Day Three of ATD 2019: Still Standing! Here's What I Learned

So, it has been an exhausting week, even though I have not been able to attend all the sessions I planned! With over 13,000 attendees (according to a vendor that my colleague Johanna Mickel was chatting with) you can't always fit in the room ...  I was turned away from a session today ... along with about 50 others.

Same Training, Half the Time – That title was a bit of a misnomer. They didn’t really tell you how to do this (because it can't be done! IMHO), but she started out with Malcolm Knowles’ characteristics of adult learners.  Interesting stuff that we studied throughout college; pretty much all training circles around to it.  In my words: it's all about the importance of WIIFM. Adults have a concept of self (so it’s important to ask what their desired outcomes are), and have a wealth of experiences and knowledge that they want to be recognized. Their motivation comes from within. They want learning to have immediate application potential, with real time solutions for current project/ situation.  So it is important to distill what is going into the program.  What does success look like?  Does this move us closer to success?  Ask what behaviors do you want to change?  (Which our company does ALL the time when talking to clients about customizing learning. What do you want them to do differently, start doing, stop doing?  Best concept, for me: "Become an information miner – pull from learners instead of pushing." That's how you can tell they are really engaged.

Spectacular Virtual Classroom Activities. Great stuff! A recipe for virtual training success: identify the goal and objectives, determine what’s social, and map interaction to the features (how they work in the platform).  The session delved into examples of virtual classroom activities that have proved successful in classes of 20 or less.  I’m hoping to work some of the examples into our virtual classroom courses, specifically the icebreaker example that gets participants using the platform and also introducing themselves to the larger team.  Sorry, can’t go into more details! You'll be wowed when you see it.  She also had a really cool example of using storytelling to check understanding by asking What have you learned based on the images?  I’m hoping to use that one too!  Instructional Designers need to have their own set of strategies to make successful virtual training: set expectations, provide clear instructions for activities, create and use participant materials, design opportunities for collaboration, deliver meaningful assessments, and build "Ninja" technical skills. 

Common Sense for eLearning Designers reviewed commonsense design principles and also shared some examples of eLearning that spoke to those principles.  Some of these also had me thinking about how we present content, in general.  Don’t list formal learning objectives.  Let the learner take control – does content need to be locked down/ sequential?  Design the “end” of the lesson first – if we don’t start there, often don’t get there.  Talk less, do more.  Create activities that suggest the desired, real world behavior.  Design specific gestures; avoid generic interaction responses.  Don’t create adversarial lessons: you don’t want to be in the classroom and hear “no, try again.”  Context is vital.  Stop judging and scoring everything.  Hold learners accountable – have them experience the consequences.  I don’t often develop eLearning, but it was great to see new examples and spark some creativity that applies to all modalities.

Did I mention I'm exhausted?