From the Coleface

AUGUST 10, 2020

Over the years I’ve enjoyed/been guilty of reading many self-help books and the lockdown has been an opportunity to read several more. Chris Taylor distils the advice from hundreds of self-help books into 11 pieces of advice: Take one small step. Change your mental maps. Struggle is good. Scary is good. Instant judgment is bad. Remember the end of your life.

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From the Coleface

DECEMBER 16, 2019

I’ve enjoyed reading Nick Shackleton-Jones’s book “How people learn” and a subsequent talk by him. Although I like the direction that he’s trying to nudge corporate L&D in, I have a few reservations about the ‘science bit’. Whilst I agree that mainstream psychology seems to have gone down a blind alley with experiments testing recall of random things, I doubt Nick’s claim that emotion is the only factor in town when it comes to memory.

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From the Coleface

APRIL 17, 2019

Easter holidays. A great time when we break out the board games in the Cole household. A particular favourite is The Game of Life (published by Hasbro). As a learning designer who often creates mini games for business purposes, I’m always interested in the subtext of a game – the behaviours and tactics that get rewarded with points and hence the model of how the world works that the game is implicitly teaching. 10 ways that the world works?

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From the Coleface

MARCH 19, 2019

The rapidly changing business environment means that increasingly people need T-shaped skills profiles (deep expertise in one or more domains and a broad awareness of several areas). As change accelerates, people will need to reinvent the vertical part of their T more often. The conventional wisdom (Gladwell et al.) is that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something.

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From the Coleface

NOVEMBER 15, 2018

The last 20 years has seen the evolution of terminology from Computer-Based Learning to e-learning to digital learning (and beyond). One term that has been static is SME (subject matter expert). Given how much the world and technology has changed in that time, is it time for a re-think? One Big Four firm has already started dropping SME as a term for internal L&D projects.

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From the Coleface

APRIL 6, 2018

GDPR is one of e-learning’s hot topics in 2018. Here’s a blog that I co-wrote with Brightwave’s Head of QA on how it will affect L&D managers when they have a breathing space from getting learning to their colleagues about GDPR. [link].

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From the Coleface

NOVEMBER 1, 2017

An update on a post about learning objectives which attracted a healthy amount of support and debate: refinements to that position and what it means in practice for learning designers. One of the richest compilations of high quality thinking is Will Thalheimer’s. If you can’t spare 30 minutes to watch the video, here are my key take outs: Showing learning objectives to learners has some measurable benefit to learners as it helps focus them on what is ‘salient’ Plenty of o

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From the Coleface

OCTOBER 4, 2017

As noted before, many factors have made it harder for L&D professionals to know their learners really well. This means that L&D initiatives are more exposed to guesswork and questionable opinions of other business stakeholders about what good learning looks like e.g. “the way I learned this was” , “the way that my kids are learning is all video on mobile phones” and what learners want e.g. “we need a different solution for digital natives” A path to gr

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From the Coleface

MAY 31, 2017

In 1990 Peter Senge published “ The Fifth Discipline ” , giving a compelling vision of how companies could transform into learning organisations. The ideas chime with many L&D professionals, but adoption by business has been patchy. As both Towards Maturity and Bersin have recently launched reports on self-managed learning, it reminded me of a project I led on self-managed learning at the turn of the century which crashed and burned*/ was ahead of its time* (* = delete according

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From the Coleface

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

Learning objectives are core tools of the trade in learning design. If you can state “By the end of this course/e-learning/other, a learner will be able to X”, you have a focus for your design and a means for reviewers to check that the learning journey will get to its intended destination. I’ve noticed in a few recent projects that clients have drafted learning objectives using the verb “understand” This is contrary to what I was taught in my own learning design 10

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From the Coleface

OCTOBER 16, 2016

Once again I had the privilege to judge the e-learning awards (now called the Learning Technology Awards). When I last judged the compliance category two years ago I wrote Five ingredients for compliance e-learning excellence . It was great to see that many of the entries reflected these five ingredients and the general improvement in learner experience.

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From the Coleface

JUNE 15, 2016

I enjoyed a day out at the Learning Technologies Summer Forum yesterday. Like many conferences, there was no shortage of vendors trying to broadcast how their offering is the panacea to organisations’ performance problems. This noise about the channels of learning (“modality”) tends to distract from a far more significant consideration: What is the nature of the learning that we want to make happen?

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From the Coleface

MARCH 4, 2016

Fresh from being awarded CLO of the year by the LPI, forum member Sarah Lindsell , Global & UK Director of Digital Learning and Learning Strategies at PwC, was the guest speaker at PSEF’s 3 March meeting hosted by Deloitte. PSEF is a networking group for L&D professionals in the UK’s largest accountancy and legal firms, held under Chatham House rules.

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From the Coleface

MARCH 21, 2016

As an experienced blended learning designer and judge of the e-learning Awards (recently rebranded as the Learning Technologies Awards), I was invited to appear on TV. As part of the learning designers series, I’ve shared three key tips on blended learning design on LNTV. Spoiler alert – or to whet your appetite – the tips that I’ve explained are: Consider your options.

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From the Coleface

OCTOBER 29, 2015

Much of the e-learning that professional firms offer is compliance-based. The risk is that poor compliance e-learning ends up tainting learners’ expectations of e-learning (this is sometimes referred to as the “compliance e-learning cul-de-sac”). In an effort to promote better compliance learning as part of positively building organisations’ cultures of compliance, Towards Maturity and SAI Global have surveyed over 250 organisations and added qualitative depth to the research by facilitating fac

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From the Coleface

JULY 30, 2015

Imagine you are running a training company that has successfully carved out a niche. You’re selling lots of training courses and it’s only capacity that is stopping you from selling more. One day you realise that you could increase reach, lock out competitors and reduce cost of sales if you put some of the training online. What could possibly go wrong?

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From the Coleface

MARCH 11, 2015

'Over 15 years of working in L&D (and a dose of studying philosophy of science at university) makes me very alert to the phrase “research says” It is usually followed by an unsubstantiated claim. After all, if you are making a claim that is backed by scientific research it is not hard to include a link, reference or a footnote, so why wouldn’t you?

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From the Coleface

DECEMBER 24, 2014

'At a recent Professional Services e-learning Forum, L&D teams were likened to “cobbler’s children with no shoes” This allegory describes the phenomenon where professionals are so busy with work for their clients and their teams that they neglect using their professional skills to help themselves or those closest to them. A beautiful metaphor, but is it true to life?

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From the Coleface

NOVEMBER 4, 2014

'It is a truth universally acknowledged in any presentation skills or business writing course that you need to get to know your audience – that way, whatever your message, you can gauge useful things like what they already know, think and feel before you jump into the delicate basis of encouraging them to unlearn some old comfortable behaviours/ knowledge and learn some new behaviours/ knowledge that will only pay off after repeated practice and a few wobbles.

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From the Coleface

OCTOBER 14, 2014

'If e-learning has a creation myth, it is that the e-learning industry was born out of the dotcom crash at the turn of the century – swarms of freshly unemployed web designers and developers started applying their skills to changing learner behaviour rather than consumer behaviour. The exchange of ideas between e-learning and web design diminished as the e-learning industry sought to distance its public perception from the failed dotcoms.

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From the Coleface

SEPTEMBER 29, 2014

'Last week I had the privilege of judging the e-learning awards (obviously my lips are sealed as to who the winners are until the awards dinner). Naturally some of the entries had other ingredients that made them sparkle in other ways, but here I can share five themes that many of the short-listed entries had in common. These should be useful to both clients and vendors who are looking to make their compliance e-learning more interesting and impactful. 1.

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From the Coleface

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

'As someone who enjoys reducing information overload and making complex topics more meaningful and accessible, I’ve enjoyed browsing my way through two coffee table books which show the power of infographics: David McCandless’ Information is beautiful and Simon Rogers’ Facts are sacred. The way that data has been put together and presented is genuinely inspiring.

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From the Coleface

SEPTEMBER 9, 2014

'Last Friday I went to an excellent session of the Trainers and Developers Network led by Catherine Shepherd. In many organisations talent management is siloed away from L&D, but it’s usually helpful to understand more about what your colleagues in HR are doing (and how it interacts with your LMS). Here are my three main takeaways from the day.

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From the Coleface

SEPTEMBER 1, 2014

'If you’ve managed to avoid the ice bucket challenge , I can only commend you for managing to stay unplugged from social media on your holidays, you have surpassed me. For the rest of us, this is a cultural phenomenon, which naturally I look through the lens of L&D geekiness to see what we can learn. The act of filming a video clip and posting in on social media is commonplace.

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From the Coleface

AUGUST 4, 2014

'Learners are used to compliance e-learning. Anyone in a big company is used to having several mandatory modules a year to complete so the game becomes “how can I do this as quickly as I can and get my tick in the box?” Left unchallenged, this leads to a mentality of “this stuff does not apply to me and would never happen here” So what better way of puncturing this complacency by explaining a real life story that happened to your organisation where regulators handed out s

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From the Coleface

JULY 4, 2014

'7 th July sees the 10 th meeting of the Professional services e-learning forum, an informal networking and benchmarking group for L&D professionals working for the UK’s top 15 accountancy and top 15 law firms. Meetings involve a structured round table discussion under Chatham House rules followed by informal networking. When I was a training manager at a Big Four accountancy firm, I found it bizarre that L&D people in professional services firms did not get together more to compar

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From the Coleface

APRIL 1, 2014

'Today I have been given exclusive reviewer access to the Beta version of Dialogomatic 2.0, the system that takes dialogue from a novel and at the click of a button can republish this as the script for self-paced e-learning, a stage play, music for a musical or as a comic strip. Inspired by those awkward conversations with your boss’s boss whilst waiting for the lift which nonetheless could be full of learning potential, the University of Shamrock created Dialogomatic.

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From the Coleface

MARCH 3, 2014

'Recently I was given what many instructional designers would consider the best brief ever: there’s unlimited budget, there’s no major urgency, just come up with something innovative and interesting. There had to be a catch, and there was - it’s one of the dullest compliance topics imaginable for people in the insurance industry. After the shock had worn off, I felt a mix of elation and fear.

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From the Coleface

JANUARY 27, 2014

'At this year’s Learning Technologies show I’ve been invited by the eLearning Network to do a slot on ‘Ask the Expert’ about instructional design. I’ll be at stand 190 from 2-3pm on Wednesday 29 January, answering any questions you might have on instructional design. I’m not anticipating being in agony uncle mode for the full hour – I’ll be very happy to go off-topic, especially if you want to find out more about how the eLearning Network could ben

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From the Coleface

JANUARY 22, 2014

'How easy is it to find the information that you need for your job within your organisation? Probably a lot more difficult and frustrating than using a search engine to find public information…. My prediction for 2014 is that this is the year that smart organisations will take significant steps to narrow this gap in user experience. They will gain benefits such as faster time to market, improved customer service and reduced reinvention of the wheel, whilst maintaining business confidentiality an

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From the Coleface

DECEMBER 24, 2013

'At this time of year there’s plenty of times that you’ll hear ‘Happy Christmas’ or ‘Happy New Year’ which got me thinking about the nature of happy. There are three pertinent stories I wanted to share, two from 2013 but the first one from 20 years ago…. After university I had a fun year where I was elected to be in charge of university sport.

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From the Coleface

SEPTEMBER 30, 2013

'Lucy Kellaway’s recent article in the FT “Compliments are always best made behind closed doors” challenges the conventional wisdom that workplace praise is best given in public and criticism in private. Whilst this maxim may be true for the praise giver and receiver, research by Chan & Sengupta “ Observing Flattery: A Social Comparison Perspective ” shows that we need to be careful about the collateral damage to bystanders.

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From the Coleface

JUNE 25, 2013

'Just when you thought you had enough e-learning buzzwords, curation came along. For those who like definitions “ Content Curation is the act of discovering, gathering, and presenting digital content that surrounds specific subject matter.” Content curation evolved as a digital marketing discipline to enhance search engine optimisation and then crossed over into the learning space.

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From the Coleface

JUNE 10, 2013

'When I’m explaining to non L&D people what I do, one thing they commonly say is “Oh yes, e-learning. We had to do a module on Anti-Money Laundering” Much as I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been involved in making compliance e-learning more interesting, there’s clearly quite a lot of page-turners still in circulation.

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From the Coleface

MAY 9, 2013

'I chose the title for this blogpost because I like the tune , not because I wanted to offend… Anyway, here’s a chain of events that’s been played out in hundreds of organisations. Often it has pretty depressing outcomes, but in case you get too despondent, let me assure you there is a happy ending, especially if you like flowcharts. Management have a problem that they don’t want to or can’t solve personally.

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From the Coleface

APRIL 19, 2013

'A really thought-provoking article by Ralf Dobelli (based on a longer essay) about information overload and in particular, news. To pick out some headlines, “news inhibits thinking, kills creativity, makes us passive and wastes time” So if Dobelli’s arguments are valid, why would anyone read or watch the news? One big factor is that everyone consumes news because they think that other important people do.

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From the Coleface

FEBRUARY 15, 2013

I’m often asked the question does Linkedin really help or is it a waste of time? Like most social media it allows us to do things that we do in real life faster, more cheaply, with more reach and more publicly (or with less privacy, if you prefer). The answer I usually give involves a game I used to play as a student. On wet wintry afternoons in the final year where we should have been doing something more worthy and CV-enhancing, I’d put on a pot of tea and one of my housemates woul

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