Why are we failing as leaders?

DID YOU KNOW?

• Training expenditure per employee has consistently gone up despite the tough business climate. in 2001, the expenditure per employee was $734 on training. By 2012, this number climbed to $1,195 per employee (ASTD stats).
• Surveys in 2000 and 2012 suggests that there has been no major shift in employee engagement attitude, 70% of all employees continue to be disengaged from their employer interest (Gallup Study).
• Allocating more money doesn't appear to be the answer. 
• Your thoughts? 

Regards,
Ravinder Tulsiani

http://www.ravindertulsiani.com

See http://www.yourleadershipedge.ca for my solution.

My review of #LearningLive 2013 Day 1

As mentioned in a previous blog post, I’m participating in Learning Live 2013. Whilst I was directly involved as a speaker on Day 2, I also attended as a participant throughout the 2 day event.

Here are my key takeaways from Day 1

Presented by Nigel Harrison

Nigel will share his experience of what is need to successfully adopt Performance Consulting in your organisation.
Nigel looks at the inherent pay-offs in our organisations for doing things the way we always have and the power of the “conspiracy of convenience”.
After a brief re-cap on “What is the performance consulting approach?” Nigel will give two examples of:
doing it the old way
doing it the new way
He will share a blue print for turning some of your learning professional into performance consultants:
A common consulting process
The skills they will need to develop
The organisational obstacles the will encounter
Finally he will investigate how to build the influence and credibility of your team and countering internal power and manipulation. Nigel will also share extracts from his new book “How to deal with power and influence by Performance Consulting”.

My key content take-away

Don’t take orders. The ‘order’ is a clue that there is an underlying ‘need’ – ask questions to identify that need.

Step 1 – The contract (repeat back EXACTLY what they say to you)
Step 2 – Who is involved?
Step 3 – What are they doing now?
Step 4 – What do you want them to do?
Step 5 – What is the value of the gap? (Talk in facts, figures, data, KPIs etc about what the ‘gap’ is ‘costing’ them / the business)
Step 6 – ID causes and potential solutions. (A single solution rarely, if ever works)
Step 7 – Action plan

Draw a picture/diagram whilst talking with the client, help them/you to see what the problem is / isn’t.

Presented by Fiona Quigley & Dr Maureen Murphy

This session will draw on a number of recent case studies of how we created digital stories that capture healthcare experiences, oral histories and workplace insights. We will look at what makes a good story, the impact stories can have and address some of the barriers we had to overcome – including people’s reluctance to tell stories and the technical process of gathering, recording and editing the stories.
The components of a good story
Different ways in which you can capture stories
How to build strategies to address barriers to designing and capturing stories
How to integrate stories in different parts of your organisation for workplace performance improvement.

My key content take-away

Stories exist all around us everyday. We may not often recognise that they are.

Storytelling is being done very well at the moment by marketing. As I’ve said before L&D can learnt a lot from marketing, perhaps storytelling is something else that we can learn from them.

Build trust with the storyteller by not tampering with their story.

Are you telling a story or a narrative?

‘Story arcs’ allow you to knit ‘stand alone’ stories into an overall story.

Very few people can tell an effective story ‘first time’. Consider providing structured questions to the person telling the story.

View the original article here

So there I was, wandering around YouTube, minding my own business….

…. when I stumbled upon the ‘edit video detail’ toolbar at the top of the page. Now I had seen this previously and had chosen to ignore it as my video editing is done in either Flipshare or more recently in Windows Movie Maker.

What an oversight on my behalf!!!

Within the video editing options there is an option to add annotations. Now this in itself is nothing startling as many video editing tools allow you to annotate on top of the video footage, but what this allows you to do is to add a ‘spotlight’ on top of anything that is being shown in the YouTube footage.

This spotlight (imagine a hot spot) will then allow a URL (including another YouTube video) to be added to it.

This then allows your YouTube video to become interactive in so far as the viewer can be steered towards making a choice which then jumps them from one YouTube video to another to another etc etc depending upon their choices. For a far more in-depth account as to how to do this then check out this blog post.

Of course I almost fell over myself in an attempt to try this out so I hope you’ll all be able to see past the poor lighting and dodgy camera angles to the real potential that this approach to using YouTube can bring. My only niggle at this moment in time is that upon completion of the clip it  jumps (as any YouTube clip does) to a ‘related videos’ window, this in turn stops the viewer from making any on-screen selection at the end of the clip, so it prevents the viewer from being able reflect upon the available choices.

Confused?

Then try watching the following short clip without making any selection and you’ll see what happens at the end of the video. Then you can replay the video and start taking part for real…

So what do you think?

Is this something you could use?

If so, what for?

View the original article here

The Ones That Got Away – video stories

As I mentioned in this previous post, I’m writing a series of posts that lift the lid on some of the plans and ideas that either never saw the light of day or (as in this initial post) never fully developed.

One of my plans in my previous organisations was to use our internal collaborative platform to share a number of video stories.

In order to ‘lead the way’ I produced and starred in the first video (which I’m unfortunately unable to share video as I no longer have access to the original file). In it, I tell a story of observing a practice amongst colleagues that my experience told me was the ‘wrong way’, the question I asked the viewer of the video was…

If you observed the same would you:

a) Stop them and inform them of the ‘right way’, saving a lot of their time, but potentially taking a valuable ‘learning experience’ away from them?

b) allow them to continue until they realised they were wrong, which would waste time, but serve as a valuable experience

I also stumbled upon an interesting story whilst interviewing my  former HR Director as part of the Learner Survey I was undertaking. In it he tells a story of conducting a series of coaching sessions with a colleague in Spain, utilising the FaceTime function on their iPads.

The ‘takeaway’ from the video was to challenge your preconceptions (he had originally been sceptical over how well the sessions would run if they were not face-to-face) – why not watch the video below and hear the story from Brett Reid himself?

Now that I had some examples of video storytelling to share with others I went on the search for other stories.

Here are some of the stories I went looking for/that found me

Sales success stories – Interview the top salesperson of the month – what did they do/say etc that made them the top salesperson? What made them perform better than others.Sales horror stories – what went wrong with a sale that they thought was guaranteed?Thinking and acting differently stories – recording people who were doing something differently. Why? What effect was it having? (one particular story centered around a team who were feeling ‘stale’. They decided to take it in turns to identify a TED talk and distribute it to each team member prior to each team meeting and to use time during the meeting to discuss the content of the video. The upshot of which was that they felt re-energised as a team and several ‘innovative’ new ideas were forthcoming.

My plan had been to support these individuals/teams in terms of the recording, editing and distribution of each video until such time that they felt they had the skills and confidence to do so themselves, at which point I would step away.

I even incentivized them by suggesting that if they (either individually or as a team) recorded and distributed 4 videos over 3 months that the L&D budget would purchase that team a Flip-type camcorder in order to allow them to progress on their own.

You may notice that I said

“My plan *had* been”

Because I left the organisation just as the pieces were falling into place, recording meetings were being booked etc

Oh well… there’s always next time…

Image source

View the original article here

Jumping on the bandwagon. My predictions for 2013…

As the end of a year approaches it’s time for the blogging fraternity to turn to the tried and tested ‘Top ‘this that and the other’ of 2012? and ‘My predictions for 2013? blog posts.

Far from me to turn down the opportunity to poke a little fun, here are my 2013 predictions / absolute cast iron guarantees…

My Twitter stream will continue to be bombarded with Instagrammed photos of hot beverages and food. Fortunately I use Tweetbot which allows me to permanently block hashtags. Unfortunately hardly anybody tags their #instagram photos.We will see a new word being made up within the L&D fraternity.Certain bloggers will still rant on about ‘killer apps / platform / piece of hardware. Why can’t things just be ‘good’, ‘effective’, ‘worth having’?Any podcast with ‘week’ or ‘weekly’ in the title is unlikely to ever be that, beyond its 5th episode.I will unsuccessfully use facts, data and research against gut feelings and anecdotes.2013 will be the year of mobile. Again.Apple will release an ever-so-slight modification of a product. Tech bloggers will work themselves up into a crotch-twitching, salivating frenzy reporting….. erm…. on the ever-so-slight modification.We’ll continue to have a L&D wide survey released approximately every 4 daysMany vendors will continue to ignore the native functionality of mobile devices whilst blowing their trumpets about how they are ‘leading’ in the mlearning world.A ‘free to use’ service will change its Terms and Conditions. Users will form baying mobs and burning torches will be seen.Certain ‘thought leaders’ in our field will use ever more bizarre diagrams to explore their concepts. It’s cos they’re clever see….

