Free T&D webinars for April

Spring has sprung, and crocuses and daffodils are brightening the scene. Infuse your April with some springtime energy by signing up for one of the free webinars being offered this month. We hope they will inspire and motivate you.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013, 9AM – 10AM PST: Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era

Good companies—those that are good to their employees, their customers, their communities, and the environment—make more money than their less worthy competitors. Yep—it’s true. Come hear economist Dr. Laurie Bassi share the hard-nosed evidence, describe the convergence of forces behind these findings, and discuss what this means for HR and learning professionals. You’ll leave armed with powerful new evidence and a fresh perspective you can use to get the resources you need to help your organization be “good company.”

Thursday, April 11, 2013, 10AM – 11AM PST: State of Sales Training, 2012

This webinar is based on the ASTD/Blackboard research report, State of Sales Training 2012. Presented by Lee Perlis, senior marketing manager for Blackboard ProEd, and Paul Terry, general manager for Blackboard ProEd, the report provides insight into sales training efforts within various organizations so that members of the sales training community can tailor their programs to help each sales team member reach his or her full potential. Nearly all the respondents (94 percent) reported that sales training helps them do their jobs better.

Monday, April 15, 2013, 11AM – 12PM PST: How to Make Yourself Indispensable with Strengths-Based Career Choices

Learn the secret to becoming indispensable by shaping your career around your natural strengths. Hear from HarperCollins author Ingrid Stabb on using the Enneagram StrengthsFactors model, how to communicate your type advantage in the workplace, and how to use your strengths to give yourself an edge.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 5AM – 6AM PST: Mission Critical: Managing Compliance Training in Europe

Almost every organization has to deliver some sort of compliance training. In some companies, it may be as simple as communicating the internal rules. In others, it can be a matter of life or death. Companies in Europe and around the world face constantly changing regulations from a myriad of external bodies and agencies—with different drivers, strategies, and assessment methods. Join David Wentworth and Ray Ruff as they walk through some of the results of Brandon Hall Group’s 2012 Compliance Survey, identifying global trends and looking at some of the challenges facing companies in Europe and beyond, as well as best practices across various industries.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 10:30AM – 11:30AM PST: Net Smart: How to Thrive Online

How can we use digital media to help ourselves and our learners become empowered participants rather than passive consumers? In his latest book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, Howard Rheingold shows how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and—above all—mindfully. Howard’s book outlines five fundamental digital literacies: online skills that help with attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information and network smarts. In this session, Howard will talk about how attention works and how we can use our attention to focus ourselves and our learners on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information; the quality of participation that empowers the best of bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online-community participants; and how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013, 11AM – 12PM PST: Transitioning a Federal Agency Business Unit to Telework

Many people in the federal government and beyond have heard about the USPTO's wildly successful telework transition program. Danette Campbell, Senior Telework Advisor for USPTO, and her team will present best practices for transitioning a business unit to a telework environment. They will walk you through the challenges and successes of implementing a telework program, using the USPTO as a case study. This session will provide you with useful ideas for managing such transitions in your own organizations.

Thursday, April 18, 2013, 10AM – 11AM PST: Executive Onboarding: Manage through the Stages of Onboarding, from before the First Contact Well Past the First 100 Days (Free for ASTD members)

Leadership transitions are some of the toughest challenges people face—professionally and personally. Nearly half of new leaders fail in their first 18 months. Often, those failures are the result of crucial, devastating mistakes made in the very beginning. The business world is changing rapidly; we’re all new leaders all the time, and we must treat the next 100 days as the first 100 days of the rest of our careers.

Learn how you can take charge, build or rebuild your team, and deliver better results faster than anyone thought possible—and how you can coach others to do the same.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013, 11AM – 12PM PST: Leveraging the Best in Culturally Diverse Professionals (Free for ASTD members)

Your workforce is becoming more diverse, whether your company is nationally or globally focused. As your professionals expand in culture, race, ethnicity, or gender, it’s critically important to know how their motivations, communications, and needs are different. You can no longer use one “playbook” to effectively manage this changing workforce. This webcast will address some critical factors for success in motivating and managing the 21st-century workforce. 

Wednesday, April 24, 2013, 11AM – 12PM PST: Solving the 5 Biggest Challenges of Coaching and Developing Leaders (Free for ASTD members)

When you think about coaching developing leaders, do these questions swirl through your mind?

