Donald H Taylor’s blog has moved to www.donaldhtaylor.co.uk

Yesterday at 23:30 UK time I closed my annual ‘What will be hot in L&D this year?’ survey. For full results, join me for Three corporate learning trends to watch in 2016 on 20 January at 16:00 UK time, 11am ET.

This is the third year I’ve run this one-question survey. 728 people voted from 52 countries, casting a total of 1922 votes (each person can vote for up to 3 items). The global results are:

The question asked was “What will be hot in L&D in 2016?” and respondents were asked to vote for what they thought would be hot, rather than should be hot. No definitions were provided for the choices given, nor for what ‘being hot’ meant.

I’ll do a full analysis of this in my webinar with Axonify on 20 January 2016 at 16:00 UK time, 11am ET: Three corporate learning trends to watch in 2016. For now, though, here are some quick observations:

1. Caveats – this population was not pre-qualified (so we don’t know it was L&D only) and was voluntary and so self-selecting. It is, therefore, likely a skewed population: more tech-focused, more social than others in the profession. For all that, over 3 years I have noticed that this population does tend to predict what will become strong in corporate L&D eventually (if not in the current year) and also, what will fall from being ‘hot’ to either being part of business as usual (eg video) or irrelevant.
2. Collaborative learning remains strong – it was #3 in 2014, #1 in 2015 and remains at the top of the leader board. It also features in the top 3 of just about every geography.
3. Micro learning is strong, but US-focused – a new entry at #5, Micro learning’s popularity is largely founded in North America. Elsewhere it’s still a new term.
4. Mobile maintains, video drops – mobile remains on people’s minds (although dropping from #1 to #3 to #4 this year), but video’s drop has been precipitous – from #5 in 2013 to #13 this year. This seems to signal that mobile remains a challenge while video is now seen as ‘business as usual’
5. Global variations are strong – there are clear differences across different territories. The UK and North America differ from each other, as they do from Europe and Australia/NZ. More about this on the 20th.
6. MOOCs are …. what, exactly? With a slight variation in wording, MOOCs have been in the survey since 2014, but have fallen from #4 to #14. Why? Three possible reasons:
   1. They are now seen as ‘business as usual’ (not my observation)
   2. L&D knows about them, but refuses to use them
   3. L&D knows about them, but can’t find a use for them – yet

What do you think? Do these results match your observations of L&D? Is there anything missing? Feel free to comment ….

Two week ago, I had the pleasure of opening the E-learning Awards, 2015, at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge Hotel in London.

The walk across town to the venue was beautiful, with a full moon shining down the Thames and every landmark picked out in glorious detail. At the awards themselves we had a great evening , with expert hosting from Phil Jupitus and Deborah Frances-White, 700 guests intent on having a good time, and a superb live band until sometime after 1am.

The full list of winners can be found here, but I really want to stress what I said kicking the whole event off: that with 400 entrants, making it to the short list for any award was a real achievement.

If you’re engaged in learning technologies in any way, I look forward to seeing you again next year!

The survey has now closed. Please click to see an initial summary of the results.

*****

Zoltar the Magnificent, fortune teller extraordinary, will – for the sum of one pound – reveal your fortune from inside his mechanical box on Brighton pier.

Each year I try to do something similar.

I am slightly less extravagant in my dress, and I’m not on a pier, but the results are at least free.

Each year I run a one-minute, one-question online poll asking L&D professionals what they think will be hot in the following year. In 2014 mobile learning topped the poll. In 2015, collaborative learning came in first.

The individual results, though, matter less than the overall trends they illustrate. For example, video dropped from 5th position in 2014 to 8th in 2015. Was that because video was suddenly less important? I doubt it. It’s much more likely that video was no longer seen as ‘hot’. It has entered the main stream of L&D practice.

What will be hot in 2016?
This year, once again, I will be asking the same question: What will be hot in workplace L&D in 2016? You can choose three items from the list.

The poll is below, mostly with the same options as in previous years. If you don’t like the options, please do choose ‘Other’ and say what you think is missing. I will add these, unedited, to the blog over the course of the survey.

To clarify – please what you think will be hot in L&D in 2016. In January, after the poll has closed, I’ll run a second poll asking whether you agree with the results, and why.

Choose up to 3 items:

The poll will finish at the end of the first week of January. Headline results will be announced here on Monday, January 11th, and the first analysis will be broadcast in a webinar in conjunction with Axonify on Wednesday January 20th at 16:00 UK, 11am ET.

I look forward to hearing what you think will be hot in workplace L&D in 2016!

[Updated 11 December]

What did I miss?
The ‘Other’ option has proved less popular than in previous years, with only 27 entries so far. They are listed below – with virtual/augmented reality standing out as the option most people seem to think should have been included:

Deep Learning
Big data
Virtual reality
xAPI
Extension of learning to broader workforce, customers, partners
“Lean” career development
Virtual/augmented reality
“Workplace learning”
Professional Membership of the British Institute for Learning and Development
Data and Learner Analytics
Augmented & Virtual reality
Non synchronous online delivery
eAssessment
Ask the learner
Capturing non formal learning
70:20:10
ePSS
Innovation in regulatory environments
Network analysis and/or visualisation
Knowledge Retention
Performance support
Debunking learning myths
on the job learning (702010sytle)
Test
Virtual Reality
virtual reality
Connecting self directed learner

Actually, I did include virtual/augmented reality, but took it out again, as I felt that 2016 was probably too early. 2017 may be a different story.

What do you think – is there anything missing from this year’s choices?

Photo: Prescott Pym https://www.flickr.com/photos/ppym1/

Are you based in Sydney or Melbourne? Working in L&D? Then let’s meet up!

I’ll be in Australia from Friday 6th to Wednesday 11th November, meeting colleagues in the world of learning and running two workshops on “The Transforming Future of Learning and Development”.

The two morning workshops take place in Sydney (6th November) and Melbourne (9th November) and are organized by PSK Performance.

In small groups, we’ll be looking at why the world of L&D is changing so fast right now, why current operating models of L&D are inadequate to deal with the changes, and what can be done to survive and thrive in the future.

I aim to provide input, provoke discussion and confront some of the issues facing L&D today so that participants will leave with a broad picture of what’s changing in L&D as well as practical actions to take.

In the workshops, we’ll draw on everyone’ s experience, including my own 25 years in the industry, including 15 years as chairman of Learning Technologies, Europe’s largest conference dedicated to technology-supported workplace learning, and 5 years as chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute.

To know more, and to register, please contact me, or click on the links below:

The Transforming Future of Learning and Development
Sydney, Friday 6th November (am)
Melbourne, Monday 9th November (am)

I hope to see you there!

My e-book “Webinar Master” is due to be published on November 16th by British e-book specialist Canelo.

The book is based on my experience coaching speakers for, hosting, and delivering hundreds of webinars since 2007, largely for the Learning and Skills Group (LSG), an international community of about 8,000 learning and development professionals.

It will make you a webinar master – if you put it into practice.

I’ve had the good fortune to work with some wonderful, experienced speakers, and had the delight of coaching some first time speakers to deliver tremendously powerful sessions. I’ve seen what works and have built up a methodology for delivering great webinars, consistently. The fruits of that experience are distilled here for you.

As well as the triumphs, I’ve also had my share of disasters – from the time the webinar service failed 2 minutes before we were due to start (and me in a New York hotel room in my pyjamas at 5 am) to the time both my broadband internet feeds at my home office failed and we ran the session through my mobile phone’s Wi-Fi tethering. In all the hundreds of sessions I’ve been responsible for in that period, we’ve only once been unable to get on air.

It’s been an exciting journey, and the thrill hasn’t gone yet. I still get excited before we kick off one of our Thursday LSG sessions, and still feel that buzz when a presentation and the ensuing Q&A have gone particularly well. And after every webinar, I want to do it all over again.

I hope that after reading this book you, too, will enjoy presenting through webinars, and that you will find the same energy and excitement in using this vital modern medium of communication.

Click for more information, and to register for a message from me when the book is out, visit my books page.

Cricket, a long drawn-out slogging match. Unless you’re Australia in the first innings at Trent Bridge in the 2015 Ashes.

For Australia, yesterday’s crushing first innings defeat in the Ashes at Trent Bridge was a subject for national soul searching, typified by the response of The Sydney Morning Herald: England humiliate Australia on a first day that will live in infamy. (North American readers can just jump from here to the bullet list below.) All out for 60 before lunch? It’s unheard of – almost. You have to go back to the 1950s and ’40s for equivalent batting collapses.

So what lessons can L&D learn from this? Here are three I would suggest, two here and one at the bottom of this post:

• Training is not always the answer. The Australians have spent their lives since boyhood training at cricket and dreaming of beating England, in England. A few more hours in the nets would be pointless. They have the skill. For various reasons they did not apply it yesterday morning.

• Knowledge without application is useless. Do the Australians know the fielding positions on a cricket field? Of course they do. In fact, they found the slips quite easily yesterday morning. More knowledge is not the answer.

I have talked widely about the training ghetto. In the training ghetto, the L&D team is usually responsible for just three types of training: compliance training, on boarding training, and fix-my-team training.

The last of these is when the manager appears in the training department doorway and says, effectively, “my team is broken, please fix it.” Usually they ask for something like time management training across the team. Of course the manager is abdicating responsibility for his or her role as manager. Training is never the answer here. The answer is to be a better manager.

John Purcell of Bath University was fond of this equation defining performance:

P = f (A, M, O)

Where:
P = Performance
A = Ability, can they do it?
M = Motivation, do they want to do it?
O = Opportunity, are they able to do it?

Of all of these, the part that L&D is traditionally responsible – Ability – is arguably the least important. After all, only 11% of contracts are terminated because of a lack of employee ability. We know Australia have the ability.

So where did they fall down yesterday? It was not Opportunity, because after lunch England came into bat and did very nicely, ending the day on 274 for 4.

It must, therefore, have been Motivation.

I am not saying that the individual players did not want to win. But there was among them something fans of any sport will recognise – a sort of dazed shellshock. When your team is like that it cannot rely on individual motivation. Only leadership on the field and in the dressing room can rescue matters, which brings me to the final L&D lesson:

• Exceptional performance demands leadership. We are fond of saying – rightly – that L&D is all about performance. But while L&D is necessary for performance, it is not sufficient. Exceptional performance demands leadership, leadership that inspires external motivation to push you to greatness, especially when times are tough.

We cannot in L&D expect to solve all performance problems and – crucially – we should set the expectation with others that we cannot. Sometimes, we must say that a performance problem can only be solved by better management and better leadership.

PS – I fully expect Australia to have rediscovered their internal leadership and to come out fighting today.

PPS – If you’re from North America and have been left a little puzzled by this post, please read Not everyone reads American on the use of sporting metaphor in writing.

“Dante Alighieri01”. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

In February my wife and I visited Florence in Italy. It’s an extraordinary place – go for the art, go for the leather shops, go for the food, but if you ever have the opportunity, just go.

Walking past the Uffizi we paused in front of a statue. Recognising it was Dante Alighieri, we fell into a collective fit of the giggles. Then we recited together:

Dante Alighieri
Seldom troubled a dairy.
He wrote the Inferno
On a bottle of Pernod.

It’s a Clerihew, named for its inventor Edward Clerihew Bentley. All Clerihews follow the same four-line format and contain some ridiculous biographical nonsense.

My father – who is fond of all forms of poetry – recited this Clerihew to me when I was a young teenager:

Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

I heard this Clerihew once, and remembered it. In contrast I had to ask my dad several times who the author was before I could remember his name – Clerihew. The picture of Davy suffering at the hands of the mob for his science was at once ridiculous and vivid and formed a dramatic picture in my mind.

Years later, living in Turkey, I purchased The Complete Clerihews at a British Council library sale of excess stock. A quarter century later, it remains a treasured book, always guaranteed to produce a laugh with its combination of Clerihew’s text and illustrations.

It is from this book that I read Dante’s Clerihew. Again, it stuck at one reading – it was so deliciously absurd, how could it not? At some point in our near two decades of married life, I recited it to my wife who laughed, appreciating in particular the sly innuendo of ‘Never troubled a dairy’ and it stuck with her, too.

And so, a few years later, we found ourselves in Florence, laughing at poor Dante’s statue.

All this says something about memory. Two different people hear 15 words in a particular order and remember them perfectly at one sitting.

Why?

Unlike my memory of Sir Humphrey Davy’s, I have no strong mental image of the Dante Clerihew, so this isn’t about pictures. Its appeal is purely in the sheer delight in the words, the absurdity of the situation, the portrayal of Italy’s leading man of letters as a lush, the anachronism of the drink Pernod. Together those 15 words form a coherent whole that stuck a vibrant chord with my mind – and my wife’s – and stuck, seemingly forever.