I’ll see you in 2013…

… no doubt saying ‘I told you so‘

View the original article here

What Learners Want – Part 2 – The ‘questions’

If you haven’t read this series to date, it may be worthwhile doing so in order to set some context.

Having decided to commit to deploying the survey, Towards Maturity and myself started to create the question bank that our employees would be asked to respond to. Laura Overton already had a significant foundation for this survey so as a result it was more of a process of tweaking some of the questions to be able to the language that my organisation uses.

I took the decision early on to allow the survey to be undertaken anonymously, with the ability for respondents to enter their contact details should they wish to contacted by L&D to follow up on any of their responses.

As I’m sure you’ll appreciate there is a commercial agreement in place between my organisation and Towards Maturity, so I will not be posting the 23 specific questions, however they fell broadly into the following areas:

Demographic informationHow people acquire info to do their jobHardware people useBYOD related questionsWillingness to share with othersFormal and informal methodsRating of currently available methods/tools/platforms etcBarriers

It was important that we didn’t alter the actual questions or response types themselves as our survey results will be feeding into a benchmark study in much the same way as the Towards Maturity Benchmark study, however there were some occasions where it was logical to amend the wording to some of the response options in order to provide clarity such as:

Using organisational roles instead of the default role optionsUsing organisational department names instead of the default optionsReferring to our LMS, intranet and internal collaboration platform by name as opposed to generic titles.

All in all, the questions do a great job of gathering hard facts and data in order to help inform our L&D strategy and next steps.

In my next blog post, I’ll explain how we went about marketing and promoting this survey ahead of the official launch

Image source

View the original article here

Podcast #17: Bill Gates is calling!

I recently asked the good folks of Twitter this…

Help please! Pls send 1 tweet with any of the many eLearning methods that immediately spring to your mind. Pls RT

22 people responded and their suggestions formed this Wordle

As expected the usual suspects were mentioned numerous times, however simulations and games based activities were only mentioned by 1 person, so I thought I would have a chat with Chris Brannigan from Thinking Worlds about the possible reasons that for many people ‘simulations’ and ‘immersive environments’ don’t figure when it comes to suggesting elearning methods and how a new FREE authoring platform may be the ‘break in’ to the simulation world that many people are looking for.

Download podcast in mp3 format: Bill Gates is calling!

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Shownotes

Music Source.

View the original article here

Guess who’s back, back again…

Craigy’s back, tell a friend (if you’re not an Eminem fan, then this blog title was wasted on you!)

As you will have spotted by now, I have been absent from my Blog for a couple of weeks, admittedly some of that absence has been down to the fact that I have been moving to this self-hosted WP site, which I am hoping will ‘futureproof’ some of the ideas that I want to take forward and also to be honest, it’s been Christmas and I’ve been a bit lazy!!!

But we’re half way through January so it’s about time I pulled my finger out and started putting fingers (both index ones only) to keyboard.

Here are a few of the blog entries I have got lined up over the next few weeks:

If you haven’t already added this new web address to your subscriptions/aggregator, then make sure you do as I don’t want you to miss out!

View the original article here

"Get Out There"

The past week has hardly seen me in work; notice that I said ‘in’ work and not ‘at’ work, because I have most definitely been at work, except that instead of being sat at my usual desk in my usual environment I have taken to the road in search of enlightenment.

Tuesday saw me travelling to Northampton to meet up with Mark Berthelemy from Capita L&D. Mark had very kindly agreed to discuss the mysteries of a SAP / Moodle integration with me as Capita had been working with this SAP/Moodle set up already.

My desire to provide our learners with an engaging, visually rich, intuitive portal into SAP is borne out of the disengaging, unappealing, complicated SAP GUI. It is my belief that as an L&D funtion we should be removing as many barriers to learner engagement and thus ‘learning’ as we possibly can. Plonking a learner down in front of a complicated LMS GUI, regardless of how much training is thrown at them is just not on, not when there are far more intuitive, engaging platforms out there. This belief led to me to Northampton to discuss the technicalities surrounding a SAP/Moodle integration.

For me the outcome of the meeting was a realisation that whilst the integration was perfectly feasible (Capita had achieved it along with a number of other organisations) it may be more prudent to wait for the SAP Learning Solutions platform to be implemented within my business as this could quite possibly provide the intuitive, engaging tool that I am looking for.

Had it not been for this networking visit then it is quite possible that I would have continued pursuing a solution that ‘may’ have proven to be unwarranted – having said that I will believe that SAP Learning Solutions provides a rich, engaging, intuitive GUI when I see it!

My organisation has been using the Atlantic Link e-learning authoring tool since July 2009, Atlantic Link themselves have recently been acquired by Kaplan IT so Thursday saw me getting further acquainted with the M6 Southbound en-route to a customer day hosted by Kaplan IT.

The purpose of this day was to acquaint Kaplan customers with the Atlantic Link products and vice-versa, I had anticipated that there would be a heavy sales pitch throughout the day but I am pleased to say that the emphasis was on letting the products speak for themselves without any pressure or sales pitches. For me though the afternoon proved to be the highlight of the day with Dr Richard Hyde (previous Director of Atlantic Link) providing an Instructional Design Workshop.

Richard and 2 previous Directors have now formed the company ‘Mind-Click‘, I won’t go into the workshop in too much detail as I believe that this site entry provides sufficient overview. If you would like to gain a better idea of the content of the workshop I have provided a pdf copy of the session here.

Friday saw me boarding a train en-route to Old London Town to participate in a Masterclass in Using Social Media in Learning facilitated by Jane Hart. I have already commented on this in a previous post.

On my return home on the train my thoughts turned to the distances I had travelled, the people I had met and most importantly what I had learned.

There wasn’t a Joining Instruction in sight, not a SMART objective to be seen, nor a session plan on the horizon…. but it didn’t matter..

… I had a great week, learnt loads and made some great connections

So in essence, if you haven’t networked recently

Get Out There

View the original article here

My day playing at marketing at #AMC13

Earlier today I attended Another Marketing Conference in order to try and (as I said in this previous post) gain a different perspective on ‘changing behaviours’ from outside the L&D bubble that I’ve found myself living in.

Readers of my ‘Small Chunks‘ post will know that instead of trying to capture every piece of information that is conveyed during conference sessions I always try and identify ‘small chunks’ that I can take away and work on as opposed to HUGE strategic-thinking pieces.

09:30

You can’t have too much data! or can you?

Peter Waggett
Emerging Technology, IBM

Data is everywhere and it is now easy to capture information on our customers and prospects. Getting beyond the hype associated with Big Data requires understanding of the data and knowledge to turn it into something actionable. This talk will discuss the issues associated with the practical and responsible use of Big Data and detail future trends.

My takeaways from this session:

Peter told us the story of ‘Millenium Challenge‘, a US Military exercise in which the ‘friendly’ force mulled over its data for so long that the ‘opposing’ force just went ahead and ‘destroyed’ several key US assets. In other words, data analysis is all well and good, but without any ‘action/decision’, well…… it’s just…… data analysis! This is something that I’ll research further and if tenable, I’ll keep it up my sleeve should it ev er look like I’m in danger of being forced into ‘analysis paralysis’!

Peter talked us through the Jeopardy / Watson exercise (as he put it, Siri on steroids!). He reckons that in 5-6 years this level of semantic technology will be on the High Streets – another nail in the coffin for L&D or another wonderful opportunity?

10:00

What Nokia did next

Richard Murphy
Global Director of eCommerce, Nokia

For years Nokia was the most desirable brand when it came to mobile phones. However, the smartphone revolution shook things up.

Consumers have changed and so has marketing. The pace of change is accelerating, putting more pressure on organisations to embrace this new digital reality and transform the way they market. How Nokia embraced this new digital reality will offer comfort and inspiration to all of us trying to change our approaches and cultures.

My takeaways from this session:

Richard identified the physical commuting routes his bosses took into work and bought  the posters/advertising space along that route! The feedback from his bosses was great!

Whilst I have no need to go that far, I do think there is some value in locating a lot of my mandatory training campaign material within eyeshot of our Directors office door, not only to ‘big up’ what we’re doing, but more critically to encourage the cascade of the messages from Director level.

10:30

Seamless brand building

Julie Strawson
Director of Marketing, Monotype

A look at how technology can challenge your brand, why the process of branding is changing and how to deliver reliable on-brand experiences at every consumer touchpoint.