• What is the best way to get leaders to trust me?
• How do I get them to share what's really going on?
• How do I get inside their heads?
• How do I help them get results with speed and impact?
• How do I prove to them that I can help them?

This webcast will address each of these challenges. You will also learn how to establish a deep level of rapport with leaders and establish their trust, access their personal and unscripted thoughts, help leaders get results quickly, capture their undivided attention in a convenient and practical way, and demonstrate proof of your effectiveness and their results.

Thursday, April 25, 2013, 10AM – 11AM PST: Thinking of Replacing Your LMS?

Your business needs are changing fast, and so are the demands placed on your current learning technology. Learning leaders must stay a step ahead of their business, but that can be difficult when dealing with antiquated technology and limited delivery options. Do you have that nagging awareness that it’s time to switch your learning technology, but haven't wanted to face the reality of doing so? This webinar can help reduce your fear of change and increase your odds of success. Join us to discuss best practices from hundreds of successful transitions, including:

• Insights on business strategies for change
• Selecting solutions for the future, not just today
• A technology migration framework, highlighting both the risks and the rewards of migration
• Tips for preparing your organization and data for a straightforward change
• Insights into managing expectations and change-management goals
• Award-winning case studies and practical steps to help you make a successful transitio

Thursday, April 25, 2013, 11AM – 12PM PST: Needs Assessment for Organizational Success

Needs assessment gurus Roger Kaufman and Ingrid Guerra-López present the four tiers of needs assessment, as detailed in their latest book Needs Assessment for Organizational Success (ASTD Press, 2013). As the authors state, "Analysis is important and useful only if you have evidence that what you are dealing with is the actual problem. Otherwise, you might think you are dealing with the actual problem, when in fact you are merely dealing with a symptom. The consequence is moving ahead, only to find that you implemented useless and expensive cures." Learn what is meant by Mega, Macro, and Micro needs assessments, and discover how to put an ounce of good assessment to work for your organization.

A game-changing day

If you haven't yet heard about Apple's announcements at today's Apple 'Educational Event', watch the keynote here. The focus of the talk is what they call interactive textbooks for the iPad - but these 'textbooks' are more sophisticated than a lot of basic eLearning, allowing for video, images and even quiz questions. The FREE tool they have launched to build iBooks, iBooks Author, appears to be easy to use, especially if you're familiar with the iWork tools like Keynote and Pages. Have some content in a Word doc? Just drag and drop into iBooks Author and it will build a book based on the styles in the doc. Drop in pictures, video, even HTML 5/Javascript widgets. Publish very simply to iBooks and share. And this is just the tip of the iceberg - there are so many cool features like note taking, glossary, study cards and more.

It's easy to see how this is a game changer not just for K-12 and university students, but also the world of adult learning. The focus might be on kids right now, but there is so much potential for application in the workplace, especially as iPads gain more traction in the business world. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for iBooks and iBooks Author - I can't wait to try it out!

Monitor and Evaluate

#9 of 9 in our weekly succession planning blog post series:

Our guest blogger, Paul Riley is life-long learner of Organizational Leadership and Change who applies systems thinking and community development principles to help people work more effectively together within the complex human systems we create.

This week’s blog post focuses on the last principle of the 7 principles of successful Succession Planning: #7: Monitor and Evaluate. Succession planning and leadership development programs should be continuously monitored and evaluated to help stakeholders understand what works, why it works, and what impact it’s having on the organization’s leadership pipeline. People often think of evaluation as an activity that’s done at the end of the program. However, it’s important that evaluation plays an integral role in the process from the beginning, during program planning and implementation, with a focus on long-term outcomes and continuous improvement.

Program evaluation starts with the end in mind. In other words, you must identify the goals and long-term outcomes of the program to understand what you’re evaluating. I like to start by establishing an explicit program theory to describe how and why a set of activities are expected to lead to anticipated outcomes and impacts. I often use a logic model with the organizations I work with to show the chain of reasoning by connecting the program’s parts using “if...then” statements to illustrate a sequence of causes and effects. The planning process begins with a discussion among stakeholders about strategies that will contribute to the program’s desired results. In essence, this conversation is about the program’s theory.