Now contrast this with what is often repeated about what we know about the human memory from the experiments of Herman Ebbinghaus. The ‘Forgetting Curve’ has been a standard inclusion in L&D presentations for many years now (including my own):

The Forgetting Curve

The common interpretation of this curve is that memory automatically decays after we are exposed to something new, and it needs several repetitions to remember the new thing.

It’s actually more complex than that.

Remember how Ebbinghaus did his experiments – by reading new, nonsense syllables and attempting to remember them. All subsequent experiments to explore this phenomenon have taken the same approach. The syllable sets are carefully sifted before they are given to people to ensure that each individual non-word has no meaning.

This is entirely right, if you want to explore people’s memory properly, you can’t have some people better able to remember their syllables because the syllable (let’s say ‘BRIK’) sounds more familiar than another group’s syllable (say ‘ZIK’).

In memory experiments, the content you learn is meaningless.

But in real life, much of what we learn is not meaningless. When my father rattled off the Humphrey Davy Clerihew, I already knew who that famous scientist was; I knew he had discovered sodium, and I knew what odium meant. There was very little entirely new meaning that I had to take on board. Only the arrangement of the words was new. The Forgetting Curve did not apply.

Let me be clear here. I am not saying that the Forgetting Curve is wrong. Quite clearly it is right for a great deal of what we learn. In fact, the very word Clerihew required me to do some spaced learning (going back and asking my dad repeatedly what that bloke’s name was) until it stuck. Why? Because the word by itself had absolutely no meaning. There were no hooks in my mind ready for it to latch on to.

In contrast, when I read the Dante poem I knew all the words, and they made me laugh. If I had been asked to remember this, instead:

Dairy the Alighieri
Pernod troubled on he
a bottle Inferno
On wrote a Dante bottle of seldom

I would have once again required spaced learning – repeatedly testing myself until I got it right.

Not everyone is a fan of Clerihews. But everyone has a memory that is particularly attuned to learning some things very easily. For me, it’s song lyrics, the origins of words and useless facts like the speed of light in miles per second and the capital of Mongolia.

In addition to these idiosyncratic traits, people develop the ability to memorize certain things faster and more accurately as a result of their work. Famously, Chase and Simon (1973) showed board positions from chess games to a range of players from beginners to international masters for about 5 seconds. When asked to recall the location of the chess pieces, the beginners could manage on average 4 pieces, while the masters could recall virtually all 20 pieces.

This was not a matter of super memory but of meaning. When shown a board not from a game, but with randomly arranged pieces, the masters fared no better than the beginners. They were unable to use their immediate appreciation of how the pieces related to each other to make sense of the position. It was like trying to memorize a poem with jumbled up words.

This knowledge can be used in learning and is. Sometimes spaced learning is the right choice. Sometimes it is the only choice. Sometimes we make content vivid, we use humour, contrast and absurdity to make it need less repetition. But as well as these tricks of the trade, the best content designers do something else.

They go to where the person already is, and use what they already have, to make the content coherent, resonant and easy to remember. They present their chess players with a real game position; they give their poetry lovers words with rich meaning, because they know the best language – the only effective language – is the language of your audience.

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If you’d like to know more about spaced learning, read Dr Will Thalheimer’s excellent research piece.

If you’d like to take up the #blimage challenge, pick one of these photos and see what it triggers in your mind:

Do you want to be liked, or do you want to make a difference?

This idea for this theme for June came from the Debunker Club, an online group run by – among others – Dr Will Thalheimer who has served our profession well in the past. As well as his work on spaced learning, Will has shown that the much repeated claim that you remember just 10% of what you read versus 80% of what you do is spurious nonsense. (It’s a ghastly corruption of Dale’s Cone.)

The aim of the Debunk Club is to move the L&D profession from pseudoscience such as Learning Styles to more rigorous theories, backed by experimental data.

We shouldn’t need a Debunk Learning Styles month at all. Coffield et al (2004) and Pashler et al (2009) have already done the research. Pashler et al in their report summary say this:

We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice.

while on their website, Coffield at al say this:

… we found little good evidence to suggest that teaching influenced by the idea of learning styles has a significant effect on achievement or motivation.

Baldly put: Learning Styles are pointless rubbish.

So, why do L&D professionals continue to use them, and to reference them?

I think there are three reasons

First, they fill a vacuum in a field that until now has been bereft of much decent experimental science to guide it. That is no longer the case. We have probably learned as much about the workings of the brain in the past 15 years as we ever knew beforehand.