Julie will also reveal the results of a new piece of research into how publishing is changing and what’s on offer for advertisers across 100 leading consumer titles conducted by Brand Perfect, Monotype’s community for brands, designers and developers.

My takeaways from this session:

My upcoming mandatory training ‘revamp’ will adopt a campaign approach. Julie reminded us that we need to have a cohesive and seamless experience from one format to another. Many of the videos and animations from the campaign will reside inside our internal collaboration platform, which unfortunately (as it sits in the public domain) requires a login everytime you open the platform up. This isn’t much of a problem when ‘deskbound’ as the platform forms a part of many people’s workflows, it becomes a problem however when I start to encourage people to access the media from their mobile devices as I feel that asking people to ‘log in’ from their mobile device is only likely to create another barrier to the content.

To get around this problem, I plan to dual-host the videos within a Vimeo Pro account. This will allow mobile users to get access to the content quickly and seamlessly as advised by Julie.

11:45

It’s all about ME (Marketing Effectiveness)

Julie Roberts
Marketing Effectiveness Director, TMW

How do we measure our true success? How do we know if we are being effective? And how can we improve? Investing in ‘big data’ is pointless without a concrete effectiveness strategy. Julie will look at, with the increasing amounts of data available, how we should plan, do, check and (importantly) act in 2013.

My takeaways from this session:

I’ll be honest, this was my least enjoyable/useful session of the day which is a pity as this was the one I was hoping to get the most from due to the work I am doing at the moment.  There was a LOT of being talked at, poor slide design, lots of “I’m sure everybody is aware of xyz“, rushing through content etc

So I thought I’d try and glean something from this session….

5 basic questions for marketing

Research – conduct some! (online, panels, in-store)Hypothesise – ask bite-sized questions & build nimble analytical modelsSet parameters – use a simple allocation modelSpecialists – internally & externally, central co-ordinating role & clear RACIs

12:15

Mapping human behaviour with immersive experiences

Jon Dodd
Managing Director, Bunnyfoot

How do we develop products, services and websites that provide customers with a rich, immersive and satisfying experience? What are the little peculiar human behaviours that we need to be aware of and tap into?

My takeaways from this session:

Never consider going into neuroscience!!! Mind. Blown.

Read up on Norman’s 6 Design Principles

14:00

The hedgehog and the fox – and why the social sciences are plural for a reason

Rory Sutherland
Vice Chairman, Ogilvy UK

Recent evidence suggests that our brains – and hence the way we make decisions – may be more variegated than we think – or than we want to believe. One of the implications is that single models of human behaviour may be woefully inadequate, or even misleading. We simply need to accept that a single toolbox may never work

My takeaways from this session:

All models are wrong; but some are useful – and some are dangerous!

Rory suggested

Anybody with a ‘number’, trumps anybody with an ‘abstract noun’ – I’ve had some recent successes when quoting/demonstrating Ebbinghuas’ Forgetting Curve. I’m going to make sure that I have more numbers in my back pocket.

Don’t get bogged down in the attitudinal aspect, make it easy for people change their behaviours and they will construct their own reasons for doing so.

Rory shared this video with us. I can’t for the life of me remember what the context was, but it’s funny so what the Hell!

14:30

Context and content: the two pillars of mobile marketing

Paul Berney
Chief Marketing Officer, Mobile Marketing Association

When it comes to mobile marketing it is vital that we understand how to deliver our content and the role that context plays in how that content is received.

Paul will talk about how the plethora of small screens is changing the way we need to think about our mobile strategies and whether or not we think that it really affects us.

My takeaways from this session:

Include a mobile call to action on my mandatory training campaign material that I can expect people to be accessing via mobile devices. As I’m planning on using Delivr.com to manage my mobile delivery I’ll be able to place the ‘call to action’ on the media landing page as opposed to having to place it on the poster (so can reduce environmental impact, printing costs etc)

I’d been planning to link out to videos / animations etc from physical posters/pop up banners etc, I’m still going to do this, however Paul provided an example of AR enabled sports tickets which has prompted me consider other options for linking the physical world with the online world.

Paul also shared this video with us, makes you think eh?

15:45

Predatory thinking

Dave Trott
Executive Creative Director, The Gate London

One of the most respected figures in advertising, Dave Trott, talks about the importance of the creative spark and how we need to manage our teams and our time to release a little bit more of that inner creative mischief.

My takeaways from this session:

Alas, by this point I had had to dash for my train to start any chance of getting home at a reasonable hour. This is a pity as the tweets that were coming out of Dave’s session suggested he was ‘plain speaking’ which would have made a nice change from one or two of the other speakers.

My overall observations of the day:

It was blatantly clear from every session that online/digital/mobile was a critical element of any behaviour changing marketing plan. Dare I say it, but the level and depth of conversation far exceeded the conversations that I see at most (not all) L&D conferences, a clear indication (I think) about how far behind we are in our thinking???

I have to admit that at times some of the conversation was above my head. I’m not saying this is a bad thing because let’s be honest I was ‘out of my usual comfort zone’ so I guess it’s to be expected, but it also served as a reminder to check the language and references that I use when speaking to people within my organisation around subjects that are within my comfort zone, but very possibly outside of theirs.

It was a welcome relief to hear that the general approach I’m taking with my organisations mandatory training in terms of creating a campaign around it, is broadly spot on. I strongly suspect that my attendance at this conference will help to tweak some of the ideas we are planning to ensure that they have the maximum chance of hitting home and changing behaviour.

Biggest non-surprise of the day was that there were no other Learning Professionals there (at least none that I could ascertain during the breaks and lunch), which is a real shame….. perhaps next year?

View the original article here

Podcast #21: Lisa’s back!!!

Craig chats with Lisa Johnson  on the subject of her teams’ recent *award winning* work with the use of internal wikis and ‘just-in-time’ performance support videos.

Listening time: 25mins

Subscribe to the podcast in mp3 format: Lisa’s back!!!

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Shownotes

Music Source.

View the original article here

My first taste of Pecha Kucha..

…was provided to me by Clive Shepherd at the 2010 eLN showcase. Clive’s effort when combined with fantastic Pecha Kuchas (PKs) from Barry Sampson and Phil Green was enough to inspire me that PK was something I needed to have an attempt at….. now it was just a case of waiting for the right opportunity…

That opportunity arose at a recent eLearning Network event, where myself, @KimSGeorge and @fionaleteney each delivered a Pecha Kucha session. I chose to talk about how my organisation had utilised technology to enhance it’s assessment processes.

Did I enjoy it? – Yep

Would I reccomend it to others? – Yep

Would I do it again – You bet’cha

So what about you? Have you ever done a PK? Would you consider doing one? If you would and are a member of the eLearning Network then why not get in contact with Lucy Cartlidge to find out more…

View the original article here

‘Fixing’ compliance training at #LearningLive

I must applaud the Learning and Performance Institute and in particular those involved in planning this years Learning Live. For the first time that I have personally seen in the UK, an L&D conference (outside of the academic world) has asked people to submit proposal for available speaking slots, I believe this is a fantastic way of surfacing those ‘hidden’ stories and allowing ‘new’ people to gain exposure, let’s hope that other conferences follow suit in the future.

I submitted a number of proposal and have been fortunate in gaining a speaking slot, here’s the official blurb

Session: ‘Compliance Training – From Course to Campaign!’

Compliance training is often seen by many L&D practitioners as a ‘thorn in their side’; a necessary evil that despite their best efforts, remains low-down on most learners list of things to concern themselves about.
If this applies to you and/or your organisation and you’d like to ?nd out how to take a signi?cant step change in the delivery of your compliance training, then this session is for you!
Craig Taylor will guide you through his journey in turning compliance training from a selection of stand-alone courses to a series of ongoing campaigns.
He’ll share his background thinking, hints and tips to obtain that critical ‘buy in’ from stakeholders and the research to back up his campaign approach along with those all important ‘lessons learnt’; AKA the bits that Craig got wrong!

Session Objective 1: Why the move from course to campaign?
Session Objective 2: How to obtain that all important ‘buy in’ from stakeholders
Session Objective 3: How to ask for what you want from external agencies.
Session Objective 4: Why you might consider a campaign for a campaign.
Session Objective 5: Share Craig’s lessons learnt

The LPI have also been asking speakers to promote/give an insight/’flip’ their session by using Social Media, multimedia etc in advance of the event. I think this is, in principle, a fantastic idea, but one that is not without it’s problems, which I have blogged about previously.

I’ve used a few approaches to promote / prepare people for my session.

I used Vine for the first time, to ask some ‘leading’ questions to hopefully encourage people to attend my session (I can definitely see Vine vids being a part of a wider campaign)

I used Powtoon to create an animation, again offering a WIIFM for anybody still undecided as to which session to attend.

I also experimented with SMS text messaging ahead of the session, why not get involved with my experiment? (details in tweet below)

I’ve been tinkering with text messaging as part of my pre #LearningLive campaign. Wanna take a look? Text learninglive to 07462251335

— Craig Taylor (@CraigTaylor74) August 23, 2013

I’m not planning on creating any ‘new’ marketing material, but there’s still the best part of 3 weeks to the event…. so who knows?

So now it’s over to you…

If you’re coming to my session…

View the original article here

Designing interactions? Perhaps you shouldn’t bother…

I was recently asked to facilitate a session at an eLearning Network event. The rest of the speakers spoke in great detail about what interactions was, wasn’t and how to ensure that we used ‘science’ to craft our interactions.

Me?

I facilitated a session that essentially said “don’t bother” – well at least for some things….

Want to know more? Then check out my Slideshare below. I’ve added some accompanying audio that I recorded live on the day. Whilst this means that you get to hear the ‘real thing‘, you also have to put up with the vagaries of live recording….

Enjoy.

Have you ever fallen into the trap of creating an online activity/interaction etc that with the benefit of hindsight, you wish you’d created in the ‘real’ world?

View the original article here

My review of the #Encore #mlearning app

I recently attended this Kineo event. I had originally intended to produce a Storify from this event, but there were several different event hashtags in use throughout the day, so I rapidly gave up on the idea – sure I could’ve manually added the tweets but you know how it is…

Instead, over the next few posts I’d like to share with you a few tools and platforms that @DonaldClark referred to during his session, starting off with ‘Encore’.

Regular readers will know that I’m a big fan of anything that can be done minimise the forgetting curve and automate the process of ‘forcing’ the act of recall around a subject so I was pleased to see Donald highlight ‘Encore‘.

In a nutshell, it’s a Moodle plugin that can be used to synchronise with a free app. The plugin is configured with certain content reminders / frequency etc and then pushes those to the app allowing a steady drip-drip-drip of ‘tasks’ directly to the employees / students mobile device.

Encore showing an alert on an iPhone

The FREE demo involves undertaking a SCORM piece of eLearning with a Moodle, completing  a ‘self assessment’ using Moodle’s inbuilt assessment tool which then unlocks the ‘Encore’ plugin. At this stage you can select to receive the automated ‘tasks’ by email or the Encore app (see below)

‘Tasks’ showing within the Encore app

As sound as the principle is, there are a few areas where I feel some improvement could be made. Having spoken to Learning Pool (the company behind the app) they were very vocal about their desire to receive feedback so I going to speak to them at the end of the 3-week ‘demo’ that is available and relay this feedback onto them.

Firstly (and this is not a criticism, just an observation) but if you’re not using Moodle (or possibly Totara?) then this obviously isn’t for you! Hopefully other LMS/VLE providers will latch onto the idea though??Despite this being a Moodle extension it’s not freely available. Having spoken to Learning Pool they said that even if your Moodle (possibly Totara?) isn’t supplied by them that that the Encore extension could probably be purchased from them.The Encore app is only available on iOS and Android, with Windows on the roadmap but a definite ‘No’ to Blackberries (possibly a stumbling block for corporates who currently use BB?Whilst the end user has the option of receiving the reminders via email or the app for me this still relies on (assuming that the organisation is wishing to tap into the mobility of the employee / student)  the end user having a smartphone. I’d like to see the option of using SMS as a delivery channel. Sure, some of the more media rich activities may not be accessible to feature phone users, but as I see it, at present, none of it is accessible to feature phone users.Some of the activities I undertook in the trial period were just tests of short term memory (see below), which for me, weren’t the best examples of spaced activation of learning, however I think with some thought around reflective questions (possibly with the option for ‘free text’ responses) and short videos there could be a real opportunity for this app to serve as a ‘trigger’ for deeper thought and processing. An example of a ‘task’ within the Encore app

All in all, I think this is a great step forward in terms of demonstrating that mobile learning can be and is so much more than responsive ‘click next’ elearning.

View the original article here

Do you have a few minutes for an #Intervue?

As I was trawling through my early morning tweets upon arriving at work on Tuesday morning (on my mobile phone obviously, due to the fact that I work in 1906 and Social Media is blocked on my work machine) I noticed that John Dalziel from RSC NW had tweeted this

Knowing that John always has something interesting to share I immediately clicked on the link, but realised quite quickly I needed to be on a PC. In the meantime I checked out what John had to say about this tool on his blog.

As soon as I got home (or as I call it, 2011) I clicked through on the link to discover this site.

Essentially you:

Set up a free accountType some questions that you want to ask others (you can add some additional text at this point)Email/tweet the link to the questions and then sit back….

The recipients of the link will see your question(s) and (here comes the good bit) can provide the feedback/responses via their webcam (up to a maximum of 60 secs video per response). Intervue will capture their video responses and allow you (or if you choose to share them, others) to view those responses.

Anyway, as they say “a picture paints a 1000 words” so here’s my initial intervue, and here are my responses why not give it a try yourself? The video responses themselves can be downloaded in mp4 format, so you could even edit the responses together to form a short movie.

My initial thoughts as to how this could be used are:

Preliminary interviews with prospective employees.Language training – pose a question in either the native/foreign language and then ask the respndent to respond in the opposite (or same) language.During a leadership training programme ask team members to provide evidence that their ‘leader’ is demonstrating the requisite behaviours. A damn site more accurate than asking the ‘leader’ to write their own evidence (as I have witnessed in a recent ILM programme!)Use as an assessment tool to allow learners to provide descriptive responses.

Please do take the time to respond to the intervue I have set up above, as I intend to wrap the responses up in a video which I will publish on this blog at a later date.

If you can think up any additional uses for this (and I am sure there are loooooads!) please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments box below.

View the original article here

What no ‘elearning’?

This tweet from David Hopkins

‘Click next’ eLearning resources … haven’t we got beyond that yet?

— David Hopkins (@hopkinsdavid) August 7, 2013

generated some reflection in relation to my last role…

Despite me having the title of Learning Technologies Manager and the organisation generally defining ‘elearning’ as ‘click next, self-paced’ modules I was able to utilise a range of methods and media to meet needs that had  previously been meet via traditional eLearning and physical classroom activity.

In 10 months I:

Produced a handful of taking head videos and placed them on our internal collaborative platform , Jive.Produced 15-20 screencasts and placed them onto Jive.Produced a handful of audio interviews.Created a single ‘go to‘ L&D group on Jive. This served as both a space to start, encourage and participate in conversations as well as a ‘marketing’ space for our activities.Designed a game involving a range of posters each including a different QR code which would link to various multimedia assets.Hosted the multimedia elements mentioned above on a Vimeo Pro account which provided immediate access coupled with an element of security.Used SurveyMonkey to revolutionise our assessment process and move it toward the Brinkerhoff Success Case method.Used Jive to create an activity that mirrored a real life customer interaction which created strong intrinsic motivators to utilise the provided performance support tool to resolve the ‘situation’.Introduced the concept and practical application of  ’spaced repetition of learning’ using Retenda, in order to support the activity mentioned above.Used Adobe XI Pro to create a range of FAQs documents and checklists.Used tools such as Powtoon and Sparkol to create a range of animations to support various activities.Facilitated various online sessions using Adobe Connect.Used a Pro Scoop.it! account to curate content on a range of subjects.

In short, I was able to operate up to, and indeed beyond, the expectations of the role, without ever having to go near an LMS or an authoring tool.

Was it easy? – No

Did everybody ‘roll over’ without a fight? – No

Did I experience some challenges? – Yes

Did some of the activities take longer than they really needed to due to the ‘engagement’ that needed to be done? – Yes

Did I win a lot of fans along the way as a result of sitting down with them and talking through their problem, my proposal and their fears? – Yes

Would I take this approach again? – Absolutely

Regular readers will know that I’m not one of the ‘Burn the LMS/authoring tool‘ fraternity as I truly believe they do have a place, depending on what you are trying to achieve, so I wouldn’t have been averse or afraid of using them should the solution to the problem have dictated it – but here’s the interesting thing….. it never did.

Not in all the time I was there or the many pieces of work I was involved was a ‘piece of elearning in an LMS’ or an ‘exodus to the classroom‘ ever the right answer.

Makes you wonder how many times as an Industry we’ve gone down the wrong route for fear of challenging, for worry of what people will think of our ‘off the wall‘ ideas???

So over to you…

Where have you come up with an alternative to the ‘old favourites’ approach?

Were you allowed to progress it?

What was the impact on your relationship with the original requester, when (and if) you produced an alternative to their request.

View the original article here

Scheduling a meeting is a doddle, I mean a Doodle..

…whatever it’s called it’s quick, simple and cheap to do!

Scheduling a meeting with work colleagues is usually very easy to do as (in my experience) everybody is ‘connected’ via an email management client such as Outlook which allows you to organise meetings around peoples availability as you can usually see their calendar which (you hope) they’ve kept up to date.

The problem lies when you are trying to arrange a meeting with people outside of your organisation who do not exist in your calendar system, again in my experience this usually involves time exhausting multiple phone calls and/or emails around the relevant parties in order to arrange a mutually convenient time.

Well no more!

I discovered Doodle several months ago and had the opportunity to use it ‘in anger’ for the first time during the planning stage of my first panel podcast.

Doodle allows you to publish potential dates and times onto the internet, publicise that information to your meeting attendees, who are then requested to select the option(s) that best suits them. A cut off date can be applied to the Doodle which means that you can be getting on with the more important things in life, whilst your meeting attendees are only taking 30 seconds out of theirs to select their preferred times.

Throughout the process you can drop back in at any time to see which option(s) are shaping up as the faves. Once the window of voting has closed, Doodle will even tot up which option is the most preferred.

Here’s a quick overview of how easy it is to set up.

So over to you..

Are you currently using this tool yourself, if so what have your experiences been?

If this is the first time you have heard about it, can you see any occasions when you might find it useful?

Why not share your thoughts with everybody via the comments section of this blog post…

View the original article here

Podcast #7: What does good elearning look like?

Craig chats with Fiona Leteney on the subject of the new Media City e-learning showcase that she has implemented. The aim of the showcase is the pursuit of excellence, and the desire to inspire and share best practice so that e-learning can always be viewed in a positive light.

Download podcast in mp3 format: What does good elearning look like?

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Shownotes

Music Source.

View the original article here

My first book review…

I’ve always said to myself that I would never write a book review, until the day that I had pored in the (no doubt) significant effort that it would take write a book myself. A sort of ‘who am I to criticise‘ perspective.

That was until this weekend; allow me to explain.

I have been looking for a non-fiction, work-related book to read for some time, to break up the months of fiction reading I have been doing. I started to gravitate towards ‘Designing mlearning‘ by Clark Quinn, however I was out off by one of the 1-star rating comments that had been made. (I tweeted about this experience and since then the book has received 2 x positive reviews). Given that the book was quite expensive for a self-purchase (even on Kindle), I decided to look for something else….

Fortunately for me I popped into work the next day (it was a weekend) and lo-and-behold, it was sitting on our library bookshelf – Result!!

I’ve only got 2-3 chapters into the book, however I have decided to stop reading and start again.

Why?

Well because Clark has very cleverly asked a small number of questions at the end of each chapter, which I think is a great way of providing a period of self-reflection and ‘action planning’ for the reader. So great an idea in fact, that my plan is to write a blog post after each chapter in which I will briefly explain what the chapter covered, but more importantly I’ll answer the very questions (where possible) that Clark asks and will then turn the tables on you ‘Dear Reader’ and ask them of you..

…. stay tuned for Chapter 1.

View the original article here

Engaging The Unwilling Learner – Live Blog from #LT12UK

Mark Berthelemy – Capita

Poor outward comms from ‘us’

Poor intrinsic motivation to listen to the poor comms (from the learner)

We put too many infrastructure blockers in place!

Possible solutions to that, may be?

Leave blockers in place and put support in placeuse simpler systems

Push people towards intrinsic motivation

Don’t we want learners to pull content down because they want to?

We may be good at designing the intervention, but we aren’t so good at communicating around the intervention. We should take a leaf out of our Comms department book, maybe even merge the departments, after all aren’t we trying to achieve the same goal?

Management should set:

And set the vision that learners are expected to identify and source their learning opportunities

Gareth Williams Cambian Group and Information Transfer

Branded their training using the word ‘achieve‘

Poster campaignsMerchandiseBrochure for all sitesPromos movieRoadshow presentationsArticle in company newslettersRegular board reports

Here are the results so far

View the original article here

Training is about telling people what they should and should not do…

…. now before you all set up a car-share and drive up to Cheshire with pitch-forks and burning torches baying for my blood,

I must stress that the title of this blog post does not reflect my own thoughts. Allow me to explain…

I work in a highly regulated Industry which is not only regulated by several Industry specific bodies, but like everybody else, by the Health & Safety Executive.

Given the extremely high importance which we apply to safety, we have a Compliance Department which contains a number of H&S Advisers, who interpret the various rules, regulations and red tape and then provide guidance and direction to the organisation on how to meet those rules and regulations.

Over the past few years I have on occasions found myself at odds with some of these advisers over the fact that best-practice L&D thinking/practice doesn’t always fit with HSE ‘training delivery‘.

So it was not without some self-interest that I brought the forthcoming eLearningNetwork event, Innovation in Compliance Training to the HSE’s attention via their Twitter account. It was my hope that they would attend the event and gain a flavour as to how L&D professionals were attempting to enhance competence and not just ‘tick boxes’. Whilst also allowing people such as myself an insight in what exactly the HSE require; is it a box ticked to cover a backside, is it an intervention that has a real chance of being transferred back into the workplace, or is it both? I really wanted to hear what they wanted and not how their wishes were interpreted by workplace providers.

At the time of writing this post I have not received any indication as to whether they intend to attend or not, but what they did send me was this document (isn’t that kind of them).

Like I said training is about telling people what they should and should not do……

Now I know why I have been having such an uphill struggle

View the original article here

Podcast #22: I have no idea where this podcast is heading…

Craig is joined by Zak Mensah for an impromptu chat about meeting people on Twitter, the similarities and differences between the education sector and corporates, the pros and cons of prefixing ‘learning’ with a range of letters, weelearning, ‘mobile’ and just about anything else that comes to mind!

Listening time: 31 mins

Subscribe to the podcast in mp3 format: I’ve no idea where this podcast is heading…

Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

Shownotes

Music Source.

View the original article here

From Anti-Social to Social, all in a day!

I was fortunate today to participate in one of Jane Harts Masterclasses entitled ‘The use of social media in Learning’, but before I get on to that I desperately need to ask the following question

“What part of ‘Quiet Coach’ don’t people understand on Virgin Trains”?

I spent the best part of 2 1/2 hours this morning sharing a train carriage with Wayne and Waynetta Slob and their kids from hell!!!

Alarm Bells started to sound in my head when Waynetta went to the buffet car at 0817hrs and returned with 2 x cans of lager for Wayne (are Virgin even allowed to sell alcohol at that time?) The kids language was more colourful than Josephs amazing technicolour dreamcoat and from somebody who spent 16 years in the Army, believe me, I’m not shocked easily… but from toddlers!!!!!

At about 0900hrs I reached critical mass following Waynetta threat to knock Waynes “fu###ng head off” so I slapped the table and asked them

“what part of ‘Quiet Coach’ don’t you understand”?

To which I received the following response

“why don’t you fu###ng shut up”

Considering that my challenge to them had been the first words I had spoken since I got on the train several hours earlier, the irony of her response was not lost on me

so from the anti-social… to the social…

The rest of the day was far more enjoyable as a result of participating in an interactive, on-line masterclass facilitated by Jane Hart. Discussion took place around the 5 various types of learning that takes place within organisations, Jane Harts website does an excellent job of expanding on this subject.

Throughout the day Jane posed a number of questions relating to our understanding and use of social learning platforms, not in the usual verbal manner of posing questions, but via Twitter. It was then over to us to tweet our responses either within small groups or as individuals. I will update this post with the Twitter transcript as and when it is available.

I found this to be a really clever facilitation method as it not only allowed us to delve into the subject of social media and informal learning but allowed us all to get some quality ‘Twitter time’ under our belts.

I used my new Flip Ultra camera throughout the day to capture feedback from some of the delegates, uploaded the video to You Tube and then tweeted it back out to the group – all within an hour!

All in all, what started out as a nightmare of a day, turned into an extremely positive experience brought about by a well facilitated event, insightful information and great participants.

UPDATE – Jon Ingham has blogged about the workshop here.

View the original article here

Online overload?

Tomorrow I’ll be participating in Day 1 of a 2-day online activity entitled the Virtual Learning Show.

Here’s why I’m getting involved:

The titles and content of the sessions interest me (although I’ve been let down in the past in the gap between what was promised in a synopsis and what was delivered in the event itself)I’m interested to see ‘how’ some of the ‘big names‘ facilitate their sessions as I’m always up for stealing a few ideas!If I’m brutally honest though, what I’m really interested in is whether it’s feasible to run a days worth of online sessions. Admittedly they’re not back-to-back sessions, but my experience in the past has always been that of my ‘attention wandering’ towards the end of an hours session…..

How will I cope with multiple sessions over a day?

Am I the only one who finds even the *best* online sessions difficult to engage with beyond 45 mins?

I guess I’ll find out tomorrow…..

View the original article here

Podcast #2 – A quick lunchtime post…

.. I’m currently sat in Gloucestershire College attending @jamesclay’s Podcasting Workshop.

I’ll blog about the workshop in greater detail shortly, however James has set us a task over lunch of creating a podcast, so without further ado….

View the original article here

From Compliance Course to Campaign Part 2 – Getting ‘buy in’

If you haven’t read this series to date it may be worthwhile doing so in order to set the context for this post…

As previously alluded to, one of my perceived areas of challenge in moving compliance training from a course to a campaign, had been the buy in from the SMEs/sponsors/Compliance team.

The 8 x subjects mentioned in the previous post were distributed over 4 SMEs/sponsors. All bar one of them wholly bought into the idea of replacing a stand-alone course with an ongoing campaign approach. The 4th sponsor was bought into the campaign approach, but didn’t want to move away from having a self-contained course wrapped up in a SCORM object.

Here’s a short video outlining the questions I asked to each SME/sponsor.

OK, I’ll admit to some artistic licence when producing this video, but it fundamentally follows the thinking that I tried to get the SMEs/sponsors to consider, which was the juxtaposition between the importance of the subjects and the method of delivery.

Keep on reading this series of posts to discover how I communicated what we wanted, engaged with suppliers and (in the fullness of time) the end result!

If you’d like to discuss how we may be able to work together to bring about a fundamental change in the way your organisation delivers its mandatory training, then please get in touch.

View the original article here

Going Mobile in the Public & Private sector – Live Blog from #LT12UK

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

View the original article here

#LMS Confusion…

… is probably the best way of describing how I felt after reading some preliminary findings from the ‘LMSwishlist‘ that Redtray have been conducting.

If I’m honest I’m not a big fan of all the L&D online surveys that seem to be doing the rounds nowadays for 2 reasons.

There seems to be about 1 survey a month (at the very least)! Can’t somebody just say “you know what, I’ll cover ‘em all Guys”Reading that 87% of senior executives would consider utilising xyz technology if it added value to the bottom line, doesn’t really float my boat or add much value to what I do.So it was with some trepidation and apathy that I glanced over the ‘Ten LMS Features Most L&D Experts Don’t Really Care About‘ and boy-oh-boy am I glad I did!!!I’ll let the Storify below outline my confusion and if I’m honest incredulity (not a bad word for a Sunday afternoon). Suffice to say that I’m dying to find out what the 10 features Experts DID care about are!!!Were you one of the ‘experts’ that participated in this survey? What were your reasons for submitting some of the responses you did? I don’t mean to be nosey, but come on…. you ‘don’t care’ about compliance? About RSS feeds? About language packs? About managing your budget?You’ve GOT to tell me what I’m missing here….

Image Source

View the original article here

Getting Beyond Bullet Points (visuals only)

Once again, I consider myself extremely lucky and privileged to have been asked to speak at the Learning and Skills Group Annual Conference earlier this month at London Olympia.

I always try to facilitate a session that (I hope) has  immediate take-aways for anybody that has attended. I believe that there are enough people speaking at a strategic and theoretical level about L&D and it’s associated disciplines without me throwing my hand in too, so I always try to ensure that I do what I can to offer what I call a ‘Monday morning quick win‘ i.e. something that can be implemented immediately (or at worst very quickly back in the workplace) following the attendees return to the ‘real world‘!

This time around I wanted to offer people the next step in improving their presentations. I get the feeling that there are more and more people who understand the need to move away from bullet-point riddled slides but are not sure exactly ‘what’ should replace them.

It was this uncertainty that I hoped to address during my session by showing some examples. It is these examples that will form the basis of my next few blog posts:

Part 1 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visuals only

Part 2 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points with visual and audio

Part 3 – Bringing in the backchannel

Part 4 – The Learners Voice

Part 5 – Getting Beyond Bullet Points live recorded podcast

Part 6 – Tools and resources

But let’s get things started, by having a look at the Slideshare presentation below. At first glance it ticks all the boxes in terms of reducing the bullet points and using images to illustrate my story, but there’s something missing. It would be great if you could take a few minutes to progress through the slides and leave your thoughts in the comments box below……

View the original article here

What Learners Want – Part 3 – The ‘marketing’

If you haven’t read this series to date, it may be worthwhile doing so in order to set some context.

Having agreed upon the questions that would be asked in the survey, I went through a short period of validating the questions with colleagues and QA’ing the survey before deciding on a survey ‘launch’ date of 25/02/13 with a window of 5 weeks complete it, leaving a survey end date of 01/04/13.

I knew that in order to maximise the responses to the survey the marketing and engagement leading up to the survey launch and indeed during the launch would be critical.

Here’s a brief rundown of the activities that took place up to and including the launch of the survey

w/c 04/02/12 - Our HR Director (who is also the sponsor for this initiative) wrote a blog post explaining why he believes it is critical for people to participate in this survey and the benefit that both they and the overall business will gain from it. This blog post was featured in both our intranet and our weekly global magazine. A link to this article was also the ‘weekly announcement’ on the L&D homepage of our internal collaboration platform.

07/02/12 – A series of Focus Groups took place throughout the day during which 23 people from various areas of the business, representing our global workforce, from Directors downwards, participated in 1:1, group and telephone interviews. These interviews were conducted by myself and Laura Overton and allowed us to gather anecdotal, ‘free text’ responses to back up the hard data that the online survey would be gathering.

In order to maximise the ‘keenness’ demonstrated by the Focus Group participants we decided to provide them with immediate access to the online survey as opposed to making them wait for the ‘official’ launch date some 2-3 weeks later. We also hoped that it would increase the chances of those people recommending the survey to their colleagues once it was widely available.

w/c 11/02/12 - I produced a short video explaining how the survey would be distributed and the format that it would take. This video was featured in both our intranet, our weekly global magazine and became the ‘featured video’ on the L&D homepage of our internal collaboration platform.

w/c 18/02/13 - We are fortunate to have a number of info-screens distributed amongst our offices so a simple TV advert using static image and text was displayed throughout this week on a ‘looping basis’ advertising the launch of the survey the following week and directing people towards the previously written artcicles.

Learner Survey infoscreen advert

w/c 25/02/13 – The survey officially launched. My organisation no longer sends ‘organisation-wide’ emails (although that doesn’t explain why I keep getting ‘scheduled maintenance’ emails, for systems I have no access to!), so we were reliant upon our previous comms and an intranet article once again from my HR Director, this time the article included a link to the LSG magazine that mentioned the learner survey that we were undertaking. A link to this article was also the ‘weekly announcement’ on the L&D homepage of our internal collaboration platform.

We also commenced a series of ‘floor walking’ exercises during which we visited every desk over the 6 floors and 2 buildings ouf our Brighton location. We left a small ‘calling card’

Learner Survey desk-drop cards

on each keyboard as seen in the photograph above, which contained a link to the survey itself (this has been obscured in the photo). It also provided us with a wonderful opportunity to speak to people face-to-face about the initiative and answer any questions that they may have.

From a personal opinion, I took 2 things away from the floor-walking exercise:

People were surprised, but very welcoming of the fact that L&D were getting ‘out and about’ within the business.Very few of the people that I spoke to (there were 5 of us involved in the floor walking) had seen the articles that had been placed on our intranet, in fact a lot of people said that they rarely, if ever visited the intranet.

In my next blog post, I’ll explain how we maintained the momentum of the initial marketing campaign and started to drip-feed weekly survey findings to people via some simple animations.

View the original article here

My day playing at marketing at #AMC13

Earlier today I attended Another Marketing Conference in order to try and (as I said in this previous post) gain a different perspective on ‘changing behaviours’ from outside the L&D bubble that I’ve found myself living in.

Readers of my ‘Small Chunks‘ post will know that instead of trying to capture every piece of information that is conveyed during conference sessions I always try and identify ‘small chunks’ that I can take away and work on as opposed to HUGE strategic-thinking pieces.

09:30

You can’t have too much data! or can you?

Peter Waggett
Emerging Technology, IBM

Data is everywhere and it is now easy to capture information on our customers and prospects. Getting beyond the hype associated with Big Data requires understanding of the data and knowledge to turn it into something actionable. This talk will discuss the issues associated with the practical and responsible use of Big Data and detail future trends.

My takeaways from this session:

Peter told us the story of ‘Millenium Challenge‘, a US Military exercise in which the ‘friendly’ force mulled over its data for so long that the ‘opposing’ force just went ahead and ‘destroyed’ several key US assets. In other words, data analysis is all well and good, but without any ‘action/decision’, well…… it’s just…… data analysis! This is something that I’ll research further and if tenable, I’ll keep it up my sleeve should it ev er look like I’m in danger of being forced into ‘analysis paralysis’!

Peter talked us through the Jeopardy / Watson exercise (as he put it, Siri on steroids!). He reckons that in 5-6 years this level of semantic technology will be on the High Streets – another nail in the coffin for L&D or another wonderful opportunity?

10:00

What Nokia did next

Richard Murphy
Global Director of eCommerce, Nokia

For years Nokia was the most desirable brand when it came to mobile phones. However, the smartphone revolution shook things up.

Consumers have changed and so has marketing. The pace of change is accelerating, putting more pressure on organisations to embrace this new digital reality and transform the way they market. How Nokia embraced this new digital reality will offer comfort and inspiration to all of us trying to change our approaches and cultures.

My takeaways from this session:

Richard identified the physical commuting routes his bosses took into work and bought  the posters/advertising space along that route! The feedback from his bosses was great!

Whilst I have no need to go that far, I do think there is some value in locating a lot of my mandatory training campaign material within eyeshot of our Directors office door, not only to ‘big up’ what we’re doing, but more critically to encourage the cascade of the messages from Director level.

10:30

Seamless brand building

Julie Strawson
Director of Marketing, Monotype

A look at how technology can challenge your brand, why the process of branding is changing and how to deliver reliable on-brand experiences at every consumer touchpoint.

Julie will also reveal the results of a new piece of research into how publishing is changing and what’s on offer for advertisers across 100 leading consumer titles conducted by Brand Perfect, Monotype’s community for brands, designers and developers.

My takeaways from this session:

My upcoming mandatory training ‘revamp’ will adopt a campaign approach. Julie reminded us that we need to have a cohesive and seamless experience from one format to another. Many of the videos and animations from the campaign will reside inside our internal collaboration platform, which unfortunately (as it sits in the public domain) requires a login everytime you open the platform up. This isn’t much of a problem when ‘deskbound’ as the platform forms a part of many people’s workflows, it becomes a problem however when I start to encourage people to access the media from their mobile devices as I feel that asking people to ‘log in’ from their mobile device is only likely to create another barrier to the content.

To get around this problem, I plan to dual-host the videos within a Vimeo Pro account. This will allow mobile users to get access to the content quickly and seamlessly as advised by Julie.

11:45

It’s all about ME (Marketing Effectiveness)

Julie Roberts
Marketing Effectiveness Director, TMW

How do we measure our true success? How do we know if we are being effective? And how can we improve? Investing in ‘big data’ is pointless without a concrete effectiveness strategy. Julie will look at, with the increasing amounts of data available, how we should plan, do, check and (importantly) act in 2013.

My takeaways from this session:

I’ll be honest, this was my least enjoyable/useful session of the day which is a pity as this was the one I was hoping to get the most from due to the work I am doing at the moment.  There was a LOT of being talked at, poor slide design, lots of “I’m sure everybody is aware of xyz“, rushing through content etc

So I thought I’d try and glean something from this session….

5 basic questions for marketing

Research – conduct some! (online, panels, in-store)Hypothesise – ask bite-sized questions & build nimble analytical modelsSet parameters – use a simple allocation modelSpecialists – internally & externally, central co-ordinating role & clear RACIs

12:15

Mapping human behaviour with immersive experiences

Jon Dodd
Managing Director, Bunnyfoot

How do we develop products, services and websites that provide customers with a rich, immersive and satisfying experience? What are the little peculiar human behaviours that we need to be aware of and tap into?

My takeaways from this session:

Never consider going into neuroscience!!! Mind. Blown.

Read up on Norman’s 6 Design Principles

14:00

The hedgehog and the fox – and why the social sciences are plural for a reason

Rory Sutherland
Vice Chairman, Ogilvy UK

Recent evidence suggests that our brains – and hence the way we make decisions – may be more variegated than we think – or than we want to believe. One of the implications is that single models of human behaviour may be woefully inadequate, or even misleading. We simply need to accept that a single toolbox may never work

My takeaways from this session:

All models are wrong; but some are useful – and some are dangerous!

Rory suggested

Anybody with a ‘number’, trumps anybody with an ‘abstract noun’ – I’ve had some recent successes when quoting/demonstrating Ebbinghuas’ Forgetting Curve. I’m going to make sure that I have more numbers in my back pocket.

Don’t get bogged down in the attitudinal aspect, make it easy for people change their behaviours and they will construct their own reasons for doing so.

Rory shared this video with us. I can’t for the life of me remember what the context was, but it’s funny so what the Hell!

14:30

Context and content: the two pillars of mobile marketing

Paul Berney
Chief Marketing Officer, Mobile Marketing Association

When it comes to mobile marketing it is vital that we understand how to deliver our content and the role that context plays in how that content is received.

Paul will talk about how the plethora of small screens is changing the way we need to think about our mobile strategies and whether or not we think that it really affects us.

My takeaways from this session:

Include a mobile call to action on my mandatory training campaign material that I can expect people to be accessing via mobile devices. As I’m planning on using Delivr.com to manage my mobile delivery I’ll be able to place the ‘call to action’ on the media landing page as opposed to having to place it on the poster (so can reduce environmental impact, printing costs etc)

I’d been planning to link out to videos / animations etc from physical posters/pop up banners etc, I’m still going to do this, however Paul provided an example of AR enabled sports tickets which has prompted me consider other options for linking the physical world with the online world.

Paul also shared this video with us, makes you think eh?

15:45

Predatory thinking

Dave Trott
Executive Creative Director, The Gate London

One of the most respected figures in advertising, Dave Trott, talks about the importance of the creative spark and how we need to manage our teams and our time to release a little bit more of that inner creative mischief.

My takeaways from this session:

Alas, by this point I had had to dash for my train to start any chance of getting home at a reasonable hour. This is a pity as the tweets that were coming out of Dave’s session suggested he was ‘plain speaking’ which would have made a nice change from one or two of the other speakers.

My overall observations of the day:

It was blatantly clear from every session that online/digital/mobile was a critical element of any behaviour changing marketing plan. Dare I say it, but the level and depth of conversation far exceeded the conversations that I see at most (not all) L&D conferences, a clear indication (I think) about how far behind we are in our thinking???

I have to admit that at times some of the conversation was above my head. I’m not saying this is a bad thing because let’s be honest I was ‘out of my usual comfort zone’ so I guess it’s to be expected, but it also served as a reminder to check the language and references that I use when speaking to people within my organisation around subjects that are within my comfort zone, but very possibly outside of theirs.

It was a welcome relief to hear that the general approach I’m taking with my organisations mandatory training in terms of creating a campaign around it, is broadly spot on. I strongly suspect that my attendance at this conference will help to tweak some of the ideas we are planning to ensure that they have the maximum chance of hitting home and changing behaviour.

Biggest non-surprise of the day was that there were no other Learning Professionals there (at least none that I could ascertain during the breaks and lunch), which is a real shame….. perhaps next year?

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Never assume…. that the idea you have had (that you think is ‘obvious’) is obvious to everybody!

This was a lesson that was reinforced yesterday, during an exchange of tweets, allow me to explain.

Over the next few years my Organisations is planning to relocate its ‘Training Centre’ (don’t blame me for the name) to a new building. I had a few ideas that I thought might be of benefit during the initial planning/design stages.

Here is an extract from an email that I sent to the building area owner yesterday:

I am aware that the current Training Centre will be relocated to the ‘new building’ at some point in the future and I have some ideas that you may be interested in.

