Today we’re going to look at the “Design Requirements for Effective On-Line Learning.” There are five essential requirements:

• Navigation through a lesson is simple, consistent and intuitive:
o The graphic interface (GUI) is attractive, inviting and meaningful.
o The components for learning appear in a consistent and logical location.
o The components for learning are always visible to the user and accessible with a single click of the mouse.
o Individual segments of instruction appear on one screen without the need for scrolling.

• Instruction is meaningful and interactive:
o Lesson content is subdivided into meaningful topics.
o Instructional information flows logically from one screen to the next.
o Embedded practice with supportive feedback enhances both learning and learner confidence.
o Assessments, prior to and after instruction, are integral components within the learning environment.

• Adult learning characteristics are accommodated:
o Learners have control within a non-linear learning environment.
o Instructional content is meaningful and relevant to the learner.
o Concrete examples are used to support learning.
o The lesson content is structured to accommodate learner time constraints.

• Media is appropriately integrated as part of the learning experience:
o High definition visuals occur on all instructional screens.
o Video stills or animation replace video motion whenever bandwidth is a limitation.
o Audio narration accompanies all text.
o Access to audio support is optional in order to accommodate learner preferences.
o Special sound effects are integrated within the instructional environment.

• Administrator management requirements are satisfied:
o The on-line lesson provides adequate learning for the targeted audience.
o The on-line lesson “works” on the intended delivery systems, be they internet-access or internal networks.
o The on-line lesson is SCORM compliant.

In addition to these instructional design characteristics, there are seven simple guidelines to keep in mind whenever you are tasked with making e-Learning purchasing decisions or when designing your own e-Learning courseware:

• Avoid motion-video whenever you are faced with bandwidth limitations.
• An option for full audio accompaniment must always exist.
• Assemble the “right” team for either evaluation or internal design.
• Do NOT become enamored with technology.
• Distinguish clearly between information and instruction.
• The lesson must be purposeful, simple and short.
• Make sure it “works.”

There you have it: a short outline of the salient characteristics and guidelines for meaningful e-Learning instruction. Take the time to flesh out each item in your mind before making purchasing decisions or when developing your own on-line courseware. You’ll be glad you did. Bad decisions waste good money and precious time.

More on Tuesday - - - - -

— Bill Walton, Founder of ITC Learning
bwalton@itclearning.com

“THE WORLD RELIES ON THE HANDS OF ITS MEN AND WOMEN”

Writing for the online publication, SALON.com, last week, Mary Elizabeth Williams engaged in some brilliant reasoning in her article, “How Nationalized Education Standards Ruin Schools.”

National Standards testing began under President G. W. Bush and has been expanded by President Obama.

The unintended results will include a decline in thinking, reasoning and individual achievement.

Why the federal government continues to believe that all problems can be solved with new regulations and additional laws is beyond me. That is certainly not going to work with our public education system — even if math and reading and science scores rise.

There is a lot more to an “educated man or woman” than reading and math and science score achievement.

Williams quotes author Alfie Kohn writing in the “Times’ Room for Debate” page: “Uniformity isn’t the same thing as excellence; high standards don’t require common standards.” Williams comments, “What constitutes excellence and achievement is specific to each child. It’s reassuring to look at numbers or letters and say whether a mark has been hit, but the data tells next to nothing about the individuals it represents.”

Further, she writes, “If you consider learning something that extends beyond what’s on the math and English standards, accept that your kids are going to be spending more of their school days busily drilling for tests, because stuff like art and music and phys ed are just too hard to quantify. And if your dreams for your children are more than to ‘provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare for college and the workforce’ so they can ‘compete successfully in the global economy’ — like, say, fostering critical thought or a love of learning, do it on your own time.”

America’s greatest educator, Robert Maynard Hutchins had it right when he said, “The objective of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.”

I don’t think “drilling and practicing” math and reading and science is going to be sufficient to accomplish Hutchins’ objective. Not by a long shot — ?!?

