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Koreen Olbrish of Tandem Learning has a post about using games to assess learning, and she addresses both opportunities and problems.

Games are a natural environment for assessment…in essence, they are assessing your performance just by nature of the game structure itself. Unless, of course, there aren’t clear success metrics and you “win” by collecting more and more meaningless stuff (like Farmville)…but that’s a whole other topic.

So let’s assume there are success metrics built into the game and those metrics align with what your learning objectives are.

Koreen’s main topic is game design, but I want to talk about that last idea:  
the game’s success metrics need to align with your learning objectives.

This sounds like Instructional Design 101, since it is Instructional Design 101.  Ever more fundamental — Instructional Design 100, maybe — are these questions:

What do you want people to do?
Why aren’t they doing that now?
How will this make things better?

No, the first question isn’t about instruction at all.  Nor is it about, “How do you want them to act?”

It’s about what you want people to get done.

When you can’t articulate what you want people to accomplish, it hardly matters what interventions you try.  You have no way to measure progress.  Might as well just run them all through whatever you feel like.

Making your goals less fuzzy

“Sheep dip” refers to a kind of chemical bath intended to prevent or combat infestations of parasites.  (Videos of older, plunge style and newer, spray style processing of sheep.)

Farmers dip or spray sheep because… well, I’m no farmer, but here are some guesses:

• It’s more cost-effective than diagnosing the needs of each sheep.
• A dip-tank of prevention is better than a barnful of cure.
• Sheep on their own rarely propose new pest-management processes.

Ultimately, sheep farming has a few key outputs: leather, wool, mutton.  While the sheep play an essential role, I don’t think you can successfully argue that these are accomplishments for the sheep.  So what matters is the on-the-job performance of farm workers.

Speaking of on-the-job, many industries and organizations impose mandatory, formal training.  Even there, the accomplishment shouldn’t be “training completed.”

One client delivered “equal-employment awareness” training annually to every employee.  The original charter was full of “increase awareness” and “understand importance.”  Here’s what that looked like after a lot of “how can I tell they’re more aware?”

• You can recognize examples of discriminatory behavior on the job.
• You can state why the behavior is discriminatory.
• You can describe steps for resolving the discrimination.

That’s not exhaustive (and the legal department would probably say you need to sprinkle “alleged” all over the place), but the three points are a first step toward a success metric that connects the individual and the organization.

Sometimes, it is a training problem

When people in an organization can articulate overall goals, it’s easier for them (as individuals and in groups) to think about how their activities and their results relate to those goals. They’re also likelier to be better problem-solvers, because they won’t corral every problem into a formal-training solution.

Even when a major cause of a performance problem is the lack of skill or knowledge, you benefit from revisiting those Design 100 questions:

• What are the results you expect when people apply the skills they currently lack?
• What could interfere with their applying them?
• How will this approach help them learn and apply the skills?

Slightly more diplomatic language led that EEO-awareness client to decide that knowing the date of the Americans with Disabilities Act didn’t have much impact on deciding whether, in a job interview, you can ask an applicant, “Do you have a handicap?”

I’m no expert on workplace games, but I’m pretty sure I get what Koreen Olbrish is talking about.  It’s the workplace first, then the learning goal, and then the application of good design in pursuit of worthwhile results.

The same is true for any planned effort to support learning at work. You need to focus on what’s important, on how you know it’s important, on why you think training will help.

Then you use that information to guide your decisions about how to help people acquire and apply those skills when it matters.

Mindlessly grinding out courses (instructor-led, elearning, webinars, whatever) isn’t the answer, regardless of how many completion-hours people rack up.

It’s just…well, you know.

CC-licensed images:
Bigg’s Sheep Dip (Glenovis) adapted from this photo by  Riv / Martyn.
Bigg’s Dips (yellow/black) by Maurice Michael.
Quibell’s Sheep Dips by Peter Ashton aka peamasher.

Once upon a time — the time of the first-century poet Juvenal — the phrase black swan implied something that didn’t exist.  More recently, the black swan theory refers either to highly improbable things, or to outliers with an outsized influence on events.

Of course, if you had lived in western Australia before the arrival of Europeans, black swans would have been the only ones you’d ever heard of.

Which simply says most people go with what they know.

I’ve seen something of this in online discussions about the world of work.  If all your virtual dealings are with consultants, academics, freelancers, and and the folks who contract with them, you can easily get the impression everyone’s working independently.