The logic model I mentioned above is an iterative tool that provides a simple framework which is revisited throughout the program planning, implementation, and evaluation phases. The terms ‘logic model’ and ‘program theory’ are often used interchangeably because the model describes how a program works and to what extent. The W.K. Kellogg foundation provides a very useful Logic Model Development Guide,  which was developed for the non-profit sector but is particularly useful for evaluating programs designed for organizational and behavioural change, regardless of sector.

Although a logic model provides a useful framework for establishing and presenting the program’s theory, the framework doesn’t provide much detail about how to select indicators. So for this, I recommend incorporating frameworks into the evaluation program that are designed for evaluating training, succession planning, and leadership development programs. For instance, Bennett’s Hierarchy describes seven successive levels to evaluate training and development programs. The hierarchy starts with inputs and activities at the bottom, which Bennett asserts are the simplest level of evaluation that provide the least value in determining whether a program is effective. At the top of the hierarchy are social, economic, and environmental outcomes, which Bennett believes represent the highest aim for educational programs and are often the most complex to measure. Kirkpatrick also provides a model to evaluate training programs, which includes four levels: (1) participant reaction, (2) learning, (3) behaviour change, and (4) organizational results. William Rothwell, author of Effective Succession Planning, proposes an adaptation of Kirkpatrick’s four-level model to evaluate succession planning programs, which includes: (1) customer satisfaction, (2) program progress, (3) effective placements, and (4) organizational outcomes.

Combining the frameworks proposed by Bennett, Kirkpatrick, Rothwell, and others, provides different lenses through which to look at the various aspects of the program’s theory. While the logic model provides a general framework to guide program planning, implementation, and evaluation, these other models offer a more targeted focus on establishing indicators to measure program outcomes and impacts. Incorporating multiple evaluation methods is likely to offset weaknesses and complement strengths of different models, and it allows evaluators to confirm results, which enhances the integrity of program evaluation by producing more accurate measurements. Mixed-method evaluation programs are also more likely to reflect the needs of program participants and stakeholders, by looking at things from a variety of perspectives, which is likely to produce better evaluation designs and more targeted recommendations.

One of the main challenges I encounter when establishing an evaluation program is that people in the organization often feel like they don’t have the time or the resources to devote to evaluation. They are too busy delivering succession planning and leadership development programs to reflect on whether what they’re doing is working. So, I recommend enlisting the help of participants of the program. Participative processes, such as empower evaluation, increase the likelihood that evaluation will happen, because users who are actively involved are more likely to understand the process and feel ownership. Furthermore, you can kill two birds with one stone by achieving program outcomes while facilitating data collection and analysis.

Creating flexibility in the evaluation process might also help to increase participation. For instance, I often work with organizations to develop a small “menu” from which users can select indicators for evaluation. This allows stakeholders to establish measurements that reflect their concerns, whereas an exhaustive list of indicators may be perceived as cumbersome and unrealistic in terms of data collection. An evaluation process that’s both flexible and participative will help to accommodate the many different contexts, goals and outcomes within the organization, and facilitate learning.

Stakeholders must be engaged in the monitoring and evaluation process from the beginning and throughout the life of the program to ensure indicators measure what is important to the organization, rather than focusing only on what is easily measured. Without clear, timely, accurate, and visible indicators, stakeholders will struggle to work toward the program’s goals, because they won’t have a clear understanding of what impact activities, outputs, and outcomes are having in building a leadership pipeline. Active participation ensures that assessment is rooted in the direct experiences of the organization and grounded in the organization’s vision, values, goals, and objectives.

Be sure to check out our other Succession Planning blog posts in this series:

What’s so important about Succession Planning? 

The 7 principles for successful Succession Planning

Aligning Succession Planning programs with the organization’s strategy

Combine Succession Planning and Leadership Development

Include all levels of the organization

Provide opportunities for practice, feedback, and reflection

Promote Openness and Transparency

Develop Simple, Flexible, and Decentralized Processes and Tools

Does the speed at which technology is changing and the pace of our modern world mean it’s okay to be a sloppy writer?

I’ve been thinking about this question lately, and a book I was reading on my Kindle prompted it all. I’m a voracious reader and I run the gamut from serious tomes to what I call “candy” reading in my choices. I was recently reading a book that admittedly leaned toward the latter category, one that I’d chosen to read as it was receiving some acclaim for huge sales and a strong following even though it was only available for e-reader devices.