More on Thursday - - - - -

— Bill Walton, Founder of ITC Learning
bwalton@itclearning.com

“THE WORLD RELIES ON THE HANDS OF ITS MEN AND WOMEN”

We’ve discussed the values and benefits associated with multi-sensory media many times in previous BLOGS. We’ve seen the real positive results that are making a real difference in education and training. Today, however, I’d like to share some factual results that individual businesses have been achieving:

a) A leading energy corporation had a training need in their pipeline division. Their challenge was to disburse training to over 100 individual sites, some of which were only manned by one or two individuals while, at the same time, reducing training costs under new budget restraints. Their solution was to adopt an e-Learning approach with the recordkeeping networked back to corporate headquarters. This company enjoyed a return on investment by reducing travel costs and reducing time-away-from-job.

b) A major chemical company had 18 satellite locations in North and South America. Their challenge was to provide consistent training to a diverse workforce. Again, e-Learning provided the solution and because of the efficiencies associated with e-Learning, they realized a cost savings of more than $500,000 in the first three years of the program.

c) A leading chemical and pipeline provider needed to launch a technician training program to 78 site locations across the country. Since the sites were automated and each manned by a staff of less than five employees, their challenge was to effectively disperse training to a group of employees whose job was to sit and do nothing but make sure that the automated equipment was working correctly. E-Learning allowed them to place the courseware right in the control center where employees could take the training while working their shift. This company saw a major reduction in training costs because they no longer had to take the employees off the job in order to train.

d) A manufacturer of airplane engine parts had a major staffing issue. Faced with the fact that their employee population was aging, with more than half of their maintenance and operations staff due to retire in the next five years, they knew they had to cross-train in order to increase the skill level of their younger workers. The challenge was how to effectively do the training and, yet, not impact the current production schedule. They could not afford to take a large group off the floor or take the more experienced workers away from the job. Their solution was to open a learning center within the facility. Workers were scheduled to complete multi-sensory media instruction in multiple shifts with little, or no, impact on the daily operations.

e) A chemical company needed to obtain certification in ISO and NICET training for their instrument technicians. Again, multi-sensory media was chosen as their training solution. The program proved a success and the training time was cut in half from what they were investing with a local community college.

f) A major employee services and consulting firm had many employees located at a variety of customer facilities, manning and maintaining a diverse range of production processes and equipment including off-shore rigs, manufacturing facilities, pipelines, construction sites and oil refineries. Their challenge was to provide a consistent training program to a diverse audience with varied skill sets and widely divergent reading levels. Multi-sensory media instruction proved the best solution because it provided consistent training and was not based on one’s reading fluency.

g) A major chemical company needed to enhance their apprenticeship program. They wanted the training to be self-paced and home accessible. They chose e-Learning as their solution because it can be delivered successfully in half the time and allows for automatic recordkeeping.

Actual experience from users is the best test of any training program. It’s good to read these endorsements of multi-sensory learning. Those who adopt it have had great success — and, with attendant investment paybacks. Those who don’t — and, continue to rely on the less effective traditional training methods of “lecture/reading” — do so at their own peril.

More on Tuesday - - - - -

— Bill Walton, Founder of ITC Learning
bwalton@itclearning.com

“THE WORLD RELIES ON THE HANDS OF ITS MEN AND WOMEN”

Multi-sensory media is part of the informational and instructional evolutionary process that has taken us beyond storytelling, the printing press, and radio wave transmission. Multi-sensory media is a communication tool. It makes possible more efficient information transfer and more effective learning.

Who then, among us, must we look to — to lead us forward? Certainly not the producers of the various technology platforms. By their very nature, those producers must remain “box sellers.”

Gutenberg spend his adult life perfecting a machine that was instrumental in bringing knowledge to the world he knew. His contemporaries owed him a great debt.

But, knowledge is attained only through the conceptual transfer that takes place between the printed words of an author and the eyes and minds of that author’s readers.

So it is today with multi-sensory media. The promise of multi-sensory media will only be attained when the applications designer can effectively communicate with the users’ senses — be they sight, sound, and/or touch.

The human animal remains a sense-taught creature. And, multi-sensory media provides the best artificial platform available for stimulating the senses of a learner.

Not everyone can be an effective multi-sensory media designer. In fact, very few can. But, the few that can should lead us. Those few will show us how to use the new media for better education and training. Some will build effective commercial generic programs. Some will build effective custom application programs. But the few that can will build those applications around one basic tenet: learner-controlled instruction!

We must guard ourselves against infatuation. All the newer technologies hold promise. All can be effective tools, but none of them are answers. The answers for this century will come from a new breed of “authors” and “artists.” Those who know that training and education are irrevocably linked today — linked by the necessity of transferring control of learning to the student learner.

And time is short. This country — its schools and its businesses — have a lot of “catching up” to do.

More on Thursday - - - - -

— Bill Walton, Founder of ITC Learning
bwalton@itclearning.com

“THE WORLD RELIES ON THE HANDS OF ITS MEN AND WOMEN”

As a friend of mine has recently observed: “Today all the moons are in alignment for the very first time.” How right he is. But I am not convinced that many of us who work with the new e-Learning technologies really understand the opportunity that’s out there. Suppose that once every five hundred years or so, you find yourself handed a set of keys which can help advance society and personal living standards, if only you know what to do with them. The answer to how you can use these new keys to unlock the ‘barriers-to-entry” for tens of millions of our “opportunity-starved” citizens will depend on your genuine understanding of the creative process.

Imagination is the single catalyst that drives creativity. One of America’s greatest scenic artists, Robert Edmond Jones, defined that process most appropriately when he wrote, “Imagination is the faculty for realization.” No one can create anything meaningful unless their imagination can foresee that created object or concept already realized in their own mind. Imagination is not fantasy. Fantasy is inner-directed, while imagination lets us envision worlds outside ourselves. And, if we are all going to fully grasp this moment, we will only do so if we can exercise a genuine imagination, which can empower us to see into the future of learning. A future, incidentally, which will be essential to economic advancement around the globe as well as the twenty-first century means for advancing individual achievement and any resultant social harmony.

So, where is the fit?

Let’s quickly eliminate the current types of reading-based e-Learning that contribute little to the learning challenges of the twenty-first century. Transporting words, numbers, graphics, and still pictures across digital networks is relatively easy today. It is also very useful for that information flow to be directed at the one-third of us who are “reading advanced.” Hooray! Let that work continue. I like it. You like it. I take advantage of all that information so readily available and so do you. I am happy to be a part of the “reading culture” and would not have it any other way. I look forward to reading my one or two biographies and history books each month. I read the newspapers, subscribe to about a dozen journals, and can’t wait to discover new things on the Internet. Great! Wonderful! And for the purposes of these remarks, I don’t very much care.

You see, I (and you, as well) can function, come up with informed opinions, cast responsible votes, earn sufficient personal income, and communicate without the richness of multi-sensory e-Learning. Oh, I like having multi-sensory e-Learning available. I can learn more “stuff” than I ever have previously; have access to more knowledge; and do all of it faster and more efficiently than I was ever able to do before. But, I don’t need it; I made out just fine before the video and audio aspects of multi-sensory e-Learning came along.

And, yes, lots of companies and lots of investors have made lots of money by capitalizing on that relatively easy type of reading-based e-Learning — which, by its very nature, is more “informational” and less “instructional” in its effects.

However, let’s get to the real point here. The opportunities in multi-sensory e-Learning that I am challenging you to think about are those instructional designs which should be directed at the current two-thirds of Americans who are cut off from that reading-based learning culture associated with the CBT-design world of the 1970’s. Our future multi-sensory instructional designs must become part of that television learning culture — which supplanted the printing press world as the primary medium for communication — beginning in the 1950’s.

More on Tuesday - - - - -

— Bill Walton, Founder of ITC Learning
bwalton@itclearning.com

“THE WORLD RELIES ON THE HANDS OF ITS MEN AND WOMEN”

More than forty years of research clearly shows that greater family involvement in children’s learning is a critical link to achieving a high-quality education:

• What PARENTS do to help their children learn matters more to their children’s achievement than family income or education.
• What SCHOOLS do to encourage parents to participate in their children’s education matters more to parental participation than parent income or education.
• What COMMUNITY GROUPS (including EMPLOYERS, RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS and SERVICE AGENCIES do to support families and schools can make an important contribution to overall community effectiveness.

