I read a pretty interesting article in the Wall Street Journal this morning that I thought I’d pass along to you regarding Knowledge Management.   I thought the conversation around what they termed the “softer” qualities and how social networking tools can help gauge this level of expertise was interesting.

Here’s the online link  if you care to read it:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203946904574302032097910314.html

How many times have you heard “We need an eLearning course that we can launch in <insert any abbreviated timeframe> and it has to be engaging, exciting, effective and can only cost <insert any really low dollar amount>?”  It’s a challenge we all know too well.  It’s also the reason many of us have developed internal project strategies for rapidly executing eLearning design and development.  Our goal on any project we encounter is to provide great learning to our customers while designing effectively and efficiently and to reuse and repurpose good learning strategies wherever possible. 

So that brings up the question, how do you reuse and repurpose effectively?  Can it be as simple as reusing assets from a repository and applying a templated approach?  Or is it more than that?   Templates have a bad rep as being inflexible as well as a format that can sap the creativity out of good designers.  Overall, I tend to disagree.  Templates, when used properly, can provide direction and structure while still allowing a designer the freedom to be creative and having a repository of assets to draw from is key to being efficient in design and development.  So, this brings up question #2, how do you use templates properly?   

I was doing some reading on principles of adult learning and the learner-centered approach to eLearning when I found an article that discussed the topic of a templated approach versus a patterned approach to eLearning.  The article is titled “Creating Interactive, Engaging and Effective E-Learning through Patterns” (by Prashanth Prabu, October 2006).  In defining the patterns approach, Prabu explains that a patterns-based approach for creating reusable solutions at the learning objective level allows designers to create effective eLearning experiences.  The key phrase is “reusable solutions at the learning objective level”.  And to break it down a step further for those of us that pride ourselves on crafting meaningful learning solutions and solid instructional design strategies, patterns are mapped to learning problems at the learning objective level.  It all comes back to identifying the learning problems and creating solid learning objectives that solve those problems.   

There is hope!  I really like this approach because this is fundamental to what we do as instructional designers and learning solution gurus – - we identify learning problems and then create solutions that are engaging, exciting and effective using the core principles of instructional design and adult learning that we all know and love.  Reusable solutions at the learning objective level are truly learning solutions that can be called a template or a pattern but fit the bill of being reproducible learning elements that are foundational building blocks for good course design.  I think it’s worth the effort

I was part of a discussion not too long ago where a group was trying to decide what would be the next course to develop in a curriculum series.  It was a great conversation with equal representation from the learning world and the subject matter experts who were going to be directly impacted by this training program.   Both sides were very passionate about the issues as they saw them.   We were limited on time and certainly weren’t lacking ideas or problems to resolve; what we were lacking was a way to get at all the information we needed in a very short time (2 hours) and a common ground to work from that wasn’t too learning-centric.

Here’s what we did, in order to put some boundaries around the conversation and to make the best use of everyone’s time we flipcharted a t-account and labeled one side Current State and the other side Future State.  (We had done a similar thing in an activity in a leadership class we designed) The goal was to take all of the conversation points and move them into one category or the other.   We started rewriting the notes and comments into this format and soon realized that the Current State side was overloaded.  In hindsight, I think this what typically happens.  We begin the Front-end Analysis focusing on why a client needs a learning solution or needs to make an existing one better. What really made the lightbulbs go off for the group after they saw the heavily burdened Current State side was that we were all in that room to find a solution, which meant equal time needed to be spent focusing on Future State needs and desires.  Once we had the visual ”t-account” in place I noticed that the rest of the Current State issues that were discussed were followed by a Future State statement.  We had a process in place, we all saw structure and value, and we also all saw a clear path for next steps. 

So to bring this around to Instructional Design-speak, we identified the current state, started the process of defining the future state and then were able to see the ”gap”.  The gap is where the learning needs to be focused.  This is the place where we focus on building the skills and abilities that are going to get us from here to there.  Can this kind of informal gap analysis be done in every learning solution design process?  Is it always necessary?  I might argue “yes” to both questions based on the outcomes we experienced in this particular situation.