After the first couple of chapters it didn’t seem that promising, but I pressed on to see if it would improve. In the end I put it down around the halfway point. It wasn’t due to the quality of the story – the reason I had to stop reading was that the number of typos, grammatical mistakes and punctuation errors was so distracting that I could no longer focus on what was happening in the story. I was amazed at this sloppy writing, and thought that I couldn’t be the only person to notice – we’re not talking about an occasional misplaced apostrophe, this was rampant. Scanning the Amazon reviews, I saw only a couple of comments about the editing amongst hundreds of four and five star reviews. I started wondering if people generally thought this was acceptable because it’s an e-book, but then I remembered a series from a well-established author and a major publishing house that started to drive me crazy because of the mistakes in printed versions.

It’s all around us, too – just look at your local newspaper’s headlines and I bet you’ll find something, and prepare to have a good laugh if you read the real estate listings! Regardless of whether these things bother me personally, I’m interested in whether it’s a sign that people in general just don't care so much any more. Is it more important to get the latest information as quickly as possible on the device that’s most convenient? I think the general population would say for some types of information, like urgent news, yes. Could acceptance elsewhere be an evolution of language? I guess that part will only be revealed through time.

And how does this all relate back to learning? Over my years in the learning profession I’ve really come to appreciate the input of a good editor, and it's something we like to factor into every project at Limestone. No matter how good the instructional designers are, the value of fresh eyes on course materials, a report or other words we use is that they see what you have missed with being so absorbed in the content. The editor is often unfamiliar with the subject matter as well, so they can provide useful feedback on the clarity of communication.

Timelines are always tight, though, and the day or two it takes to turn around the edit could be really valuable elsewhere, or mean an earlier delivery. When people seem to have so much tolerance for a lack of editing, could we cut it?

Talking to colleagues and associates has affirmed my answer of no. Learning materials do need to be held to a higher standard. People will excuse the occasional typo, but ongoing errors reflect badly on the content itself, leading people to think it’s of poor quality and may not be accurate. Also, mistakes can lead to confusion and misinterpretation, which does not support a positive learning experience! There are places where it’s okay to relax standards, but when you really need to get the message across and the face time with your audience is limited – whether onscreen or in a classroom – editing your material thoroughly is worth the effort. 

In writing this post I decided to take a look back at the page for that e-book on Amazon. I see that an announcement was made a couple of weeks ago that the book is “NOW PROFESSIONALLY EDITED”. Maybe there’s hope for editing yet!

Update on 2011-11-29 19:20 by Paula

Thanks for your thoughts Jane.  As professional writers of any sort, we spend a lot of our valuable time putting down thoughts and ideas for others to read. It's a challenging balance to be both efficient but still take the time to do the editing that our work deserves. Does our credibility suffer when we distract our readers with grammar and punctuation errors?  I think so.

Combine Succession Planning and Leadership Development

#4 of 9 in our weekly succession planning blog post series:

Our guest blogger, Paul Riley is life-long learner of Organizational Leadership and Change who applies systems thinking and community development principles to help people work more effectively together within the complex human systems we create.

This week’s blog post focuses on the second principle of the 7 principles of successful Succession Planning: #2: Combine Succession Planning and Leadership Development. Succession planning is not only about recognizing leadership gaps that exist in your organization today, but also identifying future leadership needs and creating solutions to address those needs. To meet the challenges of a changing environment, organizations need to plan and work toward establishing capability to adapt. Therefore, it’s essential to build a sustainable pipeline of people with the knowledge, skills, and experience to lead the organization into the future. Although it’s not always possible to accurately predict the future, organizations that put serious effort into planning will generally be more successful at anticipating needs before they arrive and have the capability to effectively navigate the changing landscape.

Organizations are more likely to develop deep and enduring leadership bench strength when they create a long-term process for managing talent that combines succession planning with leadership development. These processes are complementary in that succession planning traditionally focuses on identifying candidates to fill potential or anticipated vacancies and leadership development focuses on preparing candidates for promotion. In my experience, organizations often treat these as separate and independent processes, and they typically place more emphasis on identifying succession candidates than developing them. However, placing increased emphasis on development has a positive impact on retaining top talent, because employees feel engaged and motivated by opportunities to learn and grow, and they are more prepared to successfully move to the next level in their careers.

One of the best ways to identify and develop future leaders is to provide a variety of challenging work assignments. Research suggests that exposure to novel and challenging situations in the workplace promotes development of leadership skills and has a sustained impact on leadership behaviour. And an added benefit of experiential learning is that the organization often achieves its strategic objectives while simultaneously facilitating learning and development. Because a person’s early career is a critical period for learning, organizations should use experiential learning methods to expose emerging leaders to a broad range of problems and situations. Exposure to these experiences will not only equip emerging leaders with the knowledge and skills to adapt to changing business needs, but it will contribute to a sustained corporate culture and institutional memory.

We probably intuitively know that experience is the best teacher, since it’s estimated that organizations rely on experiential learning to provide as much as 70 to 80 percent of developmental experiences for their managers. But the key is to be intentional about it by designing processes and systems to help employees identify potential knowledge or skills gaps and then assign them to projects or positions within the organization that will meet their learning goals. It’s also important to provide opportunities for feedback and reflection to facilitate learning, but I’ll talk more about that later in Part 6 – Create Opportunities for Practice, Feedback, and Reflection.

It’s important to remember that succession planning and leadership development programs have a common goal: to get the right people in the right positions at the right time. By combining the two processes organizations are able to establish a sustainable leadership pipeline and ensure that they’re both identifying and developing top talent.

Want to know more about the Seven Principles of Succession Planning? Stay tuned for Part 5 of this series, when I discuss the third principle – Include all Levels of the Organization.

Be sure to check out our other Succession Planning blog post in this series:

What’s so important about Succession Planning?

The 7 principles for successful Succession Planning

Aligning Succession Planning programs with the organization’s strategy

More than a smile sheet

#8 in our training evaluation blog post series:

Digging into training evaluation uncovers a lot of debate and discussion around the value of level one evaluation data.

In my last evaluation post in this series, A little evaluation can be a dangerous thing, I wrote about the potential dangers of only using level 1 evaluation data to determine the effectiveness of learning back in the workplace. There are many articles, blog posts and forums dedicated to discussing the merits (or lack thereof) of using level 1 evaluation. I personally believe that a level 1 smile sheet has value to the learner as it allows them to reflect on their learning and provides a vehicle for their thoughts and feelings. But I also believe that we need to keep in mind that it’s only one small measurement in the overall evaluation process. Much less weight should be on the “qualitative” data gathered from a level 1 smile sheet and much more weight and importance be given to level 4 evaluation results - the impact training has on the business results.

Whether simple or complex, level 1 end-of-course evaluation forms (a.k.a. “smile sheets”) are used in the majority of training courses offered by organizations – in over 91% of organizations according to a 2009 ASTD Value of Evaluation research study. But does your level 1 end-of-course “smile sheet” go beyond the basic questions to capture data that will help your organization measure evaluation levels 2, 3 and 4?

A well-designed level 1 evaluation plan should measure not only learner satisfaction but also their level of engagement and relevance to their job. The goal is to incorporate statements or questions that focus the learner on higher levels of evaluation and get them thinking about how the new learning will benefit both them and the organization after the training event is over.

There are some simple changes you can make to your level 1 evaluation form that can provide further value:

• Consider using a 7, 9, or 11 point rating scale to provide a richer level of feedback. Only label each end of the rating scale, rather than labeling each number on the scale (e.g., 1=strongly disagree and 7=strongly agree).     
• Make all evaluation statements or questions learner-centred. For example, rather than “The instructor provided debrief activities for students to demonstrate their learning”, instead use “The debrief activities helped me to effectively practice what I learned”.        
• Consider adding statements or questions to the course evaluation form that measure engagement and relevance. This helps to focus the learner on levels 2, 3 and 4. Some examples include:
  
  •  I had sufficient opportunities to contribute my ideas. (level 2)
  •  I estimate that I will apply the following percent of the knowledge/skills learned from this training directly to my job. (Provide a % scale from 0% to 100% in increments of 10.) (level 3)
  • This training will improve my job performance.(level 4)  

You can see that just a few tweaks to a level 1 evaluation leads to insightful information that can improve your training process.