A growing number of public schools are recognizing that — because of the many advantages of multi-sensory learning — they can do more to support children and families. The list below covers many of their realizable goals:

• Offer instruction via state-of-the-art technology, including multi-sensory programs and digital video technology in academic (Basic Skills, Vocational and Technical Areas).
• Expand the hours of school to include evenings and weekends in order to accommodate the family educational needs.
• Provide technology-based instruction for preschool through adult needs.
• Offer free child care services by a licensed child care provider.
• Utilize the existing hardware and courseware in the schools.
• Prepare parents for productive employment in the world of work.
• Increase student achievement by providing parents with an opportunity to improve academic, vocational, and/or technical skills while encouraging parent-child learning, and increasing time-on-task for all students.
• Offer Continuing Education Units (CEUs) from a local Community College to those adult participants who complete a full curriculum.

Advances in our public education system usually trail those made by corporate training but with these visionary programs our children, their parents, and the schools themselves will all profit through increased learning, retention, and quality of life.

More on Thursday - - - - -

— Bill Walton, Founder of ITC Learning
bwalton@itclearning.com

“THE WORLD RELIES ON THE HANDS OF ITS MEN AND WOMEN”

A headline in “The New York Times” last week said it all, “FACTORY JOBS RETURN, BUT EMPLOYERS FIND SKILLS SHORTAGE.” The article by Motoko Rich confirms many of the issues we’ve been examining over the past year and a half.

“ . . . manufacturers who want to expand find that hiring is not always easy. During the recession, domestic manufacturers appear to have accelerated the long-term move toward greater automation, laying off more of their lowest-paid workers and replacing them with cheaper labor abroad. . . . a number of manufacturers say that even if demand surges, they will never bring back many of the lower-skilled jobs, and that training is not yet delivering the skilled employees they need.”

After blogging about this dichotomy for some time now, we can narrow the reasons why “training is not delivering” down to two major issues:

1) “Lecture/reading” courses have failed at least half of our workforce. Only multi-sensory training will communicate effectively to this very sizable group.

2) Basic Skills training is as essential to two-thirds of our workforce as is specific industrial skills training.

Unfortunately, many corporate senior executives still believe in the outdated “lecture/reading” method as the only valid learning approach within their organizations. These executives are myopic at worst — and, at best, irresponsibly unaware of their employees’ learning demographics and the phenomenal results being attained through multi-sensory training.

As for Basic Skills, in addition to multi-sensory training, a quick “miraculous” fix would be for those same executives to require their college educated engineers to write work procedures and policies using a sixth grade vocabulary. Communication is a two-way street and ignoring today’s learning reality is to exacerbate the problems within our manufacturing and process industries.

I hope these executives wake up soon. America needs a much better trained workforce and the tools to do just that are, today, readily available!

More on Tuesday - - - - -

— Bill Walton, Founder of ITC Learning
bwalton@itclearning.com

“THE WORLD RELIES ON THE HANDS OF ITS MEN AND WOMEN”

As the United States continues an uphill battle to reform its education system and to re-establish its manufacturing dominance, many educators are seeking new and innovative programs to better prepare workers and students. Tomorrow’s students need more effective training solutions and today’s workers need upgraded skills in order to cope with the ever-changing technologies of today and tomorrow.

Both multi-sensory based e-Learning and networked, digitized CD-ROM are uniquely capable of providing those solutions!

Today, many small to medium-size industries lack satisfactory training programs for their employees. Unfortunately, the cost of implementing traditional classroom instruction has often prevented these industries from investing in these more effective multi-sensory training solutions. In addition, nearly half of our workforce does not read above a 3rd or 4th Grade reading level making traditional “lecture/reading” activities ineffective.

Fortunately, more and more Community Colleges are stepping up to the plate. They are finding it possible to spread the cost of training to their business customers over a broad base by contracting with multiple users. As a Director at one such college remarked, “Our idea was to make our school a one-stop shopping training market where small and medium-size industries could come in and receive training advice and help.”

Many Community Colleges, in cooperation with local industries, are designing specific training paths for employees that utilize the most innovative training technologies (multi-sensory based e-Learning and networked, digitized CD-ROM). These cooperative solutions allow the schools to train the employees of local industries at a minimal fee, using training technology that might have been too costly for the small to medium-size industries to bear alone. In addition, the community colleges will have the opportunity to increase enrollment while providing a better-trained and more productive workforce for the community.

More on Thursday - - - - -

— Bill Walton, Founder of ITC Learning
bwalton@itclearning.com

“THE WORLD RELIES ON THE HANDS OF ITS MEN AND WOMEN”

For decades, decentralized companies have had to cope with training challenges that included lack of standardization, inconsistency, and facilitation challenges. An absence of centralized record-keeping has also negatively impacted their efforts.

We’ve seen how modern LMS’s have addressed the latter issue and, today, e-Learning is effectively solving the other challenges.

One such multi-national company has commented publicly about the positive impacts made on their organization by a corporate-installed LMS and, most importantly, by the movement toward e-Learning.

“At first, we had no full-blown training program which anyone and everyone could utilize. However, with e-Learning we have found a training answer that is not only cost-effective for use at multiple plant locations, but also has received favorable responses from the employees. Everyone’s happy today: upper management, the supervisors, the trainers, and our workforce.”

Well-designed e-Learning programs are the greatest value in training today. The investment is comparatively modest and the retention results are excellent.

With traditional classroom training, the more you use it, the more it costs. With e-Learning, employees really do spend more time on the job and less time training. That’s because e-Learning allows each worker to proceed at their own pace — rather than being slowed down within a classroom setting. The interactivity allows the worker to repeat, review, and retain much more of the information than was ever possible in a traditional “lecture/reading” environment.

As one company representative has said, “If we want to help our employees work smarter, we’ve got to give them the tools to do the best job possible. We can do that with e-Learning!”

Enjoy your holiday weekend. More on Tuesday - - - - -

— Bill Walton, Founder of ITC Learning
bwalton@itclearning.com

“THE WORLD RELIES ON THE HANDS OF ITS MEN AND WOMEN”

Let’s begin today with a series of questions — questions that you should think about and answer truthfully before we talk about solutions.

1) Is your organization getting healthier?
a. If applicable, is the export/import ratio shifting positively?
b. Are your earnings healthier?
c. Is productivity increasing?

2) What is happening to the “training function” within your organization?
a. Is the traditional “student/teacher” (“lecture/reading”) relationship changing?
b. Is the role of “visual aids in the classroom” changing?
c. Is training getting more corporate management attention — and, dollars?

3) What means the most to your organization?
a. ROI?
b. Share Price?
c. Growth?
d. Earnings?
e. Market Share?

4) What effect could “change in performance” have on any of the above?
a. Downtime?
b. Scrap?
c. Abseteeism?
d. Overtime?
e. Benefits Knowledge?
f. Selling Skills?
g. Communication?

If your answers to these questions are satisfactory to you and to your organization, there is no reason to read further. But, if you are looking for improvement in any of the above, the following will give you insight into the “positive prescription to re-direct performance” that state-of-the-art training can make today.

1) Today’s training should be “Performance-Based!”
a. Job-Oriented Content!
b. The primary focus is on Performance Objectives!
c. The training is user-controlled with Built-In Practice!

2) Today’s training should be “Learner Oriented!”
a. It is based on “Multi-Sensory Media” instruction!
b. It must have “Optional Full Audio Support” for poor readers!
c. It must have an “Intuitive Interface!”

3) Today’s training must be “Accountable”
a. It must have “Integrated Testing!”
b. It must provide for “Automatic Record Keeping!”

4) Today’s training must be “Customizable!”
a. It must provide for “Facility Specific Information!”
b. It must allow for “Customized Testing!”

Effective training and learning must be more than the organized teacher-led group environment we’ve known in the past. It must become a process that fully accommodates the uniqueness of individuals. And it will only achieve that goal when “intimidation,” a natural by-product of group instruction, has been erased. Multi-sensory media instruction, that is both user-controlled and educationally interactive, is uniquely positioned to serve as that ultimate eraser.

The “Learning Genie” is out of the bottle — and, not even Aladdin can put it back!

More on Thursday - - - - -

— Bill Walton, Founder of ITC Learning
bwalton@itclearning.com

“THE WORLD RELIES ON THE HANDS OF ITS MEN AND WOMEN”