Date : Thu, July 4, 2013 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM AEST

• What does excellence of Learning mean to you at an Personal, Team, Function and Organisational Level ?
• We discuss some models frameworks that define/measure excellence ?
• Do we aim for overall excellence or can we only aim for excellence in parts, projects or solutions ?
• Does Learning Function aspire for excellence or does it never have the time and focus to get there ?
• Where do Australian companies stand in terms of Learning Excellence ?

Panel

• Julie Catanach – Executive Manager Learning, Organisational Design and Development at Suncorp
• James Digges-  Director at Best Practice Local Government & Responsible Impact
• Zane Brown – Head of Advice Education, MLC
• Jeevan Joshi – Moderator – Jeevan is the producer of Learning Cafe and Director at KnowledgeWorking. Jeevan is an experienced Learning and HR practitioner who is passionate about enhancing the capabilities of Learning professions and the digitisation of the Learning function.

It tanked. But my confession is not that it tanked. It’s that I knew it would.

You see, when you have been in the e-learning game for as long as I have, you learn a few things that a surprising number of my peers in the broader L&D industry don’t know – or perhaps don’t want to know! This insight bubbled to the surface during my little m-course experiment. It was doomed to fail and it did. To explain why it failed, let me share with you m-learning’s dirty little secrets…

SECRET #1. Most people won’t train outside of business hours.

Some may say most people won’t train inside business hours, but let’s remain generous. The working day is typically defined as Monday to Friday, 9:00am-5:00pm, or thereabouts. An increasing number of people are working earlier and/or later than that, so any time outside of this zone is becoming increasingly precious. Off-duty hours will be spent on family, hobbies, sports, mowing the lawn, watching TV and sleeping. It won’t be spent on anything resembling more “work”.

SECRET #2. Most people won’t use their own mobile devices for training.

They prefer to use them for fun, like playing Angry Birds or updating their Facebook status. Besides, if they’re paying for the data out of their own pocket, they won’t chew it up on something that can wait until they’re back in the office.

SECRET #3. Smartphones are a pain.

There are so many makes and models and operating systems and screen sizes and versions, it’s futile trying to accommodate them all. Believe me, I’ve tried. In my m-course experiment I found it straightforward enough to resize the canvas of the original online course and retrofit the content, but while it looked OK on my iPhone, it was problematic on the Galaxy and Lumia. Oh the quirks! Apple’s incompatibility with Flash is widely known, but then there are the audio and video formats to consider. I also spent countless hours repositioning graphics so they didn’t obscure the text after they were published (what you saw was not what you got), while the “next” button inexplicably refused to work on the iPhone (whereas its text link equivant did).

While authoring tools on the market claim to deploy to multiple devices at the click of a button, I didn’t have the time to trial them, nor the budget to buy one, nor the inclination to learn it, nor the naivety to believe it anyway. Moreover, I think I would have been going down the wrong track. But more on that later…

SECRET #4. LMSs aren’t smartphone friendly.

For all the rhetoric in the LMS market about mobile learning, IMHO they are designed principally for the desktop. While some have mobile apps, not all do, and the user experience has been the subject of criticism. That makes a system that is notoriously arduous to navigate at the best of times highly unlikely to be navigated “on the go”.

SECRET #5. Most people prefer the big screen.

Size matters. The restricted dimensions of a smartphone screen compromise the user experience, and hence the learning experience.  Of course, people will use their smartphone for training if they have a burning need and that’s the only device they have on them; but given the choice, they’ll go large every time.

When you combine all of these secrets, the message is clear: The majority of online training is done on desktops, laptops and tablets. Armed with this knowledge, the question arises as to how you can use it to your advantage. Obviously you use it to inform your m-learning strategy! May I suggest the following tactics…

TACTIC #1. Think informal first.

Do you really need to push out yet another course? Instead, why not host the content on a mobile-friendly platform like an intranet or a wiki that the learner can access, browse and search via their device of choice. This approach empowers the learner to pull the learning at their discretion, wherever they are, at the time of need. It replaces the notion of training “in case” it will be required with performance support “when” it is required.

TACTIC #2. Create the one course to rule them all.

If you must push out training, forget about smartphones. No one wants to use them for that, so they are an unnecessary complication. Instead, concentrate your efforts on the one course that will fit onto desktops and laptops and tablets, based on HTML so it will run across operating systems. You may still need to accommodate peculiarities such as video formats, but with a bit of clever coding you can make the same course device agnostic.

By employing these tactics, we start to distinguish m-learning from the broader notion of e-learning.

As John Feser articulates so elegantly, and furthered by others such as Clark Quinn, m-learning is more than just doing a course on a mobile device. Such a narrow view misses the point.

The point is that m-learning facilitates learning in context, in the moment.

For example, consider a telecommunications technician working on an electrical box out in the burbs. If he needs to find out which wire should plug in where, he’s not going to go back to the van, turn on his tablet, log into the LMS, search for a course, register into it, launch it, then click through page after page until he stumbles upon the right bit.

He needs to know right here, right now! So he uses his smartphone to look up a step-by-step guide. Quick and easy.

This is m-learning. It is indeed a form of e-learning, but it’s a subset thereof. It’s not just learning on the bus or at the airport; it’s much richer than that.

This post was originally published on Ryan’s blog, E-Learning Provocateur

Watch recording

Date : Thu, May 23, 2013 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM AEST

How is Learning Design doing in Australia ? Are we good ? Are we innovative ? Do we improve our Learning Design processes ? Or are we simply too rushed to think about good design and incorporate improvements ?

We take a look at Learning Design in Australia at two levels, 1. Learning Design (techniques/frameworks) and 2. Learning Design Process (including maturity and continuous improvement). We share some of our research, talk to an experienced panel, hear from organisations about their Learning Design process and as always state the Learning Cafe point of view. We cover:

Learning Cafe Research 

• What are the common approaches for Learning Design ?
• Do the design approaches differ for technology enabled learning ?

Panel Discussion

• What is the current Learning Design approach and process used in your organisation ?
• Have we restricted ourselves to simple sequential design frameworks which are inadequate for complex and integrated learning ?Are our Learning Design processes mature and do we keep improving them ?
• Is Learning Design mostly focused on compliance or systems training ?
• Does  the capability of Instruction and Learning Designers need to be enhanced ?
• Are the change approaches for Learning meeting the needs to be responsive and agile ?
• What are some of the some of the emerging models of design outside of learning ? Can be borrow from game and social media design ?

Panel

• Mike Keppell -Executive Director and Professor, Australian Digital Futures Institute ,University of Southern Queensland. Mike has a long professional history in higher education in Australia, Canada and Hong Kong. He was Professor of Higher Education and Director of the Flexible Learning Institute at Charles Sturt University, and prior to that was Head of the Centre for Learning, Teaching and Technology at the Hong Kong Institute of Education.
• Peter Hall – Head of Learning and Development, QBE Insurance. Peter Hall has held senior L&D leadership positions with Westpac St George and IAG. Learning Cafe interview with Peter Hall
  
• Helen Blunden – Virtual Learning Consultant for NAB. Helen has been involved with Learning Design over 23 years as a designer, manager and consultant for leading Australian organisations.

We explore what organisations are doing in our Workplace Practices Section

• Tim Banning – Wespac Design Team – Design process at Westpac
• Jason La Greca Manager – Learning Technologies and eLearning at Access Macquarie Ltd (Macquarie Uni) – Design process for innovative learning.

Jeevan Joshi – Moderator – Jeevan is the producer of Learning Cafe and Director at KnowledgeWorking. Jeevan is an experienced Learning and HR practitioner who is passionate about enhancing the capabilities of Learning professions and the digitisation of the Learning function.

This event is supported by

Leveraging Technology – Ryan Tracey – AMP

Effective Learning – Bob Spence

Developing Our Profession – Pierre De Villiers – Deloitte

Summarise the Day – Jeevan Joshi & Peter Davis - Learning Cafe

Thanks Robin Petterd from Sprout Labs for the excellent videol captures

Date : 28 March, Thursday 12 pm – 1 pm, EST /Sydney

“Change is a learning process and learning is a change process” – Beckard and Pritchard

Learning and Change Management are joined at the hip. As Learning professionals become more experienced they begin to see that learning interventions isolated from the larger work context are likely to be ineffective.

We talk to an experienced panel of Learning and Change professionals about their views, opinions and experience in applying change management to Learning initiatives involving classroom, online, blended and social learning.

Some questions we discuss with the panel:

• What are the current approaches/ trends for managing change for Learning initiatives ? We look at contemporary Change Management frameworks including the Burke and Lewin Model of Organisational Performance and Change.
• Their experiences including:
  • Approach for designing and implementing a Technical Academy.
  • Change management for learning technology projects in financial services.
  • Change approach when Learning is integrated with other HR processes for large transformation initiatives.
• Many Learning professionals are skilled in change management (and visa versa). Does this result in better results due to closer integration ?
• Do the change approaches differ for technology enabled learning ?
• Are the change approaches for Learning meeting the needs to be responsive and agility ?

Panel

We have an experienced panel who are passionate about Change Management for Learning.

• Michelle Ockers – National Supply Chain Technical Capability Manager at Coca-Cola Amatil – Michelle is an experienced Learning professional, with depth in learning strategy and program development and implementation, project management, stakeholder management and change management. Michelle has developed and delivered learning strategy and solutions, learning programs and change initiatives in military aviation, manufacturing, financial services, energy and telecommunications industries.
• Rowena Maxwell – Rowena Maxwell has over 20 years experience in Learning & Development Consulting and Management roles with organisations like Canon, Vodafone, AMP, Citigroup, Suncorp, IAG, Commonwealth Bank and Institute of Chartered Accountants.  Her experience in Learning & Development covers the end-to-end learning cycle and includes all mediums of delivery. Rowena’s passion and focus over the last 10 years however, has been in the online learning and performance support space.
• Mark Busine – General Manager – NSW DDI. Mark has extensive experience in organisational development and consulting in both an internal and external capacity.  He has significant HR and organisation development experience across a range of different industries and locations. Mark has published a number of articles, research papers, and white papers, most including “The New Reality of Mid-level Leadership: A Closer Look at Middle Managers in South East Asia”.
• Jeevan Joshi – Moderator – Jeevan is the producer of Learning Cafe and Director at KnowledgeWorking. Jeevan is an experienced Learning and HR practitioner who is passionate about enhancing the capabilities of Learning professions and the digitisation of the Learning function.
  

 What was Good

• % of participants who indicated they would like ot attend the UnConference next year - 99%
• Concept/Idea of UnConference (4.88) – Like last year received the highest feedback score and was the most the consistent feedback (least standard deviation).  Good endorsement of a professional development event which wants to different.
• Stream Sessions Chosen (4.5) – The stream topics chosen for the UnConference was given the thumbs up.
• Quality of Discussion and Facilitators (4.47)– UnConference aims for substance over style to open up new windows of thinking by experienced facilitators.
• Value for Money – (4.38) Important feedback as the delivering value for money is an underlying design principle.

What need to be improved.

• Discussion of Big Issues and Ideas (4.34) – The UnConference will tackle bigger issues and ideas with less “technology” only flavour.
• Venue (4.31) – Many participants commented that they liked the venue but it was a bt noisy during stream sessions. Use of breakout rooms will be considered  next year while balancing the need to maintain the energy and buzz in the room.
• Open Session (4.05) – The feedback for the open session had the highest standard deviation or least agreement (0.73). Open session allows anyone to speak  up and injects the “un” in the UnConference. Open session will stay but the format is likely to be improved.

Some comments

• “Too noisy to hear in many sessions. Otherwise  awesome! Great to share ideas & best practices”
• “Great structure and concept for networking L&D professionals”
• “Very impressed with the level of facilitators”
• “Thoroughly enjoyed the day and the entire concept and content”
• “Great concept with well balanced “bunch” of various skill sets in the room”
• “Hard to hear clearly. Need breakout rooms”

The UnConference is an event where practising experienced L&D professionals have an opportunity to discuss the big issues and questions to create a “point of view” or thought leadership. It provides an opportunity to hear better practices, challenges, stories and lessons learn is an “safe” environment.

