eLearning and Experience Design for Learnable Services

February 23, 2009

questionholesGood service is one of those experiences most of us recognize when we get it. Much of the time though, a good service experience is as much a result of how learnable the provider makes its business processes, the context of the service, as it is the products and services themselves. I discussed this a couple of years ago in a post on the importance of a dialogue strategy for customer experience management. A dialogue strategy builds on the assumption that companies learn more from customers when customers learn from them. More recently I noted that,

The increasing maturity and diffusion of social media over the ensuing years makes it clear that a dialogue strategy provides a coherent framework for communications, whether addressing collaboration, innovation, marketing, sales, support, or branding. The key to the process is understanding customers, attracting them, engaging them, and learning from them to improve products and services, thereby strengthening your brand…

Strategists increasingly recognize that listening to customers, engaging them in dialogue, and acting on what is learned lies at the heart of experience design’s relevance to brands, customers, and social media.

These insights are relevant to the current shift in focus for experience design, from primarily emphasizing the design of products to also emphasizing the design of services, as exemplified in Peter Merholtz’s recent series in Harvard Business online. Okay, you may ask, how does this all relate to eLearning and learnability?

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2 Comments | Collaboration, Experience Design, Learning Experience | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons

eLearning 2.0, Social Media, and Co-Creation of Learning Content

December 29, 2008

openbook2As a previous post noted, assessing the business value of instructional design involves more than measuring the contribution of formal training to Level 3 and Level 4 outcomes defined in the Kirkpatrick model. Training professionals also need to understand and support informal learning processes, on-the-job and off, that enhance performance.  Most of the learning that produces business value occurs informally, dealing with exceptions to formal business processes, yet most of the attention paid to learning is focused on formal training.

One can reasonably say that Web 2.0 applications, such as social software and social media, are changing the relationships between instructional designers and subject matter experts much like those between customer communities and product designers. Both increasingly involve situations of co-creation.

The emerging recognition of eLearning 2.0’s importance to enhancing collaboration and performance means that training professionals, especially instructional designers, can add value to their employer/client’s business by learning to facilitate and manage the co-creation of learning content with employees, or even customers. Anyone experienced in instructional design in recent years is familiar with the general challenge of co-creation whenever they use information content for course design ( slide shows, documents, etc.) that subject matter experts originally created as a resource for a presentation. The presentation content too often is substituted for observation and in-depth interviewing as a first step in analysis. 

Such Rapid eLearning, though shifting content development toward the subject matter expert’s control, maintains the traditional role of training in incorporating design principles. The process of co-creation in eLearning 2.0, on the other hand, shifts control over development and distribution of learning content toward subject matter experts willing and able to share what they know, especially when they see other people who need to solve familiar problems.

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4 Comments | Collaboration, e-Learning 2.0, Innovation, Learning Experience, Social Networks | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons

Informal Learning, Collaboration, and the Kirkpatrick Model

December 22, 2008
kirkpatrick1

Kirkpatrick Model

I recently attended a meeting of the St. Louis Chapter of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) to listen to a presentation on the Kirkpatrick model of training assessment, offered by Jim Kirkpatrick, the son of the model’s creator — Don Kirkpatrick. Jim’s major point was that most training departments fail to measure learning outcomes at Levels 3 and 4 of the model. Without detailing the Kirkpatrick model’s four levels of analysis, the following are Jim’s definitions:

Reaction: involves what training participants thought of the training

 Learning: the knowledge, skills, and attitudes gained through the training

Behavior: the degree participants apply what they learned on the job

Results: the business results gained

Suffice it to say that the model provides a unique framework on how to assess the  learning outcomes of training. However, practitioners are prone to overlook a key issue in measuring learning. I previously noted the following about the Kirkpatrick model.

It is not a stretch to contend that Level 4 measurement is as much about organizational learning and change management as it is about individual learning. In the e-Learning Guild survey on measurement practices, Roy Pollock characterizes this situation as the “Catch-22” for training and development. He notes that, “assessment of on-the-job application and results is as much or more an assessment of the transfer climate…as it is of the quality of the instruction” (p. 167).

Based on what I heard from Jim Kirkpatrick as well as Nick Denardo, a presenter from Edward Jones’ strategic learning services group, the point about organizational learning also applies to Level 3 measurement, to the extent that existing organizational practices either facilitate or impede application of competencies and sharing of knowledge learned from formal training, whether on-the-job, or just informally. 

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1 Comment | e-Learning 2.0, Learning Experience | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons