Top 10 Blends
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Are you looking for Blended Learning strategies that are low-cost and easy to implement? This list of top 10 blends may help you blend learning technologies for better results.
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Top 10 Blends
- 1. Top Ten Blends Karl Richter Owner / Creative Director eLearningBlends.com
- 2. Blended Learning is NOT!
- 3. Blended Learning Blended learning combines face to face interactions with different learning technologies to maximize transfer of material.
- 4. Blended Learning & Engagement
- 5. Give the Brain a Workout Learning forms new connections in our brains.
- 6. Can You Get in Shape by Jogging Once?
- 7. Objective #1 Audience members will be able to: Share one easy and effective way to blend training at their workplace during the session.
- 8. Questions to Consider Who is my audience? What content are they learning? What can I put in a blend to help them reach our instructional goals?
- 9. Objective #2 Name three different blended learning options a week after the session without needing to reference the handouts.
- 10. Do You Have Twins at Work? I took this job expecting one set of responsibilities, then found out there was a whole second set of responsibilities I had to manage, too.”
- 12. Trailer
- 13. Which Trailer is Realistic for you? Abundant Resources and Time Doing Your Best
- 14. Flip
- 15. Sandwich
- 16. Performance Support Tools Pssst. Need a cheat sheet?
- 18. Scavenger Hunt
- 19. YouTube-like Site with Tin Can API +-
- 20. Review
- 23. Honorable Mention Move to Microlearning Sledgehammer
- 24. Honorable Mention External Training External Training
- 25. Lynda.com + LFPL.org = Love
- 27. #1. Bring the web into your online learning Comment on an internal-only blog Explore the company website Post to SharePoint Contribute to a Wiki Watch a YouTube playlist Visit Any ol’ URL This button can open a world of blending possibilities.
- 28. Meet in Small Groups Who is my audience? What content are they learning? What can I put in a blend to help them reach our instructional goals?
- 29. Anyone Like to Share?
- 30. Parting Thoughts
- 31. Thank You For Your Time Karl Richter 502.233.1746 karl@elearningblends.com
Editor's Notes
- Thank you for having me here for the 3rd annual Day of Learning.
- My talk today is about Blended Learning. Sadly, that does not mean we’ll be learning how to blend delicious smoothies, margaritas, or daiquiris, though I’m certainly a fan of those as well. Many of you may know about blended learning as a combination of online and face to face, but I’d like to expand that definition.
- The most commonly known blend is a combination of online instruction and face to face instruction. But that’s really just the beginning. There are lots of different ingredients you can put into a blend. You can blend a formal class with an informal mentoring program. You can blend a self-study module like you’d take on your learning management system, with the growing number of resources available on blogs, twitter and other social media sites. You can blend a course that is tracked and assigned with performance support resources that are available as reference guides. The strength of blended learning comes from the last part of this definition. It’s focused on results. We want to maximize transfer of material. The goal is to change behavior in the workplace. I selected Top Ten Blends as a topic for this conference because it lines up well with our overall theme of Engagement.
- This is what edge of your seat engagement looks like. These teens are fully engaged in a movie. Of course we want that kind of engagement, but we all have a lot on our plates and are limited by resources and time. The blends I’m proposing may help with this type of engagement, but more than that I’m looking for you to give your brain a workout. ..
- It’s easy to forget that learning is a tangible change that takes place in your brain. You’re building new connections between axons and dendrites that didn’t exist before. As those connections strengthen, they’re covered with a fatty substance called myelin. The more we practice the stronger those connections are.
- Some of our training strategies are like asking someone to get back in shape by jogging once. For results, you need multiple opportunities to use the information. I look at engagement as synonym for interact. If the subject matter is important and we need learners to not only remember it, but apply it, we need to create multiple opportunities to practice and put the information to use.
- The goal I have for us in our time together is for you to leave this session able to share one easy and effective way you could blend training at your workplace. Part of the time we’ll spend together will be in small groups, where you can brainstorm and share ways you could use blends where you work.
- Here are some questions you should consider to come up with an idea for an effective blend where you work. I can’t help you with the first two question. Who is my audience? What content are they learning? My talk is focused on the third. What can I put in a blend to help get them there?
- I’d love it if a week from today you were able to be able to still remember 30% of what I came up with. Ideally it would be more, but here are handouts that I designed to help you remember what we’re talking about. There’s a space for you to jot down any notes while I go through my list of ten blends. And you’ll see that each of my blends only has the definition. If you’d like to play along, you can fill in the titles while I go through each blending option.
- When I’m not at work, I’m at home taking care of a three year old and the one year old twins you see here. I’m bringing that up, not only because I’m a proud parent, but because I wanted to share what one of my clients said to me the other day. They said, “Karl, I don’t have any kids, but I kind of know what it feels like to have twins. I took this job expecting one set of responsibilities, then found out there was a whole second set of responsibilities I had to manage, too.” I thought that was not only hilarious, but something that many of us could relate to. So the ideas I’m proposing are things you can do with limited time and resources. We all have a lot on our plate. Look for small wins. The minor adjustments to your training strategy that can boost dividends once implemented.
