» Here’s Why Unlocking Your Course Navigation Will Create Better Learning The Rapid eLearning Blog

» Here’s Why Unlocking Your Course Navigation Will Create Better Learning The Rapid eLearning Blog:

Most of our corporate compliance training rules are very loosely defined and vague - on purpose, giving us room for interpretation and implementation. A simple example is rules about HIPAA and data security/passwords. Ask 50 different hospitals what that means and how they implement it, and you’ll get 50 different answers.

Does this type of training have to be as boring and wasteful (of time) as it currently is in most organizations? NO! We can do better. One simple method is to allow your users to “test out” of the courses.

We are required to have annual “training” on certain core topics for compliance reasons. We allow users to go straight to the test. If they pass, there’s no need to force them to view the course at all. We are working on re-doing the course navigation to allow users to go to the sections where they are weak (I hope to automate this process).

One reason trainers and educators get a bad rap is that we waste people’s time - a lot! (Think about your most boring college professor who loved to lecture on and on about something you cared nothing for, but you were required to take the course! He probably felt very powerful preaching to his captive audience. Remember how you wanted to skip that class each week?)

We do it because it meets our need for power. “You absolutely MUST view every single slide and read every single paragraph and diagram, because I say so and ‘the law requires it.’”

Yeah right! We use that as an excuse to meet our own power agenda. If we align ourselves with the organization’s business goals we will see that many of our courses can become much more “Lean” (ever heard of Lean Management?) - including our statutory or compliance courses!

Cathy Moore: Dump The Drone!

Another great presentation from Cathy Moore. A must read.

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The Art and Science of Rapid E-learning Design

I was discussing Adobe Captivate on a Moodle forum here. This got me thinking about workflow processes for rapid e-learning. This is sort of a touchy subject for those of us who create content because it is both a science and an art. We are designers (whether we realize it or not). We are artists (whether we like it or not). We are also psychologists of a sort as well as workflow analysts.

I think the best instructional designers realize the balance of science and art. We must stay abreast of the latest research in the field of instructional design and educational psychology. We must also keep current with the latest trends in Web 2.0 and software applications. This is the science part. We must also be aware of the art of design: layouts, typography, color balance, human-computer interfaces, etc. More than that we must be aware of the business use of our skillsets: our job is to help businesses become more effective/efficient and improve their bottom lines. We do this by providing excellent training materials which yield a performance improvement for employees (we hope).

If we've done our job well, we've helped employees improve their lives by improving their workflow processes. We've made the supervisors happy because productivity increases. It's a win-win-win situation. I love it! This is exciting and fun stuff to me.

So I'm going to outline my current workflow process for creating rapid e-learning content in a future post. I've learned much from Tom Kuhlman at Articulate on his blog (you should subscribe to it!).