Byte-sized Learning

Shark Attacks and Salary Reports

2010-05-23T13:31:00.002-04:00

In general, I do not trust statistics so when I read Cammy Bean's blog titled eLearning Guild's 2010 Salary Report it became my mission to find the flaw in the stats because this can't be real…

There continues to be a consistent gender gap in pay between men and women. On average, men are paid 14.5% more than women. This gap is most notable in part-time employee pay, where women receive an average hourly rate that is 49.4% lower than the rate men receive, while working a comparable number of hours. (p. 25)

To back my distrust of statistics …some statistics:

The NHTSA reports that 69 percent of all car accidents occur within a ten-mile radius from home.
…since most journeys begin and end at home, this stat isn't worth the time it took someone to calculate.

The Discovery Channel tells us every year, during Shark Week, that 90% of shark attacks, on people, occur at the water's surface.
…not to disillusion scuba divers but one should point out that the majority of the time people are in the water, they are on the surface.

Given my belief that statistics are often skewed, my first step was to download the 2010 Salary and Compensation Report
(United States) by Temple Smolen, culled from data provided by eLearning Guild members.

My next step was to pick through the stats and find what I believed had to be an error.

With inappropriate gestures and language omitted, here is an abbreviated log of my review:

Must be that there aren't a large number of respondents? …nope …thousands of e-learning professionals provided the data.
Must be a lot of old information with profiles not updated since the 80's!! …nope, profiles not updated in a year are excluded.
I know! -it must be that by chance, the men all work in the regions with higher cost of living/higher pay! …nope, the number of respondents by region scales equal to population and there were more women respondents than men.

Wait, I found the bias …

The bias is in our culture; a culture that continues to reward salary on metrics that have nothing to do with knowledge, skills, ability, and job performance.

This is a call to action to all in our community of Learning and HR Professionals; this is our community, this is our profession, and it is within our power to remove inequalities in employee and contractor compensation.

This post is part of a blog carnival on the subject of the gender salary gap. Read more from Julie Dirksen: Ranting on the Gender Pay Gap in E-Learning, Janet Clarey: The Salary Gap In US E-Learning Industry, and Cammy Bean: eLearning Guild’s 2010 Salary Report.

Photo credit: White Shark, Wikimedia Commons, Terri Gross

Inclusion of smartphones in meetings, workshops, and presentations

2009-07-14T08:49:00.001-04:00

Ban the smartphone from your meetings or incorporate an added layer of communication?

Most of us have been on both sides of this debate – the one chastised for the telltale bowed head and the one presenting to a group of multitasking communicators.

As the presenter, standing alone in a room of colleagues focused on their blackberry or smartphone can be irritating and if taken personally, could have you spewing your "I'm the facilitator and I rule" rhetoric. What you hope to gain, with your ban, vs. what you get are very different. Instead of a room of bowed heads, you have a room of resentful eyes. Not only do they resent your ban, but also there is a bit of panic as they worry about what they are missing – their attention to you is an illusion.

As the attendee, using your smartphone gives you options your mind never had. You text message with comments you won't say out loud, you rally others to ensure when you do speak you will have support, you take notes about the points of interest (really…some do!), you send a question to your Tweople thereby using your social network to bolster your perceived intelligence, you are quick to Google for an answer. Oh sure – at times, you check your email and try one more round of Frogger but mostly, you are engaged in the meeting agenda at some level. Some would argue that with the added dimension of the smartphone, you are more engaged in the meeting topic.

The smartphone is here to stay – it is time to find ways to embrace the inclusion of this in presentations and meetings. Instead of banning them from the room, include them as an active part of the discussion and agenda. A couple of weeks ago, I posted a question on LinkedIn asking for ideas on how to include the smartphone – below is the question and some of the responses. Please use the comment section to add your ideas.

I am looking for ideas on how to include the use of a smartphone in meetings. What ideas do you have?

The blackberry and smartphone are here to stay – is it time to find ways to embrace the inclusion of this in presentations and meetings? Instead of banning them from the room, I want to find ways to include their use as an active part of the discussion and agenda. Please share ideas you have tried (include results) or ideas you have but haven't tried yet ...we can imagine together. Thanks!

Daniel Jatovsky responded:

Instant polling might be one idea, either for pop quizzes to enhance a presentation or for audience feedback.

Texting questions might also be more efficient than the usual Q&A where microphones are awkwardly passed around the room, or people queue up before stationary mikes. It might also encourage questions from people who are too shy to speak in front of an audience.

Clare Hutchinson responded:

Hi Kelly,

I really like Daniel's ideas! Texting in questions would be a great solution to those awkward Q&A sessions.

I was thinking you could also use the video/camera features for a prolonged conference. You could have attendees send in candids of the conference throughout and have a little slideshow at the end, or a competition for best picture from a smartphone during the meeting.

For a shorter meeting, agendas could be made available via email, as could PowerPoint presentations. If you have a delayed send feature on your email, instead of having to stand up in front of a projection screen, you could email each person at the meeting with your visuals. It seems like a more personal way to interact with the data (and a great way around inevitable projector problems).

Denise Link responded:

Twitter comes to mind first: designate a hashtag that everyone will use to identify the conversation in their tweets, project the twitter feed for that hashtag, and treat the tweets like comments/discussion. I haven't used this as a presenter, but I plan to do so next month at a conference. (Wish me luck!) I have followed tweets by people who were tweeting at a conference I couldn't attend, which was both interesting and frustrating.

If the topic is sensitive or confidential, there are alternatives like Yammer, which I understand does something similar but is not public.

I also saw recently a post about a polling tool that uses text messages to create dynamic graphs of audience answers. (Note that I have not used this tool)

Steven Ourada responded:

If you have meetings where knowing who attended is important or where you'd like to allow people to subscribe for more information, people can text in their name/ID/email/whatever. This idea came up for a company I worked with, but it was never implemented, so I don't know how well it works in practice.

Vimal Menon responded:

Hi Kelly,

Couple of ways in looking at Smart Phones. Senior Management could use smart phones to share presentations via a wireless networks when they can't be part of a meeting owing to other more imp engagements. Instant polling for quick decisions where either a Yes or No is required. But you will also be in danger of getting people using their emails on a smart phone and this could cause a major deviation in the purpose of a meeting. Ideally good if used among a controlled audience I would say. Or for M-Learning purposes.

Private Answer:

Hi Kelly:

I envision the smartphones being used for group polling, timekeeping, and/or submitting questions to the meeting facilitator.

Perhaps incorporating a "scavenger hunt" for information on the web to compliment the presentation or activity would be a fun use of the smartphone as well. Or they could be used in a networking exercise by having the meeting participants introduce themselves and gather contact information on one another.

One challenge would be ensuring that the phones are used at the appropriate times only, and not distracting the user from the rest of the meeting.

Hope this helps - if I can think of anything more creative, I'll let you know!

Click Next

2009-07-08T12:37:00.001-04:00

Is this eLearning at your company? We remember what we do and we become masters of what we repeat.

The need for accurate information and legally compliant details makes the subject matter experts (SMEs) a critical resource for any learning project. Alternately, when SMEs design eLearning the result is likely to be content-centric. If your company has purchased and loaded "rapid-development" software onto the SMEs computers and applauded the savings as ROI then they have not looked for the deficit. The deficit is in performance.

Instructional Designers gather raw material from SMEs and create a learner-centric event. There are many ingredients needed to build an effective learning program but you can assess your current courses and guide the build of future courses by starting with this short list of questions. Ultimately, you want no variance in the answer from learning event to work environment.

What does the learner do during the course and is that the same as what you need them to do on the job?
What challenges exist in the work environment and are those challenges replicated in the course?
On the job, how does the learner receive feedback for a job well done? How do they receive feedback for a task that needs improvement? How is feedback delivered in the course?
What is the motivation to learn?

What Facilitators Need From Instructional Designers

2009-06-08T11:00:00.000-04:00

Instructional Designers spend a great deal of time focused on the learner, and that can result in making too many assumptions about how that design will be delivered. Facilitators want ISDs to empower them with the information and insight needed to deliver the program as designed.

The following is a list of 10 items to include in a Leader Guide. This list comes from my experience as a Facilitator and an Instructional Designer. I look forward to hearing from others and expanding this list.

Leader Guide delivered in an editable format - I ranked this as #1 because even with the best of efforts, everyone has something a little different that they like and by providing the Guide in an editable format, they can easily tailor the information to their needs. If formatting is a concern, use Tables in Microsoft Word and you will virtually eliminate formatting variances.
Resources Page - provide a list of all the resources used during the design and development of the program. Similar to the Designer, a Facilitator must become an expert on the topic but often afforded far less time than the Designer. This list of resources should include, at a minimum, a comprehensive list of SMEs, and any online resources.
Checklist of Materials needed for delivery of the program – the interactive exercise using origami puzzles will likely flop if the Facilitator forgets the origami paper.
Provide transition tips for each section – No one wants to transition the class to the next topic by saying, “okay, let’s turn to page 32” but if the sequence of topics is not clear then we are unable to make that transition for the learners. Provide a prompting question or declarative statement to provide that critical transition insight.
Answer Key for any quizzes or exercises – no further explanation needed.
Pre and Post Workshop Activities - very few workshops are designed to stand alone – Blended Learning is here to stay and the Facilitator is often the glue that tracks the prerequisites and becomes responsible for the post workshop activities. Provide these details in the Leader Guide and since this is in an editable format (Item #1), the Facilitator can take this information and copy/paste to their Task or Calendar software.
Provide delivery detail as summary bullets …DON’T SCRIPT THE DELIVERY. The details of how to deliver any topic should be prompts, not word-for-word scripts designed to suck the personality and style from the Facilitator. Experienced Facilitators will find a 230 page Leader Guide far too overwhelming to be of any help and will disregard the entire file. Inexperienced Facilitators will pace in front of the class reading your script.
Start Time & Duration Estimates – provide these quick reference timing notes so the Facilitator can, with a quick glance, check in with their timing for the day.
Templates – if the Facilitator will need to communicate with the students via email, provide a template they can use.
Trainer Tips – provide a list of recommended Icebreakers, Introduction Exercises, and Review Techniques that match the content of the workshop to choose from. There is always more than one way to achieve the objective and the Facilitator needs to select the option that best fits their presentation style and their learners.

ADDIE - a worthy model past prime

2009-06-02T14:53:00.000-04:00

I'll start by saying that the ADDIE Model has served us well but (you knew that word was coming) over the past five years, so many of the tools we use have changed while the core of our process remains the same. In a "google world", where getting information is a mouse-click away, it has become increasingly difficult to convince clients that we need six to twelve weeks to assemble information for their learners. Oh, I know ...of course we do more than assemble - our passion for learning is wrapped around ideals, models and theories we believe in and we follow. Have you noticed lately that half way through the explanation of the process you intend to use, your client (or employer) is glancing away and no longer engaged?

...they have probably just sent a tweet asking if someone can submit a learning proposal in 140 characters or less.