I’ve been doing a bit of work with clients lately where their “training request” is really a request for communication design. I devised a graphic to help clarify the distinctions in “learners” using terminology that I’ve heard several clients use: shallow dive vs. deep dive. Shallow dive implies we need to tell them SOMETHING, but we don’t really expect them to have to use a lot of the knowledge on the job – they will ask others to help them. Deep dive implies they are teaching other people to swim or they are applying the knowledge in pretty significant ways. There’s a third group – left standing on the shore – that are just supposed to be “aware.” (This group doesn’t use the knowledge at all…they just have some peripheral awareness of stuff that’s going on.)
Often, organizations REALLY just want to communicate stuff to people – they don’t really expect them to learn to DO anything. This is not a bad thing…except when we over-engineer the “learning solution” when all we really want to do is tell someone something and ensure they can locate the information later when they need it. In instances such as these, people don’t need courses – they need a place to find information.
How many of you, dear readers, have visited Web MD? It’s a great website, full of info. I’ll bet most of you have been there – and most of you can’t remember exactly what you’ve looked up the last 5 times you’ve visited. Doesn’t matter, though, because you can go back when you need to and find more info.
I think Web MD is a terrific example of creating a tool that is useful for communicating information and make it it easy for people to FIND information. This is is a frequent, unrecognized goal of lots of “learning solutions.” We create e-courses with NEXT buttons when what we really need is a resource that helps people find information when they need it.
We just created a learning solution that I think is really cool. It’s an “online quiz” that simply asks people questions about what they know. If they get the question right, terrific – they move on. If they don’t get it right, they get a “hint” about where they can find the right info. The “hint” links them to a reference document -already available on their website – that gives them the relevant info. This solution does three things:
1) It let’s learners quickly access whether or not they know core information that they should know as part of their jobs.
2) It gives them immediate feedback about what they don’t know. If they get a question wrong, it points them to the right reference source for locating information. This reference source is available to them outside the “online quiz.” The quiz simply helps orient them to the presence of the reference and helps them use the reference immediately AND figure out where to find it later.
3) It eliminates reading screen after screen of information learners won’t remember.
With the quantify of information we are all fed each day, designing solutions that are more about helping us locate information and less about attempting to embed things in memory is a critical need.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 3:04 pm and is filed under learning design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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