eLearning guru follow-up

"Hi, I'm Lisa with Allen Interactions," she says, offering her hand.

"Margi," I say, returning the shake. "Nice to meet you."

"Do you have a blog?"

I'm not prepared for this question. "Why do you ask?"

Lisa then tells me she received an email while she was traveling to Denver. It notified her of my previous blog detailing my excitement about meeting Michael Allen. I'm embarrassed, and vow to be sure to read through my blog and delete anything that's overly frivolous. *ahem*

I'm floored, really, that my little blog caught the attention of folks at Allen Interactions and of Dr. Allen himself. Apparently, they have something that searches for keywords, like Allen Interactions and Michael Allen. I wonder how their search is doing now that those keywords appear multiple times in this posting? :-)

It's now time to get started and we begin by going around the room briefly introducing ourselves. I am again inspired and humbled by the company I keep. My colleagues at Schwab are a pretty impressive group of people. I'm trying to decide what to say when it's my turn.

"My name is Margi and my introduction to eLearning began with your book," as I angle myself to look at Dr. Allen in the back of the room. He smiles. Several people smile and nod. "I have been in training for about 10 years; most of that as a facilitator. I came to Schwab as an instructional designer about a year ago."

Whew! Other people introduce themselves and I hear years of experience in the field in the 8-20 year range. I realize again how new I am to this field and how much more I have to learn. Dr. Allen introduces himself and says something about the late 60s being his entry into the field. Wow. Again, I'm humbled and impressed.

Our next item on the agenda was to review the very cool piece of eLearning Allen Interactions partnered with Schwab to create. To oversimplify, it is a tool that allows learners to practice a phone call with a client. However, it's cooler than just that. In a classroom setting, an instructor can mimic a client as much as possible, but both the instructor and learner know that it's not really a client they're talking to. This tool is totally online; learners have headsets and microphones. When they click a button, they answer the phone as they realistically would on the job. The client then responds. And so the conversation goes.

What's also nice about this tool is that the clients aren't always necessarily nice. In a classroom setting, an instructor isn't likely to be "too hard" on a learner. We don't want to make people feel badly or embarrassed. Each client in this tool, however, gets frustrated, annoyed, irritated. I'm pretty impressed with it.

Next, the moment most of us have been waiting for - our director introduces Dr. Allen. It's a very gracious and complimentary introduction, to which Dr. Allen replies "Oh, that's great. I can't wait to hear what I have to say!"

Note: I took notes throughout the session, and I think I captured most of it. However, if you were there and catch an inaccuracy in my account, please let me know so I can correct it. Or, if you have further information to clarify some things, like Dr. Allen's background, etc ... I'd appreciate those comments as well.

Dr. Allen strikes me as a genuine person. I generally think of experts as “stuffy” or above the rest of us. But Dr. Allen strikes me as affable, soft spoken, and confident (not to mention a positive presence in the room). He says he's thrilled to be here, and I wonder if he says that all the time. My guess is if he didn't mean it, he just wouldn't say anything at all about it.

He says he has always had a passion for creating great learning experiences. This isn't about creating training with all the latest tools. Sure, the latest tools are certainly helpful in this goal, but the real message behind everything is about creating a great learning experience.

Dr. Allen points to the plethora of terrible eLearning that's out there. He says it's almost a little embarrassing to admit he's in the field of eLearning simply because of the terrible things people are putting out there and calling eLearning. Similarly, I have had to explain, and almost justify, my interest in this area for the past year. There are far too many examples of someone plopping a boring text-only (or worse, over-animated) PowerPoint presentation on the Web and calling it eLearning. Ew.

Dr. Allen's schooling began designing control systems. He's always been interested in fun gadgets with buttons and things that make life - and learning - interesting. He went on to study philosophy and psychology. I'm impressed, but I'm sure he'd shrug it off if I said that directly to him. He doesn't strike me as the kind of person to think his degrees are impressive.

He talks about computers and computers used for learning: they can be used for both good and bad things. But really, they're about "amplifying our humanity." In a classroom, a facilitator teaches, delivers, facilitates. It can go well or not. At the end of the day, it simply went. Yes, you can learn and improve next time, but that class you just delivered is over.