Even though I’m a consultant myself, I’m skeptical about that broad a generalization.  So I’m revisiting something I wrote about more than three years ago: who works where (or, who’s an employee and who’s not)?

I’m getting this information from various business and non-employer statistics published by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

• In 2008, there were 21.4 million non-employers in the U.S.  Their total receipts were $963 billion, or roughly $45,000 per firm.
  • According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a non-employer is an organization with no paid employees, with $1,000 in business receipts, and subject to federal income tax. 
    (For some reason, a non-employer in the construction industry needs only $1 in receipts to be counted.)
• In 2007, there were 120 million employees working at 6 million firms.  Total receipts were $29.8 trillion.

Certainly with the economic downturn since 2007, those figures have changed, but I doubt they’ve changed that much.  Even if every single non-employer were a unique individual, and even if none of the non-employers also had a job working for someone else, 120 out of 141 million people in the U.S. were employees.  And, as the Census Bureau says, “Most non-employers are self-employed individuals operating very small unincorporated businesses, which may or may not be the owner’s principal source of income.”

I wondered where all those non-employers worked.    Here’s a breakdown by number of non-employer firms — in other words, the fields where you’d find these folks:

• Professional, scientific, technical services: 3 million
• Construction: 2.5 million
• Real estate, rental, leasing: 2.1 million
• Retail trade: 1.9 million
  • “Store and non-store” retail — the latter would include things like catalog and home-based sales
• Other services: 3 million
  • A catchall taking in everything from equipment repair to dating services to pet care

Four of these sectors (construction, real estate, retail, and “other services”) account for almost half of all non-employers.  Though perhaps the numbers would look different if the Census Bureau had a category for “social media expert.”

Meanwhile, back where you find 120,000,000 people:

• 5.1% of employees work for firms having 0 – 5 employees.
  • The zero apparently takes in seasonal work when the work’s out of season.
• 30.3% of employees work for firms having 5 – 99 employees.
• 14.2% work for firms with 100 – 499 employees.
• 5.2% work for first with 500 – 999 employees
• 12.4% work for firms having 1,000 – 4,999 employees.
• 32.7% work for firms with 5,000 or more employees

All this to demonstrate that most Americans who work, work for someone else.  And of the 120 million who are employees, nearly half work for firms with at least 1,000 employees.

I don’t have a big conclusion to finish this off with a flourish.  I just think this kind of information helps set in context some workplace learning and performance-improvement issues.

CC-licensed image of a black swan by specksinsd.

Are you in a corporate training environment? Dick Carlson in his mild-manner way muses on how learners feel about training (Learner Feedback? You Can’t STAND Learner Feedback!).

Dick and I have some differences — I think dogs ought to have noses that they themselves can see — but not in this area.  The core of Dick’s post is the ultimate assessment: can you now accomplish whatever this training was supposed to equip you to accomplish?

(Yes, that does mean “that you couldn’t accomplish before due to a lack of skill or knowledge.”  Don’t be cute.)

Because — if we start with a true skill deficit that prevented you from producing worthwhile results — that’s vastly more important than whether the training fit your purported learning style, whether the ratio of graphics to text was in a given range, and whether the person helping you called herself a trainer, a teacher, a facilitator, a coach, or the Bluemantle Pursuivant.

If you need to learn how to recover from an airplane stall or how to control paragraph borders through a class in CSS, learning assessment comes down to two words: show me.

With all that, I do think that how the learner feels about what’s going on does  influence the learning situation.  I just want to make clear: that’s very different from saying that those feelings matter in terms of assessing the learning.

High profile?  You bet your assessment.

I was once in charge of instructor training and evaluation for an enormous, multi-year training project.  In the final phase, we trained over 2,000 sales reps to use a laptop-based, custom application.  90% of the them had never used a personal computer.

Which was a drawback: the client decided that as long as the sales reps were coming for training on the custom application, we should “take advantage of the opportunity” to teach them email.

And word processing.  And spreadsheets.  And a presentation package.  And connection to two different mainframe applications using simple, friendly 3270 emulation software.

In a total of five days (one 3-day session, a 2-day follow-on one month later).

Our client training group was half a dozen people, so we hired some 30 contractors and trained them as instructors.  I mention the contractors because we needed a high degree of consistency in the training.  When a group of sales reps returned for Session 2, we needed to be confident that they’d mastered the skills in Session 1.

(If the informal learning zealots knew how we electrified the fences within which the instructors could improvise, they’d have more conniptions than a social media guru who discovered her iPhone is really a Palm Pre in drag.)

We used a relentlessly hands-on approach with lots of coaching, as well as “keep quiet and make them think” guidance for the instructor.  The skills focused on important real-world tasks, not power-user trivia: open an account.  Cancel an order.  Add a new contract.

We conducted nearly 600 classroom-days of training, and we had the participants completed end-of-day feedback after 80% of them.  I never pretended this was a learning assessment.  I’m not sure it was an assessment at all, though we might have called the summary an assessment, because our client liked that kind of thing.  We had 10 or so questions with a 1-to-4 scale and a few Goldilocks questions ( “too slow / too fast / just right” ), as well as space for freeform comments.

Why bother?

I made the analogy with checking vital signs at the doctor’s or in the hospital.  Temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure, and respiration rate aren’t conclusive, but they help point the way to possible problems, so you can work on identifying causes and solutions.

So if we asked how well someone felt she could transmit her sales calls, we knew about the drawbacks of self-reported date.  And we had an instructor who observed the transmit exercise.  We were looking for an indication that on the whole, class by class, participants felt they could do thist.

(Over time, we found that when this self-reporting fell below about 3 on the four-point scale, it was nearly always due to… let’s say, opportunity for the instructor to improve.)

When we asked the Goldilocks question about pace, it wasn’t because we believed they knew more about pacing than we did.  We wanted to hear how they felt about the pace.  And if the reported score drifted significantly toward “too fast” or “too slow,” we’d decide to check further.   (2,204 Session 1 evaluations, by the way, put pace at 3.2, where 1 was “too slow” and 5 was “too fast.” )

Naturally, to keep in good standing with the National Association for Smile-Sheet Usage, we had free-form comments as well.  We asked “what did you like best?” and “What did you like least?”  (In earlier phases of this project, we asked them to list three things they liked and three they didn’t.  Almost no one listed three.  When we let them decide for themselves what they wanted to list, the total number per 100 replies went up. )

Early in the project, our client services team sat around one evening, pulling out some of the comment sheets and reading them aloud.  It was my boss at the time who found this gem, under “what did you like best?”

My instructor made me feel
safe to be dumb.

Everybody laughed.  Then everybody smiled.  And then everybody realized we had a new vision of what success in our project would mean.

We wanted the learners to feel safe to be dumb.  Safe to ask questions about things they didn’t understand.  Safe to be puzzled.  Because if they felt safe, they felt comfortable in asking for help.  And if they felt comfortable asking, that meant they felt pretty sure that we could help them to learn what they needed to learn.

What about weaving their feedback into the instructional design?  In general, newcomers to a field don’t know much about that field, which means they’re not especially well equipped to figure out optimal ways to learn.

Please note: I am not at all saying newcomers can’t make decisions about their own learning.  In fact, I think they should make ‘em.  In a situation like this, though, my client wasn’t the individual learner.  It was (fictionally named) Caesar International, and it had thousands of people who needed to learn to apply a new sales-force system as efficiently as possible.

Mainly procedural skills.  Low familiarity with computers, let alone these particular applications.  High degree of apprehension.

(By the way, Ward Cunningham installed WikiWikiWeb online eight months after our project ended, so don’t go all social-media Monday-morning-quarterback on me.)

I felt, and still feel, that our design was good.  So did the Caesar brass: within six months of the end of the project, a nearly 25% increase in market share for Caesar’s #1 product, and the honchos said that resulted from successfully training the reps to use the new sales software on the job.

When you feel safe to be dumb, you don’t stay dumb long.

CC-licensed images:
Yes / no assessment by nidhug (Morten Wulff).
“Cover-the-content” adapted from this photo by antwerpenR (Roger Price).

In her comment on yesterday’s post, Kathy Sierra included a link to a presentation she made at a recent Government 2.0 Expo.  Here it is:

Sierra’s often talked about passion, and makes a good distinction here between “passion” and “fantasy models.”  In the workplace (as elsewhere), passion means more than “I’m interested in” or “I care about” something.  For her, it means that you’re so into whatever you’re into that you’re constantly learning.

Not everyone is, which explains the difference between 15 years’ experience and one year repeated 14 times.

That’s how I interpret her remark about passion meaning that you’re engaged in “a sustainable way.”  You’re not just connected to something passively.  You interact with it, and that interaction changes you.

In her talk, she touches on the fact that many people don’t learn and change even when they’ve got a real stake in the outcome–like people who’ve had coronary bypass surgery.

That doesn’t mean they can’t, of course.  It may mean that they need better tools to help them change–clearer examples, support systems, networks, all that stuff.

In the meantime, her suggestions for getting started include:

• Teach something cool (as a bridge to other things)
• Provide opportunity for self-expression (meaning, let people do things with what they’re learning)
• Wrap the mundane or pragmatic in a compelling context

If you’re in the U.S., your local jurisdiction produces an annual water quality report (here’s the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission’s version).  Sierra points to recent reports from the city of Bryant, Texas (available from the Water Services department’s main page).  Since 2004, they’ve worked at doing things differently, at least in part to raise awareness of what the department does for citizens.

Links at the Water Services page offer reports from earlier years, like the 2004 edition from which I took the picture above.  Even without reading all the text, you get a striking image.  They’re talking about backflow prevention–keeping hazardous material from contaminating the water system (not to mention the water from your faucet).  The city has backflow prevention in place, and so can you.

So the citizens of Bryant could learn more about their water and modify their usage based in part on the report.  And on a couple other levels:

• The staff of the water department has more visibility.
• The city thinks differently about how it communicates with citizens.
• Individuals (workers, citizens, passers-by) see a fresher, potentially more effective way to share a message.

Maybe it’s not always calendars.  Or maybe the calendar form, and the increased resolution that Kathy Sierra talks about, helps drive people to more and more creativity.  It’s like what the poet Robert Francis said about the sestina in general and his poem Hallelujah: a sestina in particular:

If you drape thirty-nine iron chains around your arms and shoulders and then do a dance, the whole point of the dance will be to seem light and effortless.

Robert Francis knows, as Kathy Sierra knows, that “light and effortless” won’t happen unless you pick up those chains, get out on the floor, and dance.

I haven’t read any of the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer, and now I don’t have to, thanks to the reviews at Pop Suede.  (I started with the third, the one for Twilight: Eclipse, but here they’re in what I think is the proper sequence.)

Review of Twilight:

Review of Twilight: New Moon

Review of Twilight: Eclipse

What’s the point (other than a teensy bit of humor)?

It struck me that, based on the little I’d picked up from newspapers and online, the Pop Suede folks have done a great job of capturing the plot of each book, then tweaking it enough that you see both the textual source and the satiric object.  It’s like a wildly informal approach to… a book report.

Understand: I no more want everyone churning out lolcats book reviews than I want another couple thousand terabytes of online-learning Jeopardy quiz.  But think what it took to put these things together: you had to grasp the key points of the original book, weed stuff out, and then express your understanding in a way that communicates.

It’s that kind of reworking and recasting of a complicated set of ideas that helps foster learning, not a 20-item multiple-guess test at the end of the half-day module on Twilight: New Moon.

I once needed to mitigate the effect of the typical marketing department information dump.  New victims employees were sentenced to hear 90 minutes’ worth of feeds and speeds about three major products.   So I asked the product managers to agree to a new format in which they’d present for only an hour, take a short break, and then participate in a discussion with the new hires.

This is how I explained the “discussion” to the sales folks, immediately before the first presentation:

We’re going to have three one-hour presentations today.

Yeah, I know, but after two of them, you get a 15 minute break.

Look on the back of your name card.  You’re in one of three groups based on the colored dot.

At the end of each presentation, I’ll name one of the colors.   During the break, that color group has 15 minutes to make a pitch on “the 10 main ways to sell [whatever the product is].”

After the break, you make your pitch.  The rest of you get to ask questions, kibitz, figure stuff out.
At the end, the Product Manager will jump in.

Yeah, it was manipulative.  Hey, I’d been working with sales reps for a while.

Some of the things I had in mind:

• Reduce potential product-manager-induced sleep by 33% (one hour instead of 90 minutes).
• Increase attention, at least in the first session, since the sales rep didn’t know if he had to work on the pitch till after it was over.
• More breaks than expected (a feature, but for most folks, a benefit).
• Rethinking / reworking by the sales reps replaced canned product-manager summary.
• Product manager got to hear what the sales reps thought were the main sales ideas.

In a way, it was very formal learning: one-time, face-t0-face,  scheduled.  We even had mediocre coffee, pastries, and PowerPoint.  But we also got the salespeople doing what their jobs called for: thinking about the products and how they could sell them to potential customers.