- Initial activity – an introduction to the topic. Conflict resolution for managers. It could be a video that shows the consequences of mishandling conflicts between employees. It can pique their interest. Come to class prepared to discuss ways to handle the problem. Followed by a substantial learning activity. A course. Then after the course, there is opportunity for followup. It could be as simple as a quiz a month after the class. It could be a real-world scenario where learners chime in during a conference call.
- The trailer blend is the idea that you just have a followup activity. You can hitch that on to an existing class, or presentation. Maybe your company has a week-long conference for engineers. There’s lots of meetings and presentations throughout the week. Maybe it’s an hour-long company meeting, or just a regular instructor-led class. Have a quick followup activity a week later. You’ll boost retention by activating that neural connection again. And… who knows, maybe folks will pay closer attention if they know they’re going to be responsible for it again in the future.
- We all work under different conditions. Maybe you are in an environment where you have abundant resources and time. You’d be able to put together a really professional looking trailer. The course followup could be a branching simulation where sales folks choose the best way to handle common objections from prospective buyers. Maybe you’re just doing your best with the time you have. It could be as simple as a 5 question followup quiz that gets assigned from your LMS.
- The next blend is an idea that is popular in the K-12 world. The Khan Academy gets a lot of credit for the idea of a flipped classroom. The primary idea behind the flip is that class time isn’t used for a lecture. Instead, make the lecture pre-work so that you can take advantage of class time for activities and interactions that require real human interaction. Get that foundational knowledge covered before the class, so that you can practice applying it with the other members of the class. I jokingly call in class lectures a “live elearning”. Take a look at the classroom. If it’s one-sided where the trainer talks and the audience listens for long periods of time, you may be able to free up your trainer by creating an eLearning asset that can take place on demand. My choice of picture here was deliberate. Flipping your training class can be a lot of work. It can be exhausting to flip even a few classes. Forgive the pun, but it’s understandable if even looking at this makes you tired. The flip isn’t possible for all courses. But it can come in handy. Especially for a class that takes multiple days. A topic that needs high degree of personalization / customization. Or for audiences that are hard to schedule.
- This one isn’t a metaphor. I’m suggesting that you take advantage of an informal setting. Offer free food for everyone who was in a class and have some sort of loosely structured followup activity. Perhaps the topic was something like advanced sales techniques. Get reps together to swap stories on how it worked or didn’t work in the field… If it’s a conflict resolution class for managers. Give them an opportunity to get together and share details about how trying the tips learned in class work back in the “real world”. For the price of a big sandwich and chips, you’re sending the message that corporate culture expects buy-in and you’re creating opportunities for discussion and practice using it.
- I’m a huge fan of performance support tools. These can be printable guides like a reference sheet or job aid. They can be the same idea in electronic form. Short videos showing you how to use the online performance management tool. Perfect for things like annual reviews that don’t take place often. You don’t need a formal class on the performance management system each year. You can have references there to help folks out when they need it. Again, as designers, our focus should be “what tools do they need to get the job done?” You may be wondering – yes, I deliberately took the PS and T from performance support tool for the guy who’s saying PST. It may be different where you work, but I feel like these types of resources are often seen as inferior. We turn our noses up at them because aren’t really doing our best as trainers if we’re just giving our audience a cheat sheet. They want the full service training. But I think there’s great value in having resources there as just in time training. I’ve seen plenty of folks guard their little cheat sheets because they’re really useful tools that give them what they need when they need it. As an industry, I see performance support tools gaining momentum. It’s much easier to train the basic concepts and let the performance support tool handle the details than it is to train to memory.
- This screenshot comes from a tutorial I made for a manufacturing facility. Again, focus on transfer. Our goals are what Kirkpatrick would call level three and level four. It’s not enough that people know the skills. Can they do it? Are they doing it? This blend combines an online modules, where the employee completes self-study slides and quizzes with a hands-on skills verification with an on the job trainer. The manufacturing skills they need are practiced in the real world in the presences of a live OJT who has a secret password. On screen you see a fill in the blank quiz with white text on a white box to keep that password a secret. Once the OJT enters the password the learner gets credit for completing the course and it is all tracked like a normal eLearning module – even though its verifying that the learner has real-world skills.
