learning re-imagined

The Purpose Driven Leader – Rick Warren on Peter Drucker

“Every social and global problem is a business opportunity in disguise.” - Peter Drucker

A couple of weeks ago we attended the Peter Drucker Centennial conference in Vienna, Austria and had the incredible opportunity to interview and film world thinkers and leaders who were there celebrating and discussing Peter Drucker’s legacy and the future of management and business in the world.  Peter Drucker called himself a ’social ecologist’ - which is to say he focused on understanding and improving human interaction, our constructs in business, government and communities, and that impact on our lives and environment. Another favored definition is: ‘the study and practice of personal, social and environmental sustainability and change based on the critical application and integration of ecological, humanistic, community and spiritual values’

The key words there are ‘integration’ and ‘application.’ Rick Warren, author of A Purpose Driven Life, attended and gave the opening address at the conference and spoke of the three primary characteristics that defined Drucker’s life and work: Integrity, Humility, and Generosity.

These three traits are the antidotes to the three traps of today’s leaders.  The first trap is to segment and partition our lives into work life, home life, sporting life, community-service life, etc., and instead our greatest strength comes from integrating all the disparate interactions, ideas and energies into a unified and integrated whole.  The etymology of integrity is from the Latin integer, meaning wholeness, or the unit of one.  Rick pointed out that the second trap is to focus and try to remedy what we think are our faults.  Often humility is misunderstood to mean acceptance of weakness or inadequacy, when instead humility is freedom from arrogance and pride.  And that intellectual freedom gives way to the ability to recognize the marvelous and to embrace wonder and curiosity.  And then, importantly, to be inquisitive and open to learning.  Rick had a powerful story about how each time he went to visit Peter Drucker and learn from him, he wound up trying to answer and wrestle with Drucker’s own persistent questions.

And finally Rick echoed Drucker’s advice that management and leadership was a liberal art yet a practical calling, and we all need to focus on what we can give and contribute in generosity.  The third trap is to hoard.  It’s no accident that to be miserly with time, energy, resources, talent, etc., is to be miserable.  From Peter Drucker to Rick Warren to you, pause to keep Integrity, Humility, and Generosity ever present.

You can see Rick Warren’s address here.  Doris Drucker’s address starts at about minute 35 and Rick Warren’s presentation at about minute 52.  Enjoy!

By: Shawn Hunter

The Blessing of Abundance

How many courses do you really need in a course catalog?  100? 1,000? 10,000?

The real answer is simple. One.  You need only need the one course that fits the mission at that point in time.  However, the odds that the learner will find the one course needed increase as the depth and breadth of the catalog grows.  Selection saves times and reduces disappointment and frustration. It’s why cinemas have morphed into multiplexes, and food markets are now superstores.  E-learning abundance, therefore, is a blessing for the learner on a mission to fill a knowledge gap.

Abundance is a blessing in another way.  Digital learning offers tremendous advantages over traditional classroom in the variety of course content that can be made available.  Since e-courses have no dependency on physical space, live instructors, or specific time slots, an organization can make a virtually limitless variety of course topics available to learners with a simple mouse click.  Not only can courses address different topics, but different learner levels, perspectives, and learning styles as well.  We can think of this as the abundance of relevance.

And from the organization’s perspective abundance is a blessing.  First and foremost because the organization cannot begin to reliably predict the needs of a large population of users.  The workforce changes, individual needs change, projects change and the nature of the organization’s focus and mission changes.  In today’s world, where entire economies can change dramatically overnight, learning has never been more critical to ensuring organizational agility. And because technology makes abundance possible, it is almost always preferred to the alternative, scarcity. 

Moreover, we are living in an era where abundance has become economically feasible.  This is especially true when an organization begins to calculate the often hidden costs of trying to administer a small tightly focused set of courses for small subsets of the workforce.

But there is a caveat. As abundance increases, so too must the ease of selection.  That is, the ability to find what you are looking for. When the catalog is small, a loose grouping can work.  As selection grows, a more sophisticated organizational structure, i.e. a topical hierarchy, is required. A course catalog is a hierarchical listing and when delivered digitally it offers users greater flexibility for efficient navigation including well-understood conventions like nested subcategories, cross-linking, and cross-binning content that can be relevant in multiple categories.  

By far, however, the most important tool when navigating a vast catalog is search.  Users have been ‘googlized’ and have come to rely on search as a primary way to navigate large content domains.  So, search engine strategy is a key requirement for enabling your workforce to effectively leverage a wide and deep e-learning catalog.  In a sense, search is the sibling of abundance, and together this pair can power an organization’s development strategy exponentially over traditional classroom learning options.      

