Thoughts On Learning

May 10, 2012

3D or not 2D? That is the Question

Is 3D media a better choice than 2D for asynchronous learning experiences?

First, context: I think marketing and entertainment savvy have an important place in training and development. All cross-disciplinary approaches to improve the design and production of exceptional online learning experiences are welcome. Enspire’s own media subsidiary, Houndstooth, reflects this philosophy – cross pollinating heavily between the worlds of marketing, learning, and entertainment, and deploying 3D or 2D media as need dictates.

That said, I’ve noticed customers are specifically seeking out vendors to create 3D environments for asynchronous learning experiences. Note the “asynchronous” modifier. I’m referring to single user experiences, not multi-user virtual worlds.

Is 3D better for this kind of learning?
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April 30, 2012

Free Webinar: Storytelling Delivers Effective Learning with Cisco and Enspire

Matt Lisle, Instructional Designer at Enspire Learning, and Dawn Adams Miller, from Cisco’s Learning & Development Solutions Group, teamed up in this Brandon Hall webinar to explore storytelling as a technique for presenting learning content. Matt and Dawn explain how the graphic novel approach was used to engage learners in a corporate-wide initiative at Cisco. You’ll learn how the project progressed from selling the concept to the stakeholders, through design, development, implementation and deployment.

Click here to watch the recorded webinar!

April 12, 2012

Sim Mind, Beginner’s Mind

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,
in the expert’s mind there are few.”
– Shunryu Suzuki

Is it easier to train a beginner or an expert? I need only reflect on my repeated failure to learn a foreign language in my adult years in order to answer this question. I’ve studied both Spanish and French, but whenever I encounter French or Spanish speakers, I must arduously translate the words and sentences I happen to recognize into English in order to understand them. At this point, I’ve come to the conclusion that if I really want to learn either of these languages, the only thing left for me to do is to pick up and move to Paris or Mexico City, to immerse myself in an environment where I am forced to upend what I know about language and become a beginner again.

Well-designed simulations are like these foreign countries I imagine moving to. They offer the opportunity to immerse ourselves in environment in which we are forced to challenge our expertise, to disrupt the long-rehearsed patterns of our daily lives and work. In doing so, simulations allow us to grasp the possibilities of learning complex tasks and systems in ways that cannot be merely studied. This is where the true power of training simulations lies – in turning all of us “experts” into beginners in some way.

This is not to say that expertise isn’t useful, but it is inherently limited from a learning perspective. When we call upon it, we foreclose on possibilities for viewing our area of expertise in a different, often deeper way. Therefore, the first question in designing a training simulation is not so much how we can create experts but how we can get individuals with varying areas of expertise to approach a task or challenge with a beginner’s mind. It is from that place that we can affect the greatest behavioral change in our audiences.

March 30, 2012

Enspire at the CLO Symposium

CLO Symposium 2012 is nearly here and we cannot wait for this exciting event. If you’re attending the conference, be sure to check out “Southwest Airlines: Developing Legendary Leaders, Southwest Style” led by Bjorn Billhardt and Bonnie Endicott, Senior Manager People Development at Southwest Airlines.

Southwest Airlines has a highly engaged workforce known for its sense of humor and teamwork. Its culture is fueled by significant investments in leadership development. This session explores how Southwest’s Developing Legendary Leaders program, an intensive boot camp for managers and directors, builds leadership, strategic thinking and business acumen skills. The session takes a close look at a competitive team-based simulation that allows Southwest’s rising leaders to hone their business acumen skills.

Get an inside view into Southwest’s successful leadership development program, and see the results of Southwest’s focus on developing leaders from within the organization.

In this interactive session, you will learn best practices for:

Building effective high potential leadership development programs
Leveraging experiential business simulations to provide practice and insights
Increasing business acumen and leadership skills among organizational leaders

To learn more about Enspire’s Business Challenge at Southwest, read our case study here.

March 26, 2012

New Issue of Enspire’s Newsletter

The Spring 2012 issue of The Dispatch, Enspire’s quarterly newsletter, is now available on the website.

This issue includes:
Lights, Action, WOOF!: VCA Video Shoot
A Word from CEO Bjorn Billhardt
“Role-Plays Reloaded: Simulation-Based Approaches to Leadership Development” by Nathan Kracklauer
“Sim Mind, Beginner’s Mind” by Robert Bell

Click here to view the latest issue of The Dispatch.