With eLearning, it's an iterative process. We create eLearning. The first time out, maybe it's terrible. Hopefully, that's our testing phase. As we continue to improve that piece of eLearning, it gets better and better. So by the time it's all said and done, it's fantastic! Well, at least that's the goal most of the time.

We talk a bit about Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and Instructional Designers (IDs) and what "sets them apart." When creating training, SMEs are most focused on the content. IDs are most focused on the experience. Or at least, that's how it should be for IDs.

Dr. Allen says he doesn't believe Instructional Design for eLearning is hard. Unless you have training in classical instructional design, or if you have experience as a student in training/education designed with classical ID processes. By the way, I'm pretty sure that's just about everyone.

He suggested instructional designers should ask themselves "How would I like to learn?" and stop focusing on "models" we think we're supposed to follow. "How would I become confident with this material; how would I become engaged with this material?" These questions should be an ID's guide when creating new material.

Dr. Allen then opens the session up to questions and someone asks what's next in the field of eLearning.

His answer is pretty much the rest of our session and I take lots of scribbled notes. He says the next thing in training/education is change management. It's a focus on performance. He points out that companies and employers don't really care what their people know. Employers care what their employees do. When employee performance increases, so does a company's bottom line. Duh :-) Those of us who have been in training and have ever had to justify our presence to management know this fact.

As professionals in the training field, it is our job to help people realize their potential faster than they would have without our help. This reminds me of my days teaching software programs. I often told my students that the program we were covering that day wasn't necessarily hard to learn or use, and that I certainly wasn't any smarter than they were. My job as an instructor in that situation was to show them things about the program that they're smart enough to figure out on their own, but didn't have time to mess with. It's simply faster for an instructor to at least introduce some basic concepts about a program to give learners a more solid foundation so they can start teaching themselves the rest of what they need to know.

Dr. Allen shows us a pretty cool graphic, and if I can get a copy of it, I will post it here.

Classic instructional design says that learners go through some sort of instructional module(s) and as a result, their behavior and performance is expected to change. Sounds easy enough, right?

The real world says there are a million factors that come into play. Someone coming into a training program has prior successes and failures. Maybe not with this material, but in some training capacity. They have their own thoughts and ideas and attitudes that shape how they even "show up" for training.

During training itself, people have all kinds of things on their minds. Personal or professional, it doesn't matter. The fact is, people have other things going on in their lives in addition to any training they attend. Training success is increased by a learner simply stating - intending - what they will learn. So the next time you are in a training class and the instructor asks why you signed up for the class, give it some real thought!

One statistic Dr. Allen quoted is that informal learning events account for 80% of business learning. At first that surprised me, but then it made a lot of sense.

For those of us who have been in corporate training (I'm pulling from pre-Schwab experiences for examples here), there seems to almost always be some sort of disconnect between management and training. For some reason, there is animosity between those groups. When a new hire comes out of training s/he is immediately given a list of "oh, we don't do it that way." Worse, the comments turn into things like, "oh, the trainer's never DONE the job. Don't listen to him/her. Let me tell you how it is."

Then there are well-intentioned coworkers. "Oh, here's a shortcut I learned." And it's wrong, and either no one knows, or notices or they don't care. And then the managers continue to say training doesn't work because this new hire is continually doing X task incorrectly. (I can almost hear colleagues groaning and see heads nodding in agreement. We've all been there.)

After the instructional event, there are performance expectations, which come from supervisors and coworkers. There are rewards (or not), there are job aids (or not). This is a lot to process; no wonder new hires are always nervous taking that first call, or performing that task the first time on their own.

Dr. Allen cites the work of James Prochaska in discussing how people change behaviors. And isn't that what training is really about? Changing behaviors, learning new ones, etc. People don't change until they go through a process. And the first step in the process is articulate the change they want to make. At this point, Dr. Allen has ceased using the word 'training.' He's talking about performance and training is simply performance maximization.

I have a few more scribbled notes from our session, but I can't read them. I hope I'm not missing something really important!!

After our session, Lisa tells me she'd like to introduce me to Dr. Allen and walks me over. He's read the blog "teaser post." I feel like a teenaged groupie. :-) I'm excited and honored and Dr. Allen gives me his card "because I don't really have a souvenir to give you except this." It's all I can do not to giggle.

And now, it's time to ask someone to read this post before it goes live. Dr. Allen will probably read this, after all!