National Learning Week

We will get back to ISD, the ADDIE model, and analysis in my next post, but this is a good time for a break because it’s ASTD National Learning Week. The local ASTD chapter I serve sponsored and prepared for this by asking members to provide some learning tid-bits that fit within an acronym we defined for L-E-A-R-N:

L - Learning

E - Evaluation or eLearning

A - Assessment or Activities

R - Reinforcement or ROI

N - Networking

They are posting and distributing responses out to members with one letter of the acronym for each day of the week. Here is my submission:

L:
At some level, we are all in the business of Learning, but what do we mean when we refer to learning, behavior, or training? The following definitions can be useful from an operational standpoint... Let’s start with our subject - the learning-participant or learner. The assumption is that learners behave in a certain way until they learn to behave in another, through some sort of experience. Let’s define behavior as something that a participant does that can be observed and measured. If so, then we can agree that any measurable change in behavior is some sort of learning. That being said, the training experience needs to be the purposeful cause of that measurable change in behavior so that what is learned is consistent and applicable.

E:
Some Evaluation questions to ask your self after learning events or better yet - to prepare for during course development: Do they like it? Do they know more now than they did before training? Can they do more now than they could before training? Are work-performance outcomes better now than they were before training? Are departmental or business metrics better now than they were before training? How am I ruling out confounding variables (reasons “other than training” for your evaluation data)?…

A:
What to analyze when Assessing the need for training: Define the sponsoring organization’s/department’s mission, goals, vision, culture, obstacles to performance and budget for training. Identify and what learners need to do in “an ideal world” for their job-roles in terms of tasks, knowledge, skills, and abilities. Validate what learners are actually doing in “the real world” for their job-roles in terms of tasks, knowledge, skills, and abilities. Identify the capabilities and limitations of your learners in terms of education-level, experience, and available technologies. Use assessment results to design and develop content that focuses on the gap between the ideal and real world requirements while accounting for organizational needs and learner capabilities.

R:
When designing and developing content, apply Reinforcement principles to learning events as ABCs:

A = Antecedents – or what happens before any change in behavior, in our case a learning event that is aligned with the learner’s needs and is effectively delivered before the she meets the learning objective.
B = Behavior – is what the learner does; ideally, meeting the learning objective.
C = Consequences – these are are anything that happens after behavior that can either reinforce (increase the likelihood) or punish (decrease the likelihood) that what was learned will be applied on the job. Build and deliver activities that reinforce: Tell’em > Show’em > Let’em Try It (guided) > Let’em Apply It (unguided) > and Test’em. Also, use reminders, job aides, feedback, and supervisor support to reinforce behavior back on the job.

N:
Use social Networking and Web 2.0 tools to learn: Blog to broadcast subject matter expertise; micro-blog to keep your team abreast of newly learned knowledge and skills; write wikis to share and update reference-able knowledge-bases between team members; video short info-bytes or demonstrations from vid-cam at your desktop for your corporate YouTube. Don't have a budget? Get permission to use free tools like Blogger, WordPress, PBwiki, WetPaint, Twitter, Google Docs and Reader.

Happy National Learning Week!