Stay tuned for more upcoming blog posts with tips and strategies for other levels of evaluation and be sure to check out our other evaluation blog post in this series:

• Measuring the Value of Learning

• Our favourite training evaluation resources

• Refreshing the Kirkpatrick Four Levels evaluation model – Kirkpatrick Then and Now

• 8 tips for creating a successful evaluation strategy

• Selling the importance of evaluation

• How much to evaluate?

• A little evaluation can be a dangerous thing

A little evaluation can be a dangerous thing

#7 in our training evaluation blog post series:

I was reading an interesting article recently called, “Are you too nice to train?” by Sarah Boehle and she included an interesting case that I’d like to share:

Roger Chevalier, an author and former Director of Information and Certification for ISPI, joined the Century 21 organization as VP of Performance in 1995. The company trained approximately 20,000 new agents annually using more than 100 trainers in various U.S. locations. At the time, the real estate giant's only methods of evaluating this training's effectiveness and trainer performance were Level 1 smile sheets and Level 2 pre- and post-tests. When Chevalier assumed his role with the company, he was informed that a number of instructors were suspect based on Level 1 and 2 student feedback. Chevalier set out to change the system.

His team tracked graduates of each course based on number of listings, sales and commissions generated post-training (Level 4). These numbers were then cross-referenced to the office where the agents worked and the instructor who delivered their training. What did he find? A Century 21 trainer with some of the lowest Level I scores was responsible for the highest performance outcomes post-training, as measured by his graduates' productivity. That trainer, who was rated in the bottom third of all trainers by his students in Level I satisfaction evaluations, was found to be one of the most effective in terms of how his students performed during the first three months after they graduated. "There turned out to be very little correlation between Level I evaluations and how well people actually did when they reached the field," says Chevalier, now an independent performance consultant in California. "The problem is not with doing Level 1 and 2 evaluations; the problem is that too many organizations make decisions without the benefit of Level 3 and 4 results."

Industry studies appear to support his words. A 2009 ASTD Value of Evaluation research study found that 91.6% of the organizations in the study evaluated training at level 1, 80.8% at level 2, 54.6% at level 3 and 35.9% at level 4. 4.1% did no evaluation at all! Of the 91.6% that evaluate at level 1, only 35.9% said this level had high or very high value. Yet of the 36.9% of organizations that evaluated results (level 4), 75% said this level had high or very high value.

ASTD’s findings are somewhat alarming because they suggest that the majority of these organizations are going no further than level 1 evaluation, if they’re evaluating at all. We could assume from this data that the level 1 information gathered by these organizations’ training teams is the primary or maybe the only measurement used to justify their training efforts. Qualitative data and comments get rolled up into an overall total and used as a benchmark to measure the effectiveness of the trainers and the training programs being offered. Level 1 is used in isolation with no knowledge or thought about how the training programs address (or don’t address) key business needs. So why do companies do this?

I agree with Boehle’s theory that it comes down to two factors. First, Level 1 “smile sheets” are easy to do while levels 2, 3, 4 and 5 may appear to be costly, time consuming and potentially confusing (where do we start? How do we do it?). Secondly, if stakeholders (e.g. CXOs, internal clients and business partners) don’t demand accountability, why evaluate further? Digging in further may uncover negative results - if all appears to be working well on the surface, no one is asking questions and learners are happy, why rock the boat?

It’s been our experience that the best practice training and development teams recognize that they have a responsibility to ensure that the programs they produce and deliver are aligned with the organization’s needs – to demonstrate how training is contributing to the success of the organization. They need to show proof that training is really making a difference - clearly identifying how organization’s bottom line is being positively impacted and how business needs and issues are being addressed. Using only level 1 data to measure training and trainer effectiveness is dangerous and tells very little about how much learning is actually taking place on the job and how business results are truly being impacted. And sooner or later, this will catch up to the training providers and ultimately to the organizations they work for. Training budgets will be cut, work will be outsourced, and organizations will struggle to keep up with their competition in a tight and highly competitive economy.

Be sure to check out our other evaluation blog post in this series:

• Measuring the Value of Learning

• Our favourite training evaluation resources

• Refreshing the Kirkpatrick Four Levels evaluation model – Kirkpatrick Then and Now

• 8 tips for creating a successful evaluation strategy

• Selling the importance of evaluation

• How much to evaluate?

Make your learning more engaging without spending a penny

Talking to learning professionals we know and attending workshops, webinars and conferences, we hear it over and over again – how can I provide engaging and effective training with little to no budget? It’s a challenging question. Here are a few ways to add interest and engagement to your learning that may not cost you a penny...

1. Talk to other people in your organization to see if there’s potential to pool resources. Even if you’re dealing with different topics, there may be an opportunity to share resources, templates or components that have been successful. Working together to create organizational standards can also streamline development, saving time and money.
2. It’s a fact that 80% of workplace learning happens informally. Put on your detective hat and find out how this is happening already – are there ways to enhance this with free or inexpensive tools? For instance, is there a subject matter guru that everyone turns to for your topic? Could you record her answering frequently asked questions and distribute them as a weekly podcast or post them on an intranet site? If you can record from your computer, the only cost may be your time.
3. Become a storyteller – an inexpensive yet effective technique to engage learners and make them understand the importance of your topic is to tell real stories about the subject within the organization. For instance, if you’re developing policy and procedure training, gather stories from real employees as to how they are important to their work. Using a conversational tone and adding emotion enhances the stories.
4. Take your own pictures and video. There’s a place for professional A/V teams, but you can do a lot yourself with a digital camera you already own or borrow that beats stock photos any day because it’s real. Follow a subject matter expert around to capture what your learners really need to know in its true context. Tools you probably already have on your computer or can easily download for free will let you crop your photos to focus in on the action.
5. Make a point to seek out and regularly follow a few blogs on the topic as  they’re great for new ideas. I particularly like the Rapid eLearning Blog (great ideas for eLearning even if you don’t use Articulate) and recently started following Gamestorming (awesome focused games for face-to-face). The eLearning Learning blog aggregates posts from other bloggers, so it’s a quick way to get ideas from a variety of sources. I find using a free tool like Google Reader or NetNewsWire makes managing the blogs I follow a snap.

And as for getting that bigger budget - we’ve found that the first step is working on ensuring your training is clearly aligned with business needs. Then, add evaluation so you can prove to senior management that what you’re doing is really worthwhile and has a clear impact on organizational performance and bottom line. Dollars follow proven results!

Musings on mobile learning

Just this morning I attended a thought-provoking webinar with Gary Woodill, author of Mobile Learning Edge.

Near the beginning of the session, Gary mentioned the Marshall McLuhan quote “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future,” and discussed how this is apropos for learning in general and mobile learning in particular. This really struck a chord with me. When I think about it, even in modern times we are always trying to fit the latest advances that come to learning into the box of what we already know. For instance, eLearning can too often be like the PowerPoint presentation we knew from classroom training, trying to recreate that classroom experience in an online environment instead of taking advantage of the capabilities of technology to create truly engaging and interactive experiences that relate to the learning material. Now we see the same happening as mobile learning gains more traction: looking in the rear-view mirror at eLearning and trying to repurpose it for a smaller and more portable delivery mechanism, instead of embracing the true potential at our fingertips.

Gary also talked about the changing definition of mobile learning over the last 10 years. I think that it’s not only the definition of mobile learning that is undergoing change, it’s also our deep-down understanding of learning itself. Yes, as modern people involved in adult learning, we understand that learning is not tied to a classroom, or even a desktop computer, but do we (and the C-levels in our organizations) truly accept that a valid learning event can take place in two minutes using Twitter – for example, to poll contacts for the best way to do solve a problem?

One of the examples Gary gave that really resonated for me, and shows the power we have with mobile learning, is the story of a doctor travelling in Africa who came across a teenager with a severely infected arm due to a hippopotamus bite. The doctor recognized the need for an amputation at the shoulder to give the teen a chance at survival, but he’d never performed such a surgery before. After unsuccessfully trying to reach help by phone, he ended up connecting to a colleague on vacation by text message.  The doctor learned to perform the operation through a series of text messages from his colleague, and was able to successfully amputate the limb. Now if that’s not a poignant example of the value of mobile learning and the need to embrace the tools and technology that can make it happen, I don’t know what is.

Read about Gary Woodill on his website here. I'm looking forward to reading his book!