By: John Ambrose

Marketing is an Invitation to Learn

 

I am so fortunate to work with talented and articulate professionals.  I am amazed at the level of talent in the Learning Consultant organization.  One of our Learning Consultants, Beth Brock, wrote an article on marketing for the ASTD magazine  Getting the Word Out. Her ideas on marketing are simple and straight-forward. 

Beth once worked for a supervisor who believed that if they developed exactly the right training content, learners would just somehow materialize.  Her team consistently produced well-designed programs with thought-provoking content but the courses never saw much action.  Frustrated, they kept asking themselves why.  It wasn’t because the courses weren’t good or relevant – they were.

It was because nobody knew they existed.

The moral of the story is this:  no matter how good your program is, it is of little value if your audience doesn’t know about it.

For some, the idea of marketing conjures up images of used car salesmen hustling unsuspecting customers.  Indeed, many training professionals scoff at the need for marketing, believing that good training should be able to sell itself.  Ultimately it can, if it is supported by a good communication strategy that promotes the program’s value to the right people.  If you think of marketing as an opportunity to educate rather than sell, you will be providing a valuable service to your audience in helping them understand about how your programs and services can address their critical business needs.  All it takes is a little creativity and a healthy dose of insight into your audience’s needs.

The possibilities for promoting learning are limitless, but the realities of budget, time, and staffing constraints will of course ultimately determine what you do and don’t do.  Just remember that marketing doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming to produce valuable results. 

One of the easiest and most inexpensive ways to promote your learning programs is to get previous students to do it for you.  Whenever I shop online, I always read the customer reviews.  As a consumer, they help me make informed purchasing decisions.  Student testimonials work the same way by helping others envision how your program will benefit them.  Praise from a satisfied customer is not only one of the easiest forms of promotion – it is also one of the most powerful.  When individuals hear from a peer and colleague how a particular program was helpful to them, it means more.  Weave learner feedback into your course catalog, or better yet, enable individuals to post comments online and learning becomes an Amazon.com-like experience.

To develop a learning program and just assume that learners will show up is a bit like throwing a party without sending any invitations.  Think about marketing and promotion as an invitation to experience great learning.  Marketing is where the SkillSoft Learning Consultant team can help steer you in the right direction.  Our customers have access to the robust Client Community, where we share templates and tools that customers have used.  If you give your audience a compelling reason to participate, chances are they will.

By: Lori Neblung

Epiphany on iTouch

OK, let’s first establish the context – I am a Baby Boomer (well, really, on the very youngest edge of that generational divide).  My peers think that I’m a technology genius since I work in elearning, after all – but really I feel that I’m falling behind every day.  I asked for an iTouch ^TM for my last birthday so that I can read MapQuest on the big screen to find my way around, and because I love the way you can zoom in on photos with that finger-stretch action.  Last night, after a ten hour day of working on my laptop, I shifted from my home office to the living room sofa to transition to “leisure time.”  (There really is a connection to learning coming soon.)

The home page of my iTouch has a YouTube icon.  As a way of getting acquainted with my iTouch, I was systematically  tapping all the icons and menus, including YouTube.  I’ve launched very few YouTube videos, because I’ve not been too interested in the Dancing Babies and other “educational” subjects you hear about on the evening news.  But I eventually tapped the “Most Viewed” icon and what came to the top of the list was a video called “Carl Sagan – A Glorious Dawn” (Cosmos Remixed).  Now this title appealed to my passion for academic inquiry, and so I launched.

The music, the images – captivating.  I mean, a DJ re-re-remix, you know? But within, the pearls of wisdom: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”  I’m mesmerized by the quality of the image on the screen, the clarity of sound through the ear-buds: “A still more glorious dawn awaits, not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise – a morning filled with four hundred billion suns, the rising of the Milky Way.”  Science, poetry and thought, together in the palm of my hand: “The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean; recently we’ve waded in, and the water seems inviting…”

Leisure, learning, recreation, learning, music, learning, imagery, learning…blended til the boundaries are impossible to discern.  (This being my own poetry, almost as mystical as Carl Sagan’s.)  The point, dear reader, is that the immediacy of the learning opportunity is what drew me into my learning moment.  And so we observe the very equal importance of content and delivery.

This is the idea behind SkillSoft learning portlets.  Portlets bring access to learning out of the Learning Management System and into the familiar online sites where employees already spend time.  In the course of day-to-day work, an employee is one click away from problem-solving information or personal enrichment.  With all the priorities competing for the time and attention of today’s knowledge worker, convenient access is as critical as engaging content.

By: Darlene Frederick

e-learning 101

e-learning can provide benefits at all levels of an organization. Because I work in the industry, the benefits are obvious to me. But recent blog posts by two of my colleagues, Rachel and Julie got me thinking about those benefits again and about the fact that maybe some of them aren’t so obvious to the rest of the world. So for my second blog post, I thought for my second post a little return to basics might be in order.

For learners, e-learning resources provide the ultimate in self-service education. E-learning resources are “always on” allowing learners to access materials where and when it best suits their schedules and their learning needs. A diverse library of learning assets also means that learners can choose the best learning modality to match their learning style. And because learners can return to materials over time, they can review and refresh their learning from other e- or live learning experiences increasing the impact of all your training efforts.

From an organization standpoint, e-learning can often provide a cost-effective means for increasing the impact of training within your organization by making resources available to more people. Workshops, seminars, and other classroom-based training options can be highly effective . . . but they can also be costly and they require learners to spend time away from the job. As a result, you may have to limit participation in these live events to a select portion of your audience. With e-learning you can provide learning materials to more of your audience with minimal disruption of their work.

Obviously these are just a few of the benefits to using e-learning within an organization. What other benefits of e-learning are important to your learners or to your learning organization?

Next week I’ll be heading off to present at Learning 2009 in Orlando Florida. I’m looking forward to spending time immersed in the great learning culture and learning from and sharing with my colleagues. If you’re there, look me up. We can compare notes . . . or hit the rides!

By: Tim Hildreth

Halloween Candy and Bite Sized Learning

On this Halloween eve I am thinking about (and of course eating) candy. Like many people I tend to take a treat from the various bowls around the office, a Hersey’s Kiss® from here, a MaryJane® from there. (By the way, check out this great interactive Hershey’s site where you can build a custom Kiss and email it to a pal.) For some reason, stopping to enjoy some bite-size bits throughout the day seems perfectly acceptable.  Of course I wouldn’t dream of eating an entire regular size candy bar.  That would be fattening! So much for logic.   

In some ways we’ve seen a similar trend in learning.  Many learners are put off by the idea of a “regular size” course.  Two-three hours seems like an awfully long time in the middle of a busy work day.  But a smaller serving of learning that’s right at your fingertips is fine.  In the past several years SkillSoft has introduced a number of learning assets that are shorter in duration than traditional courses, and the response from customers has been a resounding “More please!”  So, you’ll see SkillSoft continue to produce a stream of learning products that fit into our learners’ hectic schedules, everything from one-hour courses to the diminutive Learning Sparks.  And of course we’ll continue to expand our on-demand resources such as Books24x7 collections and Leadership Development Channel—great for quick answers and inspiration.

Don’t get me wrong, our customers still want and need in-depth learning resources to support compliance, certification and other mission-critical needs.  Just like every once in a while I give in to the urge for the full size Baby Ruth® (and be sure to take a moment and give in to the urge to check out this hysterical Baby Ruth site!).

By: Julie Ogilvie

So many emails, so little time: Read the ones that matter

We all get so much email these days; we have a work email address, a home email address, and other varied and sundry accounts to manage such as FaceBook and Twitter.  Although spam filters help with some of the true junk mail, I know that I still get a lot of things I barely read. 

Once in a while, a great summary update comes along and I just LOVE it when it shows up in my inbox.  If you do not subscribe to the alert email in Books24X7 titled “Books24x7 New Title Notification” it is the one email I absolutely love to get.  It feels like a virtual trip to the neighborhood book store.  The email originates as a Books24x7 subscriber, checking the boxes for topics that are important to the individual.  I personally love only getting titles that matter to me.  It shows little icons of the newly released titles that are on Books24X7.  Running through it takes all of 45 seconds to see what is new in my area of interest.  It helps me stay current on things happening in areas that matter to me.

One day recently, I was scrolling through the titles I saw the photo of a colleague of mine who recently recorded a “Quick Talk” for the Leadership Development Channel series.  Pamela Meyer is an author and business owner who also teaches at DePaul University, which is where I met her.  It gave me a great reason to connect with her and catch up.  It was also great to see what she had to say.  I also find books I want to dive more deeply into for my personal and professional needs, all in a short time frame.  If you do not get this email weekly, be sure you go to your Books24x7 profile (Click the “Settings” tab then click “Email Options”) and set one up.  It is a great “coffee break”!

By: Lori Neblung

Two Studies (Large and Small) Support Online Learning Effectiveness

It’s not unusual to run into people who listen politely to my spiel about how great online learning is, and then ask “the” question:  is it as effective as classroom training?  It’s a loaded and somewhat unfair question (from my point of view); loaded because it suggests the classroom is the gold standard against which all other forms of learning are judged, and unfair because it’s too broad to be meaningful.  

You could ask the same question of any learning modality.  Is the classroom effective?  Well, depends on the quality of the teacher, the material being taught, even the classroom itself.  You could also ask what the definition of “effective” is.  Are you referring just to individual learning outcomes, or are you asking if it’s effective in supporting overall business goals? Are you taking into account the constraints most companies have for cost and resources?  Have you considered how the learning will be delivered to global populations?

So often my response to “the” question is the answer: “it depends.” That sounds like a cop-out.  But thanks to two recent studies, I can answer that not only is online learning as effective, it has been found to be more effective than classroom training.

The first study that comes as music to the ears of any online learning proponent is the US Department of Education’s “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning:  A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies.”   In a review of 176 studies conducted between 1996 and 2008, the researchers found that online learning is actually more effective than classroom.  It’s great to finally have statistical research showing the effectiveness of online learning, and undoubtedly this will come as a shock to some folks who would assume that face-to-face is always superior. 

In many ways the study provokes as many questions as it answers.  One of the key findings was that the use of video does not improve learning outcomes.   It made me wonder about what kind of video had been studied.  It also questioned whether the positive results for online learning had resulted from the fact that the online courses took place over a longer period of time.  They may have been on to something there.

The second recent study of note was conducted by the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital of McGill University.  This study looked at how different types of training resulted in different types of memory formation.  Specifically the study looked at the difference between training events spaced out over time and “massed training.”  The study found that “trials distributed over time were superior at generating long-term memories.”

The McGill University study was looking at memory formation at the molecular level, and the study subjects aren’t ones that we see much of in the corporate world: a type of mollusk called Aplysia (aka sea slugs).  However, the researchers believe that the chemical process of memory formation is likely to be the same from mollusks to higher life forms, so the results are something to pay attention to.

What struck me about the second study is that for years now, many of our customers have been talking about the desire to deliver learning in smaller chunks, spaced out over time.  They may not have had a scientific research study on memory formation to back them up, but they were definitely headed down the right path.

Just don’t mention to your next class of high-potentials that their learning program is based on sea slug research. They might not be flattered by the comparison.

By: Julie Ogilvie

Many training organizations I speak with are intrigued by Enterprise 2.0 technologies and their promises for creating a viral collaborative community within the organization.  At last count, there were more than 400 companies out there touting ‘e2.0 technologies’ … everything from wiki and blog products, to products that promise a safe Facebook-like or Twitter-like platform that can be rolled out behind your firewall.

Admittedly, some of these products are quite impressive, but they all share one common thread.  They are all enabling technologies. Just software.

Early efforts with these products are mixed at best.  Many early adopters or experimenters with these technologies report a lack of success in creating a sustainable collaborative environment. 

McKinsey, in a white paper entitled Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work,published in February 2009, observed the same phenomenon and described it this way:

“Perhaps because of the novelty of Web 2.0 initiatives, they’re often considered separate from mainstream work…Thus, using Web 2.0 and participating in online work communities often becomes just another “to do” on an already crowded list of tasks.”

Does this mean that social environments can’t work in the enterprise? Emphatically no.

But I am suggesting that there is a better way. 

There are three ingredients to creating a sustainable collaborative environment:  1) enabling technology; 2) abundance of content; and 3) enthusiastic community. When brought together, these three ingredients can produce a delicious collaborative result.

So the call to action for those learning professionals seeking to leverage collaboration to drive new levels of learning is simple.  Think about starting not with the enabling technology, but with your existing content and your existing active community of users who are already coming to your learning destination.  For instance, if you are currently using a product like Books24x7 from SkillSoft, why not think about the millions of pages of professional reference content that you already license as “seeds of discussion” for a thriving collaborative environment.  

Social collaboration offers great potential to help informal and formal learning, but the most effective path to accomplishing this will be to leverage what’s already working.

By: John Ambrose

Workplace Learning: the new “Classroom without Walls”

I was assembling a piece of “big box” furniture for my guest room last week, and the experience presented a metaphor for job-related learning.  (It helps to break out of our traditional assumptions about professional development and observe what happens in everyday life, where we’re actually learning all the time.)

In this case, I thought about how my learning process started, well before I opened the box and spread the pieces of my purchase over the guest room floor.  1) My learning started with realization of a need: my guests had no place to unpack their clothing and other stuff.  2) I turned to the Internet to learn what was available to solve my problem.  3) I engaged in “elearning” as I explored various products available from online vendors.  In most cases, this was pure knowledge transfer – how did the product look, what were the specifications, how much did it cost?

The real point of my story is that I never 4) read the “how to” instructions until my purchase arrived at my door and I prepared to actually do something with all the “learning” that I’d consumed previously.  The manufacturer had wisely included that learning resource for use “on the job” – along with the phone number of a mentor at Customer Service to help me work through the task.

In a very practical way, this experience of selecting, purchasing and assembling my guest room cabinet reminds me that our concept of a blended learning program must extend beyond classroom or online events and include the tools and resources that support the trial-and-error application of new skills on the job – wherever the work is actually done.

I’ll continue to share ways that learning can extend to the classroom-without-walls in our next encounter…

(By the way, I did get the piece assembled on the first try with no injury to self or property!)

By: Darlene Frederick