Lose the ICT suite. This only serves to isolate technology from current learning activities as opposed to embedding it within them. It also stands empty for the majority of the time, which is a waste of space and resources. IT access could still be gained by……Provide netbooks/laptops to each learner attending events. These can be kept in purpose built storage/charging trolleys. Coupled with a WiFi connection this will allow learners to connect to the outside world as opposed to relying solely on the knowledge that is being shared amongst the facilitator/delegates, a great example of social constructivism. A modern approach to learning which fits with a modern building.I have also made contact with Professor Stephen Heppell from Bournemouth University who has done some amazing work in redesigning physical learning spaces, most recently for Air Traffic Control training who I know would be able to consult with us.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you require any further clarification on any of these points.

Once I had sent that email, I thought I’d send this tweet

Just contacted L&D team to suggest they 'lose' the ICT suite when the new building is built and provide laptop/netbooks to learners + WiFi.

Which resulted in these tweets in response

@CraigTaylor74 revolutionary. Brings a whole new meaning to 'get out of the classroom' No classroom? RT @CraigTaylor74: Just contacted L&D team to suggest they 'lose' the ICT suite & provide laptop/netbooks to learners + WiFi.

So I thought it might be a good idea to clarify what I meant from my initial tweet and email.

We currently have 3 x training rooms, 2 of which are ‘conventional’ rooms and 1 that is a dedicated ICT Suite

This ICT suite stands empty for approx 95% of the time as truth be told we don’t actually deliver a lot of IT systems training, of course when we do, we need a suitable area in which to deliver it.

We also have a couple of conventional rooms

in which non-IT training takes place and are usually utilised day-in and day-out.

My suggestion of allowing the conventional rooms to absorb the ICT is based upon the following:

As the ICT suite is unused for the majority of the time, it is a waste of not only resources (not least of which is the physical space itself), which is unable to be easily repurposed for other events.The separation from IT and the internet from the conventional training rooms, I believe, exacerbates the opinion that learning and IT are separate from one another, a view that I suspect you Dear Reader do not share?By providing 15-20 laptops/netbooks per room with a WiFi connection (stored in one of those storage/charging trolleys) every room could be quickly repurposed into an ICT suite whenever needed.Most exciting of all however, is the fact that when you place 10 learners and a facilitator into a room you are relying on 11 people’s accumulated knowledge on a given subject. Provide each learner with an organisation approved, WiFi enabled device and all of a sudden that 11 people’s knowledge is now supplemented by access to the internet. Learners can start to realise that learning and personal development need no longer solely rely upon a formal event and a ‘sage on the stage’. Digital literacies can start to be formed and refined.

No cost to the learner in terms of data charges from personal devices, no exclusion based upon the learner being unable to afford a personal device, no waste of physical space by allowing an ICT suite to stand empty, further embedding of learning technologies into what many people consider face-to-face activities.

So what do you think?

Is this another one of my pipe dreams or does it have legs?

Would this work in your organisation?

Why not share your thoughts in the comments box below?

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Back in the ‘speaking saddle’…

… that’s right folks, despite being a dreaded vendor, I have recently spoken at the UCISA Using Social Media For Training event at the kind invitation of the lovely Gillian Fielding.

Gillian and I met several months ago and discussed potential subjects and settling upon me looking at the use of YouTube, whilst other facilitators delved into other areas.

As always, I’d like to share my ‘take aways’ from the sessions that I attended, as well as the content from within my session.

Sue Beckingham - Looking in from the outside: Developing your own windows of opportunity using Social Media.

Sue delivered a great session that I’m sure would have had a HUGE impact on those individuals who were still debating/in the tentative stages of using Social Media. The takeaway for me from this session, wasn’t the content as such, it was the way that Sue delivered that content using Infographics – which Helen Keegan has done a good job of capturing here. Thanks for the inspiration Sue!

Matthew Stephenson – Legal and Policy implications of Social Media

I have to be honest here and say that I didn’t enjoy this session. Whilst I understand that there are implications of using Social Media incorrectly and for that very reason it is important to provide a balanced view during an event such as this, I felt that this particular session involved a lot of scaremongering, which I actually tweeted and which attracted quite a few ReTweets

Some scaremongering taking place here. Suggestions that no1 should push boundaries & should wait for 'top down' direction #UCISASoMe

the notion of not pushing boundaries and waiting for ‘top direction’ seems very ‘old school thinking’ to me and I hope didn’t put any of the attendees off!

Gillian Fielding – Facebook for Facilitating

Gillian took us on a whistlestop journey of a recent ‘QR codes’ course that she had facilitated in Facebook and the successes and challenges that this had brought.

We were then asked to discuss whether the constant changes and updates to Facebook (which, unlike an LMS are obviously out of your control) meant that this platform was unsuitable as a VLE/LMS. Having had some time since the event to reflect upon this question, I feel that as long as the changes/updates haven’t lost any content and still allows the learner to interact with that content then it’s not really a big deal.

Let’s be honest, there will be a few reasons why you are choosing to use Facebook and as long as one of those reasons is because that’s where your learners eyes are then the chances are they have already cottoned onto the changes (as happened with the recent Facebook Timeline changes)

Yours Truly – Using YouTube for Training

Given that it would be somewhat ironic to attempt to do deliver my sessions content without using YouTube coupled with the fact that I only had 30 mins to facilitate my session I decided to record and publish a number of YouTube videos focussing on some ‘less obvious’ uses of YouTube and encourage attendees to view them in advance, interact with them and then use them as a catalyst for conversations during the the f2f session itself – a ‘flipped‘ approach if you will!

My greatest concern over doing this, was that the attendees may not have taken the time to view the content ahead of the session, however of the approx 50 people that attended my session (split over 2 x sessions), only 2 or 3 people had failed to viewed the videos in advance. I’ve no doubt that this was down to the very clear direction provided in the pre-event information.

Here are the videos; I’d recommend clicking through and watching them on YouTube itself, as that way you will be able to read the responses to the videos and more importantly view the video responses that many attendees (and even a few that weren’t attending) took the time to upload.

I even created one on my phone, titled it, tagged it and uploaded it via my phone just prior to my 1st session commencing to show how quickly it can be done, here it is.

Just prior to the event taking place (in fact it was on the train travelling to the event), I discovered a great little trick courtesy of Jane Bozarth’s Social Media for Trainers book that I unfortunately didn’t get time to screencast prior to the event, so I ‘walked and talked‘ the attendees through the trick with a promise to screencast it and post it to YouTube…..

…. as promised!

My next step will be to upload my slides to Slideshare, but more importantly (and time consuming) I’ll be adding some audio to the slideshare to create a slidecast.

Image source

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My #COLF L1 Assignment

As mentioned in a previous post, myself and the L&D team in which I work are undertaking the COLF programme.

Upon completion of each of the 9 lessons/workshops there is an assignment to undertake as well as some additional reading (I’m making some assumptions here as we’ve only just completed the first session).

When the assignment was originally discussed it was indicated that it should be submitted via a Word document, however when I enquired as to whether the submission could be made using any media format (as long as it was accessible by the facilitator), I was pleased to hear that that would be perfectly acceptable (I also suspect that this may become an overt option in the future for participants).

Here’s my first assignment

Additional resources:

What stinks about webinars? – Alison Rossett

Image source

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My first book review…

I’ve always said to myself that I would never write a book review, until the day that I had pored in the (no doubt) significant effort that it would take write a book myself. A sort of ‘who am I to criticise‘ perspective.

That was until this weekend; allow me to explain.

I have been looking for a non-fiction, work-related book to read for some time, to break up the months of fiction reading I have been doing. I started to gravitate towards ‘Designing mlearning‘ by Clark Quinn, however I was out off by one of the 1-star rating comments that had been made. (I tweeted about this experience and since then the book has received 2 x positive reviews). Given that the book was quite expensive for a self-purchase (even on Kindle), I decided to look for something else….

Fortunately for me I popped into work the next day (it was a weekend) and lo-and-behold, it was sitting on our library bookshelf – Result!!

I’ve only got 2-3 chapters into the book, however I have decided to stop reading and start again.

Why?

Well because Clark has very cleverly asked a small number of questions at the end of each chapter, which I think is a great way of providing a period of self-reflection and ‘action planning’ for the reader. So great an idea in fact, that my plan is to write a blog post after each chapter in which I will briefly explain what the chapter covered, but more importantly I’ll answer the very questions (where possible) that Clark asks and will then turn the tables on you ‘Dear Reader’ and ask them of you..

…. stay tuned for Chapter 1.

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