Design Principles

Big questions and contemporary topics - Topics are contemporary and discuss some big questions. The discussions are facilitated (not presented) by experienced L&D professionals including:

• Informal Learning -Keep L&D Away
• Making Learning – Design Agile
• L&D Better – Outside of HR?
• Can L&D Ever Know Business?
• And 12 more sessions.

Pure & quality (not quantity) discussion - The emphasis is on pure discussion with no sales messages. The UnConference wants to keep out “selling messages” which sometimes explicitly or implicitly influences what is talked about a conference. The number for participants is limited to enable intimate and quality discussions. In the future it is likely that there will be more people wanting to attend than places available and we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

Reduced expertise distance - Our base design principle is that all participants have expertise and insights to share which are valuable to everyone. The idea is to avoid having an “expert” stand up and address an audience. The sessions are structured so that the majority of the time is set aside for a discussion. Opportunities such as the “open sessions” (soapbox) are available for any participant to speak up on any topic relevant to them and the audience.

Cost effective professional development event - This learning event is a cost effective professional development day for L&D professionals. It is a very much back to basics – it will be unglamorous and workman (or workperson) like.

2013 Design Changes

Last year the UnConference was successful (95% of participants indicated they would like to come back). One participant commented that his “brain got fried”. We are hoping for the same but gentler effect this year. As a result the day is crammed with “goodies” from last year including facilitated discussions, open session (soap box). Changes introduced this year include

•  Now includes a panel discussion and working session for the development of an open source framework.
• Based on the feedback of the participants, reduced the number of concurrent facilitated sessions (from 20 to 16) and increased the time (from 20 -30 mins), which will allow exploration of each topic in greater depth.
• A more deliberate strategy to capture and synthesise the knowledge generated, which will be covered in another blog post.

There still a few seats left if you or someone you know is interested in joining us on 21 Feb 2013. Here is to looking forward to a cracking day

On of the areas in which coaching is commonly used in organisations is in the development and training of those in mid to senior organisational leadership roles, especially those new to their roles. In these cases, it quite normal for the individual to be assigned a coach or mentor and sent on leadership development courses. More often than not, the choice of leadership course, and the models underpinning it, is determined by the organisation – as are the choice of coach or mentor and the areas for coaching and mentoring.

I’ve always been curious as to how, and on what basis, leadership development programs are chosen. It is was with this in mind that I recently read “Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management – Meeting the Challenge of Complexity” by Ralph Stacey (2012)”. A mixture of science, philosophy, organisational psychology and social science, Stacey argues that the leadership and management models commonly used in organisations have not been proven to work and will not be proven to work. This is because the “if…..then” causality for these models to do what is claimed for them simply does not apply to human interaction, and it is human interaction – in the form of conversation and the meaning that is made in these conversations – that ultimately determines organisational performance. Further, expert leaders and managers must move past prescriptive tools and techniques and exercise practical judgement in the ambiguity and uncertainty of today’s organisations.

In previous works Stacey Stacey presents the conversation as the best analogue of complex processes. that occur in organisations. Conversations are creative and enlightening when:

• they deal honestly with real issues
• lead to new insights
• are responsive to the environment
• challenge one’s understanding and practice
• they are iterative, not repetitive.
• they are safe enough to enable 1-5 to take place.

Current leadership and management models cannot control organisational outcomes because they cannot control the conversations that occur in an organisation: It is the conversations that occur at the local level that ultimately construct the organisation. However, these models do allow for the organisational control of bodies and the activities of those bodies to a considerable degree i.e. where people are in the organisation and what physical activities they do. In this sense, Stacey argues that leadership and management models are simply the techniques of disciplinary power of surveillance, normalisation and examination. – to which leaders and managers are also subject. Leaders and managers have some limited ability to design rules, procedures and routines but they can never fully how they are taken up in local situations.

The expert leadership and management needed for the complexity of organisations takes the form of practical judgement. This pattern recognising capacity is developed through experience but can be enhanced and sustained by supervision and mentoring to develop skills like reflexive inquiry, wider and deeper communications skills, sensitivity to group dynamics, and an awareness of purpose, values and ethics.