Second, they are entrenched because too often it pays somebody that this nonsense on stilts be believed. On page 144 of the seminal meta-analysis on learning styles, Frank Coffield et al put this very well: “… fortunes are being made as instruments, manuals … and workshops are all commercially advertised and promoted vigorously by some of the leading figures in the field”.

Finally, they are accepted because as a profession we are too keen to be liked rather than to be critical. We almost never ask “What’s your source? Where’s the research?” when someone wheels out another of these pseudoscientific canards.

We can’t do much about the first cause. We can’t add to the body of science, although we should certainly read it.

We can’t do much to stop people making money out of Learning Style instruments, apart from refusing to use their systems.

We can, however, challenge.

And this is where I ask: do you want to make a difference, or do you want to be liked?

I believe that we are too inclined in L&D to avoid conflict, to believe that everyone should have their say. But we cannot sit on the fence with Learning Styles and other learning myths, because this matters.

It matters because you are known by the company you keep, and if we mindlessly repeat these old saws, then we are no better than any charlatan who deliberately repeats them only to make money. Ignorance – in the L&D community of all places – can never be a defence.

It matters because until we take ourselves seriously enough to root out this nonsense, we cannot expect anyone else to take us seriously.

It matters most of all because bad theory will inevitably lead to bad practice.

Challenging someone’s use of Learning Styles does not have to mean a personal attack. It does not have to mean confrontation. It can be done as simply as asking, politely: “Excuse me, what’s your source for that? Because Coffield (2004), Pashler (2009) and others found no scientific basis for Learning Styles.”

It doesn’t have to be rude or personal. But it does have to be done.

Please, help raise the standing of our profession, and its standards, by being an honest friend to colleagues. If we allow Learning Styles and other myths to influence our work, it will lead to bad practice. Yes, you might not be liked – for a short while – if you challenge the notion. But you will be improving our work as a whole.

The next time someone mentions Learning Styles, ask yourself the question: do you want to be liked, or to make a difference?

Note: This blog previously appeared on LinkedIn, and I used a shorter version as my introduction to the June edition of Inside Learning Technologies and Skills Magazine. 

Shocking, right? The problem is, it’s not true. Not in the literal sense of the words.

30% of nominees to the House of Lords contribute 97.9% of donations to political parties.

Literally, that means that the vast majority of money given to political parties comes from 30% of nominees to the House of Lords. A moment’s reflection told me this couldn’t be the case, so I went back to the source, a 33-page paper from Oxford University: Is there a Market for Peerages?. I also scanned reports on this paper in the press. Here’s how the Guardian put it:

That left 92 “others”, who donated between them 97.9% (£33.83m) of all the donations coming from nominees to the Lords

That’s clearer. It’s still pretty shocking. As the Daily Telegraph summarizes: 92 nominees to the Lords had effectively bought their way in. (Got the cash? Interested? Best bet is the Tories, accounting for almost half the 92 nominees.) However, the point is also that this is not all money donated to political parties. The 97.9% only refers to the share of money donated from among those nominated to the Lords.

The problem for Twitter is this: the Guardian’s phrasing may be clearer, but it’s 5 words too long, and a little too complex. What to do? Cut. Never mind the accuracy, feel the brevity.

This is why I’ve been using Twitter less recently than I did in the past – it’s just a little too noisy and a little too inaccurate.

To be precise: there is always noise, but the noise to signal ratio seems to have increased significantly over the past year. Also, among the noise is too much of the glib and the trite. The glib includes motivational quotes that irritate more than they motivate. The trite manipulates the truth to lazily present an inaccurate picture of it, which is what @Election_HUB seems to have done with this fact about buying peerages.

And of course at the intersection of the glib and the trite is the misquote. Twitter’s favourite is probably this:

In the 9 hours since midnight today, this has been repeated and amplified 20 times. It’s an admirable sentiment, but as Brian Morton pointed out in the New York Times in 2011, Gandhi didn’t say it. If you care about accuracy, there’s no excuse for not discovering that when doing your fact checking … unless of course you don’t care about accuracy and you don’t do any fact checking.

I do hope that I’m wrong about this. I would love Twitter to be a friendly exchange of useful information, banter and conversation, and indeed, I continue to read interesting, sometimes challenging, Tweets from the more thoughtful people I follow.

However, lately Twitter seems to have become more of a haven for the lazy and the inaccurate, not to mention the hateful. I hope that in the run up the UK election we’ll manage to have some better informed debate than this. I somehow doubt we will.