t always the most experienced worker, but the most recently competent one: that newer person who remembers what it was like not to know how to do a task, who remembers having to learn and what that entailed.”
There’s a thought.
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
First published in Inside Learning Technologies, November 2011

There are plenty of ways of getting the information you need. The worst way is to get the SME to produce a PowerPoint deck. What you will get is far too much information, expressed almost entirely in bullet points. The SME will be aware that this isn’t the finished article, but expects that somehow you will weave your magic by adding a load of pictures and other decorations, and sticking a quiz on the end. But you’re not going to do that, are you?
Every slide, no every bullet, that you remove from the SME’s slide deck will involve intense negotiations. The SME will be in mourning for ages afterwards, if indeed they ever recover. Better to avoid this process altogether.
One way to research the topic is to sit in on an existing class, perhaps one for which the SME is the instructor. Talk to participants to see what they found useful and what they found confusing. Extract the important learning points, but even more importantly, note down all the instructor’s war stories, examples, anecdotes and jokes. All too often, the reason why learning content is so dull is because it is so matter of fact – it has no personality. The stories are a lot more than entertainment. They provide context and relevance. They allow learners to see patterns and make connections, which is what learning is really all about.
Chances are you’ll also need to interview the SME. Documents and slide decks are OK up to a point but they are a long way from where you want to be. Your focus is on the performance. What do you want the learner to be able to do? What activities can you devise that will allow them to practise doing this? What knowledge does the learner need in order to engage in this activity? Credit is due here to Cathy Moore who spells out the questions to ask as part of the process she calls Action Mapping.
If your SME has only ever experienced knowledge dumps then you may have difficulty communicating what it is that you are aiming to achieve. The best way to overcome this barrier is to show the SME the best example you can find of performance-focused learning content. If you can’t find anything, perhaps you need to create some demo material yourself.
Unless you are really lucky (or skilful), the SME will still want to include more material than you believe is really appropriate. This is the point to make the distinction between courses and resources. The aim of the course is to engage the learner’s interest in the topic and help them to develop sufficient confidence to move forward independently. That is not the end of the story. Learning will continue back on the job and learners will inevitably have many questions of detail, which is where the resources come in, available online, on-demand. Resources are not an optional extra; they are step 2 in the plan. All the information that the SME recommends will be included; it’s just that most of it will be at step 2.
Finally, don’t forget to thank the SME for all their hard work. Even better, credit them on the materials. They will appreciate it.
Part 1 Part 2
Coming in part 4: What when you are the SME?
First published in Inside Learning Technologies, November 2011

As with any important stakeholder, your first job is to establish a good working relationship with your SME. A good way to start is to read up all you can about the subject in question, particularly any materials already created by the SME. You’re unlikely to remember it all, but at least you will have an overall picture of the subject in question, be aware of some of the terminology, and have an idea of the important issues. Don’t expect the SME to have spent as much time beefing up on their knowledge of learning design, although they will certainly have ideas of their own to bring to the table, however ill-informed.
Right from the start it pays to be absolutely clear what you expect from the SME and what they can expect from you. They are the expert on the subject matter. You are the expert on adult learning. Your job is to construct a solution that will meet a performance need in the organisation. You cannot do this without the benefit of their experience and wisdom. Be 100% clear that your task is not to replicate the SME’s wisdom in every member of your target audience, just to make sure these people can do their jobs. It takes years, if not decades, to build true expertise. You may only have 30 minutes.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to you getting the project ready on schedule is the time it takes to get SME approval of your designs and scripts. This work is almost always underestimated, leading to all sorts of delays and disruptions. It’s best to spell out quite clearly when you will require SME time and for how long. Show the SME a typical design document or script so they know what to expect. Explain that approvals, while perhaps not completely binding, will be regarded as permission to proceed with the next stage of the project. Changes can still be made, but only with a corresponding risk to the schedule and budget.
Don’t bore your SME with learning jargon. They will find this every bit as impenetratable and uninteresting as you (and your target population) may well find their subject expertise. But using plain English isn’t the same as acting dumb. You have a duty as a professional to make clear how it is that adults learn best. Surprisingly, this isn’t common sense. If it was, why are so many learning experiences no more than a knowledge dump. Explain how hard it is to engage the learner, to get them to focus enough on an idea to hold it in long-term memory and then be able to retrieve this learning when it really matters – doing the job. Transmitting information is the easy bit – your job of making it stick is really hard.
Back to: Part 1
Coming in part 3: Asking the right questions
First published in Inside Learning Technologies, November 2011

The theory is straightforward enough. You’re the content design expert. You want to create some learning content but, in order to do this, you need to clarify the goals for this content and, as a result, what it needs to cover. You seek out someone who’s an expert who can help you with this. You meet with this expert and they provide you with all the information you need and no more. They leave you to work out how – if at all – you use all this. At key stages in the process of design, the expert casts a helpful eye over your work just to make sure you’ve got it all straight. They even throw in ideas for ways you could get some of the information across for you to use if you see fit. You get the content designed and developed on schedule and it learners find it helpful. Both you and the expert are happy to take a share of the credit.
OK, things may not always go so smoothly. Perhaps they never do. But they certainly can if you take the time to establish the right relationship with your subject matter expert (SME) and then make sure you ask the right questions. It would be no exaggeration to suggest that getting this right could make or break your project.
So, why are SMEs such a problem?
The first problem is that there is no such thing as an SME. At least, no-one has that as their job title. Generally speaking, SMEs are co-opted on to your project because they are the ones who know how things are done. They also have a day job and that will undoubtedly be their first priority.

An even greater problem is that SMEs are experts. Sure they are supposed to be, but this provides you with a major obstacle to overcome. In their 2007 book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath describe the ‘curse of knowledge’, the difficulty that experts have in empathising with novices and with the difficulties that novices face. They find it hard to conceive that people exist with less enthusiasm for their subject than they do, and less appetite to lap up every last morsel of information.
Over time, experts (and this includes you, because just about everybody has become expert at something, even if just playing Angry Birds) build elaborate schema in their brains that connect together the various facts, concepts, rules and principles that underlie their field of interest. They may not be aware of it, but by virtue of millions of synaptic connections, they have a fully functioning, working model to guide them in dealing with all the problems and decisions they have to deal with on a daily basis. They are rarely overloaded by new information. In fact they are always thirsty for more.
Novices, on the other hand, do not have the benefit of all this understanding built up over years of experience. When confronted with a completely new subject, they struggle to relate this to what they already know. They are not sure what’s important, what’s superfluous and what’s plain wrong. They are easily overwhelmed by new information. What they want is the absolutely essential information explained to them as quickly and simply as possible, and then a chance to put this into practice straight away. In this respect, SMEs are not always a lot of help.
Coming in part 2: Building a relationship with your SME
First published in Inside Learning Technologies, November 2011