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Posts from January 2011

THE THREE REQUIREMENTS

Higher education has a place in preparing our next generation of trainers and instructional designers. Theoretical understanding is important. However, when it comes to teaching “templates of learning design,” higher education seriously misdirects the student. Cookie-cutter solutions are never the answer. Every training initiative challenge undertaken has specific — not, generic — solutions. Templating (either by the organization itself or by the purchase of a vendor’s templated creation) will not work. You...

QUESTIONING HIGHER EDUCATION

As I have commented in previous Blogs, higher education is, unfortunately, crossing over into traditional training objectives — and, away from the historical aims of a higher education. We see the movement away from a liberal arts exposure (with its attendant focus on thinking as exemplified by the great ideas and contributions made by history’s giants of thought and contribution). Instead, we are encountering an almost exclusive emphasis on “skills training” in...

BEFORE YOU BEGIN !

Before you move forward with any new training initiative, you’d better line up your objectives. Unless you know what you are attempting to accomplish, your new training initiative is probably fated to go nowhere. Let’s look at some of the items you might consider when determining your objectives. For example, do your objectives include minimizing downtime, reducing scrap, cross-training your workforce? Maybe your objectives are designed to change employee attitudes or to...

CHOOSE WISELY !

Making your training choices should be a careful process. If you’re going to reach all of your people, you know by now that the training choices you make must be multi-sensory in design.  We have discussed many times the absolute necessity of full-motion video and optional word-for-word audio if you hope to train the 40% of your workforce who do not read above a 4th Grade level.  Most importantly, we know by...

MULTI-SENSORY TRAINING !

Multi-sensory media instruction offers the best in learning to American business and industry. Today, both CD-ROM (either stand-alone or digitally networked) and multi-sensory based E-Learning reap the greatest returns. More than anything else, the body of multi-sensory training developed for business and industry brings training efficiency. There are several obvious reasons. Multi-sensory instruction reduces training time. Estimates are that learning occurs 38-70% faster than with traditional classroom instruction, and course content is...

CHANGE OR LOSE !

I am about to complete four decades of working in the training technology arena. Having lived through the earliest years of industrial videotape training – with a camera in my hands –- an engineer to provide content and very loose scripting –- and a two-inch reel-to-reel (“black and white”) mastering machine — the evolution in Learning Technologies today is awesome. I was also one of the early pioneers in the giant instructional...

A HISTORY LESSON !

Regular readers of this blog will be reminded that 40% of the nation’s workforce does not read above a 4th Grade Level and that one-third of our graduating high school seniors cannot assimilate what they read. For a very large population, reading is not the best answer for information transferal nor for the basis of forming individual opinion. Therefore, it’s worth a little time today to look back at the learning-technology trail...

LEARNING vs TESTING !

The “Great Books of the Western World” and its companion collection, “The Great Ideas Today,” were published more than a half-century ago. Their introduction was designed to stimulate thinking and their publication was an attempt to bring the best of education to Americans everywhere. Unfortunately, education has slid backward from that earlier promise. Even in the time of their original publication, the naysayers were attacking “The Great Books,” “by those modernists who...