The leadership model proposed by Cavanagh (2012) seems to align nicely with Stacey’s view of the requisite skills for leaders and managers to work effectively with the complexity of organisations. Cavanagh proposes a four factor model of the skills to work effectively as managers and/or leaders:

Perspective Taking Capacity – the ability to take multiple perspectives on what is happening

Mindfulness – the ability to stay calm in the face of stress and tension.

Purpose – they are going somewhere.

Positivity – they create positive “emotional spaces” and are able to bring out the best in others

I now find myself evaluating what difference the systemic approach advocated by Stacey and the Four Factor model proposed by Cavanagh will make to what I actually do as a coach.

The people I coach accomplish their work by engaging in conversations and making choices that reflect their ideologies. Coaching provides an opportunity for them to abstract from their experience to better understand what is going on within them and without them. My coaching in this context might better serve them by directing attention to what they are actually doing, rather than trying to apply prescriptive models. Noticing how I am showing up in certain coaching conversations and awareness of the systems I am in, and how they are impacting me before I start to try to understand the coachee’s systems, will be critical if I am to do this successfully.

Understanding the coaching relationship as a system into which I bring my individual ideologies, norms and values, and in which meaning is co-created, iterative and contextual, will encourage me to relate to clients by holding both our stories more lightly. However, I have always viewed coaching as an iterative process and feel the solution focused approach to coaching very much fosters an emergent rather than definitive approach to the coaching conversation. Socratic questioning, Self Determination Theory and Mindfulness, Acceptance and Commitment approaches are all part of my coaching armamentarium and well suited to encouraging self reflection, emphasising personal values and encouraging reflection on how these are manifested for the coachee, and in their interactions with others. There is plenty of evidence for this being a useful approach. The key difference moving forward will be how they inform me as to what is going within and without me as well as how they inform the coachee.

I have previously thought that a deeper understanding of self and others is not worth much unless it produces a new set of tools and techniques. My challenge as a coach is not to learn more techniques, skills and models but to develop my phronetic skills and learn to rely on practical wisdom and judgement. Practical judgement, based on an awareness of my own values and purpose, will guide me in  knowing when to hold conversations open and when to close them and increase my sensitivity to the dynamics in the coaching relationship.  This reflects the  inherent tension between coaching research and practice:  Whereas science highlights the search for objective, generalisable truths, practitioners are more interested in knowledge that is subjective and applicable to individuals. Engaging with this tension offers the possibility for contextually new and creative ways to improve my coaching.

In the interests of readability and space I have removed most of the references from this article. A fully referenced copy of the above article can be obtained by emailing me on kevinsinclair@ascentcoaching.com

This is where the intervention of an interface designer can make it look simple at the end – this is where one may look at its simplicity and wonder why a designer was even needed but common sense or the “user sense” is always obvious in hindsight and is most often sidelined in the design process itself. The trend for organizations to focus on user needs and experience, and not just functionality, has been no accident but a learned lesson. It usually takes an iterative process and the experience of the designer working with users to get it right.

E-learning is education via different technologies. Examples are, web-based learning, computer-based learning, virtual classrooms, and digital collaboration. It can include the delivery of content via Internet, intranet/extranet (LAN/WAN), audio- and videotape, satellite broadcast, interactive TV, CD-ROM, and more.

E-learning is not the traditional classroom based, direct, face-to-face interaction with the teacher but nevertheless involves interaction of a different kind – with technology. Technology is also the means of interaction with the teacher. Since e-learning is often self-paced and independent with no immediate interaction with a human when a problem arises, it is even more important to provide the user/learner, a smooth experience. Access problems or navigational issues faced by novices can put them off and produce a negative perception of e-learning. Hence, usability plays a key role in e-learning.

When usability is part of course design and development, it becomes visually pleasing, easy to navigate, users quickly find what they want, adequate user and environment profiles are obtained to ensure appropriate design and access for the young and adult learners etc. If these criteria are not factored in, e-learning becomes nothing more than disengaged, page-turning lessons. The intertwining of the steps of a user-centered design process and a process like ADDIE for design and development of instruction has many overlaps and commonalities that make using such a model very attractive. The requirements gathering phase is common to both, the design phase occurs in parallel in both, once the interface design for the product is stable the development of the e-learning begins, the usability testing can provide valuable input into what the areas of training focus should be.