- The scavenger hunt gives your employee the leeway to explore and learn on their own. You can have a manager or co-worker show them the basics, then give them time to explore and find out more on their own. For example, use it with new hires. Here’s the company directory. Give them a quick tour of the company intranet. Here’s the org chart. Here’s how you can look up someone’s extension and address. Then here’s a worksheet with a few sample tasks. Let’s see if you can go out now and do it on your own. Let them follow up with a manager. Can you find your boss’s boss? Who is the current VP of sales? What is that person’s extension? Who is in charge of facilities? Or maybe you encourage a new teller at a credit union to explore the company website. What are the different types of checking accounts we offer? What are the requirements for each type of account. How many different types of retirement plans do we offer? Explore that website and complete the worksheet. Make it pre-work and encourage them to bring it to product training class. That way they’re already coming in with some knowledge of what’s out there for their members. This type of blend shows the difference between pull and push. Typically we push our learners down a certain path. With a scavenger hunt, we can give them a minimal amount of push, then they pull the information on their own.
- I think youtube is a terrific model for learning. When we look at the way the internet is changing and what we’re doing outside of work, we see that the information age makes it possible to quickly and easily find short videos on even obscure topics like how to fix a sump pump. When I had trouble with my basement this past spring, I was able to find a number of easy videos that showed me how to fix my problem. However, in the corporate learning, it can be that the 5 minutes of information you really need are buried inside a 30 minute online class. In some cases, you can’t even skip ahead to the part you are looking for. So this is kind of a followup to what I was talking about with performance support tools. Youtube is a terrific resource. And there are a number of free youtube clones that you could install and keep within your company intranet. Tin Can API, which is the next version of the LMS. Tin Can isn’t a technology so mkuch as it is a new way of tracking what learners do online. Instead of loading multiple courses into an LMS and assigning them, you can let users create and share youtube style videos and Tin Can will track what videos they watch. So you get a record of what employees are doing online, in a much looser, freeer system.
- Now let’s do a review of the top nine. #9 is a worksheet which is different from a mere handout. Rather than giving your learners a copy of the slides you’re presenting on, craft a worksheet around what you want your outcomes to be. My goal for this talk was to give you 10 different types of blends you can use. Instead of giving you a list of them, I’m trying to engage you with the content and have you complete each term as we spend time together. At the top is a section for my other goal- to give you a chance to take a blended learning strategy back to your organization. There’s space there for notes on your audience, goals, and the blends you could offer them. Before I reveal my favorite type of blend, there were just a few others I couldn’t leave out.
- Use a book like this as a springboard for discussion. Meet monthly throughout the year. Have a different person present a chapter to the group.
- Podcasting is cheap. If done well, great ROI. Short or long. Audience is really important - sales folks who travel can listen. Consider having a quiz as a trailer.
- Microlearning is one of my favorite trends. Break up your one hour training course into smaller 5-10 minute chunks. They’re easier to return to. Easier to update and manage and most of all a short course forces you to edit out the nice to knows and focus on the need to knows. Build a course that is focused squarely on the lone objective for it.
- One of my first projects as a contract ID was to make “Microsoft Office training for the way we use Office at our organization.” I was happy for the work, but realized quickly that I was reinventing a wheel that didn’t need reinvented. Everyone uses Office the same way. There may be design standards or a set of expectations for how to present the material, but that was only a small sliver of the training I developed. So look for external sources like Coursera and Lynda.com before you waste resources creating training that is already available.
- My number one blend is a way to bring social learning into the lonely world of SCORM courses. Use the Web Object in rapid eLearning tools like the Articulate products to embed a “live” webpage into your course. As the page updates, your course will change. And you won’t have to manage it. Throughout the rest of the Internet, we can share, comment, and learn from one another. Why can’t our CBTs do the same thing? Here’s one example to tie this all together. Imagine you wanted to train your sales force to handle the common objections they hear on a sales call. You could use a bookend blend that kicks off with an online module to give them a foundation in the topic. That module could be followed by a classroom experience where they had time to role play. Two weeks later, they could meet with a coach to fine tune the process and help them convert even more objections into sales. Use the web object to kick off the discussion. Put a few blog posts in the course that focus on typical objections and ask sales reps how they would respond. What they write in the comments not only give you a good idea of what’s happening in the field and establishing a baseline for existing performance, you’re warming up the room for your synchronous time together. Attendees have already started discussing solutions before the class begins. The synapses in their brains are already engaging as they share and learn from one another.
- We’ve talked about blends and engagement and I hope at least one thing I’ve said today rings true with you. The kind of engagement you see in this graphic is a lasting and hopefully permanent change. Isn’t that what we want our training to be? When we train, we’re physically building connections in the brain and that doesn’t happen in one go. The more your brain engages with the content, the stronger those connections are. If the content is important to learn, commit to more than one session to learn it. Extend what you do in the classroom in simple ways. We have an exciting mix of tools at our disposal to help reach our goals. Build opportunities to engage with the content. Avoid a training philosophy that treats training like a one night stand. The ultimate goal is to impact behavior. Actions not only speak louder than words, they are what make company profits rise and fall. Our responsibility as trainers is to make that impact on the bottom line.