Sign up here to be added to The Dispatch email list. You will receive the newsletter in your inbox quarterly.

March 21, 2012

SXSW: Another Great Year!

SXSWedu and Interactive are over and I am exhausted. I got to meet Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in person (thanks, Drew and the Chamber!) and had a nice crowd attend my speech on simulation-based learning. For slides, click here. I have to say that some of the conference had a distinct 1999 feel to it, which I hope is a good sign. It seems that far too many companies and start-ups are vying for user attention these days, some with fairly dubious business models. And the accelerator business model, so prevalent in the late 90s, has made a full-scale comeback, too. I hope that as SXSW evolves it finds new ways to separate great new innovations from the inevitable hype that exists when new industries are born. Overall, though, two great conferences and I look forward to next year – congratulations, Ron and Hugh on pulling off another banner year!

February 29, 2012

Customer Service – Food for Thought

Before I came to Enspire Learning, I spent years working as a chef and restaurant owner. I’m frequently struck by the degree to which working for a learning provider is like working at a restaurant. Some restaurants sling pre-packaged value meals. Some learning providers do that, too, while others prepare sumptuous feasts created specifically for the person or business consuming them. People working for both of these businesses need to share a common preoccupation, though: customer service. More often than not it is the quality of the service experience, not just the quality of the training or the meal, that brings customers back for more.

How can you improve your customer experience? In every professional services engagement there are multiple touchpoints with the client. Plenty of people have an opportunity to delight the customer, or alternately degrade their experience to the point that they never want to come back. I’ll talk about my old business – the restaurant business. In the restaurant business, a customer’s experience starts before she even sets foot in the door and doesn’t end until she’s left the parking lot. There are many points of contact before and after a diner enjoys the meal where a little extra effort can go a long way.
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February 22, 2012

Cache it if You Can

A few weeks ago I posted about how we “outsource control of behavior to the environment.” This made me think about the concept “distributed cognition.” Distributed cognition proposes that knowledge is not confined to an individual, but rather is distributed throughout an environment. That is, we use external sources including other people, materials, and other tools and supports within the environment to help us in critical thinking and decision-making.

Distributed cognition always plays into my instructional design thinking. What and who do learners have at hand to support their thinking, ergo support their performance?

Recently, I heard the term “transactive memory” which proposes that groups of people collectively encode, store, and retrieve knowledge. This term is meant to explain the processes behind “hive mind” or “group think.” It’s not really a new idea either, but to me it seemed like another phrasing of distributed cognition.

A lot has been made that we are losing our memorization capabilities due to the easy and immediate access to information. My colleague Matt wrote about “second screens”; I find myself looking up information ever more frequently on my smart phone as I watch TV, read a book, listen to music, or take a walk outdoors. What is that flower, or tree, or snake!?
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January 24, 2012

Free Webinar: Gamify Your E-learning

Join us for a free webinar Thursday, Feb. 9 at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. CT
Game On! 7 Gamification Techniques to Enliven Your E-learning
Led by Jan Farquhar, Senior Instructional Designer and Writer

From grocery store scratch-off coupons to credit card use rewards, the marketplace recognizes our natural response to challenge and rewards. Learn simple techniques to integrate game design mechanics into your e-learning to boost engagement, retention, and compliance.

Attend our webinar and learn these gamification techniques that can help you transform your e-learning. Click here to register!

January 11, 2012

Change Your Environment to Change Your Behavior

NPR Morning Edition aired a fascinating piece last week: “What Vietnam Taught Us About Breaking Bad Habits.” The context of the story was New Year’s resolutions and why breaking bad habits or even starting good habits is so hard to do.

The question: “What does science know about translating our resolve into actual changes in behavior?” The answer: “People, when they perform a behavior a lot, outsource the control of the behavior to the environment.”

For Vietnam veterans treated for heroin addiction, only 5% relapsed during their first year returning home from Vietnam. The serviceman beat an extremely addictive habit by treating the physical addiction and by undergoing a radical change in their environment.

In other words, our mind automatically engages behaviors based on familiar environmental cues and patterns.
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