The Total Learner Experience

5 Steps for Rapid Needs Analysis

2013-03-26T09:30:00-07:00

In today's world it's almost impossible to carve out enough time in a project schedule to perform a comperehensive needs analysis. Many people are forced to perform iterative analysis as they deliver. To help ensure the effectiveness of your learning experience, consider this 5-step rapid needs analysis process when you find time is of the essence: Identify the improvement opportunity. Identify and clearly state the issue or improvement opportunity, and the desired organizational outcome. It's easy to assume that all the key stakeholders know what the issue or opportunity is, but there can be significant variations in people's viewpoints. Many...

Going Blended: Questions to Help Define Your Learning Strategy

2013-03-25T10:13:10-07:00

I often work with clients who have questions and are interested in blended learning solutions. Here, I've outlined what I believe are a few positives and challenges for going blended, and then I leave you with questions you can ask yourself to help determine the best path to follow. Classroom Training Positives: Face to face. The Instructor can see/recognize when a student is understanding the material or not, and offer a personal touch. Classroom training is the current comfort zone in many organizations. Students may be more accustomed to it, and may not feel comfortable with online training. Classroom training...

How Effective is Your Sales Training? Really.

2013-02-27T10:59:27-08:00

A 2011 Aberdeen survey on the impact of sales training shows that the firms that enjoy the most effective return on performance improvement among their salesforce share these characteristics: 91% focus on instructor-led training as the most effective training modality 85% have defined competencies and training for each sales role 83% use of a formal sales methodology - either homegrown or from an external provider Salespeople drive the company’s revenue. The last thing a performance-focused learning organization should do is waste a salesperson’s time with training that is redundant, not relevant to the individual’s specific knowledge and skills, and doesn’t...

On Story

2013-02-25T10:44:43-08:00

Recently, I tweeted on what I feel are five necessary elements of a disruptive learning experience: Story Journey Failure Redemption Resolution I’ll expand a bit here on what I mean by Story. Story unlocks creative consciousness Many of us that work on the creative side of writing and instructional design (and I argue that proper instructional design requires good writing) toil with what makes story most effective for our audiences. The very idea of story is about discovering the essence of what makes us human: good writing drops the reader directly into the heart of the matter, with tension, romanticism,...

Instructional Design Rules to Break

2013-01-28T09:20:34-08:00

The world of instructional design is overrun with endless rules. Many rules are steeped in years of research and driven by appropriate learning theory. However, we think there are some rules that are OK to be bent, twisted, or broken to fit specific needs. There’s an old saying that in order to break the rules, you need to know them. In this series, we are going to take some long-lived rules of Instructional Design and discuss the when and how to break them. Agree or disagree? Let us know! Rule #1: “Avoid Direct Instruction” Direct Instruction (DI), is the explicit...