Your goal is to be part of the everyday

Speaking of people from the field I follow, Clea Mahoney is also trying to dedicate more time to her blog. The dedication to trying to blog every day of January is inspiring, although if I were to try it, I’d have to figure out a better writing flow. I’ve sometimes thought about things like, “what if there was a GDoc integration that would post directly from there?” (I’m sure there is). I’d also seen a demo from Keegan Wheeler ages ago about posting from sending an email. I think for me, there is friction between what I expect myself to write (longer form pieces) and the workflow I actually use to get a blog up. Making some changes this year to try to improve this on both fronts. The blogging SwissMiss has often inspired me. Sometimes it’s just a quote or something that made her laugh. She’s been blogging since the HTML only days, but the style feels like modern social media simplified.

Anyway, what caught my attention from Clea’s post here was a quote from Nick Shackleton-Jones’ How People Learn (p. 169):

Your goal is to be part of the everyday…not the once a year.

And from Clea:

Throughout the last year (and a bit longer), I’ve been trying to learn how other Instructional Designers design. Where they design, what they design, why they design.

The stuff that rises to the surface is elearning modules, but we need to go deeper.

No one asked for more elearning in the past year, right? At least, no learners. Maybe stakeholders who care more about compliance than actual learning.

So if it’s not elearning or a course or a webinar, then what?

I don’t know, but Nick encourages us to launch an MVP, which terrifies my perfectionist bones but I know It Is The Way.

This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past few years as well. I know in other contexts for ID, it is common for a business leader or manager to come to L&D and say something like, “we need a training on xyz”. In my experience in higher education and education more generally, the default is always a course. It might be called a training, workshop, module, or institute, but it’s always a course. There is an absolute focus on what people who are trying to learn or accomplish a task know instead of what they are trying to do. I saw this through a transition from one learning management system to another, and the platform itself didn’t lend much assistance in terms of helping people at their point of need.

I’ve been reading and listening to work by Bob Mosher and colleagues called the five moments of need. Their model/concept is that for any performance support and learning in the workplace, there are five moments of need:

1. When something is new
2. When learning more (going deeper)
3. When applying knowledge and skills
4. When something goes wrong (troubleshooting)
5. When something changes

Courses and more formal learning sits within the first two. Now the order here implies courses first, but Bob and the team changed the order somewhat recently which really flips solutions I’ve been considering on their head:

1. At the point of apply
2. When something goes wrong
3. When something changes
4. When something is new
5. When learning more

It’s a subtle reordering, but worth looking at problems that land on the L&D desk from that avenue rather than cracking open our favourite authoring tool before the client is done speaking.

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via cleadesigner, Direct Link

Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash