Companies should attract more Instructional Designers for training #InstructionalDesign #elearning

Online learning is increasingly pushing university learning and professional training into new directions. This means common ground must be set on what online learning is, which approaches are considered as best practices and which factors need to be taken into account to ensure a positive company wide uptake of the training. Although online learning has been around for decades, building steadily on previous evidence-based best practices, it is still quite a challenge to organize online learning across multiple partners, let alone across cultures (in the wide variety of definitions that culture can have).

Earlier this month Lionbridge came out with a white paper entitled “steps for globalizing your eLearning program”. It is a 22 page free eBook, and a way to get your contact data. The report is more corporate than academically inclined (subtitle is ‘save time, money and get better results’), and offers an insight look of how companies see global elearning and which steps to take first. But when reading the report - which does provide useful points - I do feel that corporate learning needs to accept that instructional design expertise is necessary (the experts! the people!) and needs to be attracted by the company, just like top salespeople, marketing, HR … for it is a real profession and it demands more than the capacity to record a movie and put it on YouTube!

In their first step they mention: Creating a globalizing plan

• Creating business criteria
• Decide on content types
• Get cultural input
• Choose adaptation approach

The report sets global ready content as a baseline: this section mentions content that is culturally neutral. Personally, I do not belief cultural neutrality is possible, therefor I would suggest using a cultural, balanced mix, e.g. mixing cultural depictions or languages, even Englishes (admitting there is more then one type of English and they are all good). But on the bonus side, the report also stresses the importance of using cultural native instructional design (yes!), which I think can be learner-driven content to allow local context to come into the global learning approach. Admittedly, this might result in more time or more cost (depending on who provides that local content), but it also brings the subject matter closer to the learner, which means it brings it closer to the Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky) or enables the learner to create personal learning Flow (Csikszentmihalyi) or simply to allow the learner to think ‘this is something of interest to me, and I can learn this easily’.

In a following step: Plan ahead for globalisation

• Legal issues: looking at IPR or the actual learning that can be produced. 
• Technology and infrastructure: infrastructure differs. 
• Assessment and feedback mechanisms: (yes!) Feedback, very important for all involved
• Selecting a globalizing partner

The report is brief, so not too much detail is given on what is meant with the different sections, but what I did miss here was the addition of peers for providing feedback, or peer actions to create assessments that are actually contextualized and open to cultural approaches. No mention of the instructional design experts in this section either.

In the third section a quick overview is given on what to take into account while creating global elearning content, again the focus is on elements and tools: using non-offensive graphics, avoiding culturally heavy analogies, neutral graphics…, not on the actual instruction, which admittedly would take up more than 22 pages, but the instructional approach is to me the source of learning possibilities.

Promoting diverse pedagogy

The final part of the report looks at the team you need, but …. Still no mention of the instructional design expert (okay, it is a fairly new title, but still!). And no mention of the diversity in pedagogy that could support cultural learning (not every culture is in favor of Socratic approaches, and not every cultural group likes classic lecturing).

Attract instructional designers

While the report makes some brief points of interest, I do feel that it lacks what most reports on training are lacking, they seem to forget that online instruction is a real job, a real profession with real skills and which does take years to become good at, just like any STEM or business oriented job. This does indicate that corporations are acknowledging an interest in online training (and possible profit), but … they still think that it can be built easily and does not require specific expertise.

There is no way around it: if you want quality, you need to attract and use experts. If you want to build high quality online training that will be followed and absorbed by the learner, interactions, knowledge enhancement, neurobiological effects… all of this will matter and needs to be taken into account (or at least one needs to be aware of it).
Now more than ever, you cannot simply ‘produce a video’ and hope people will come. There are too many videos out there, and a video is a media document, not necessarily a learning element. Learning is about thinking about the outcome you want to have, and then work backwards, breaking the learning process down into meaningful steps. Why do you use a video? Why do you use a MCQ? Does this really result in learning, or simply checking boxes and consuming visual media?

Building common ground as a first global elearning step

Somehow I feel that the first step should include overall acceptance of a cooperatively build basis:

What are our quality indicators (media quality, content quality, reusability, entrepreneurial effect of the learning elements, address global diversity in depicting actors (visual and audio), …)

Which online learning basics does everyone in the company (and involved in training) need to know: sharing just-in-time learning (e.g. encountering a new challenge: take notes of challenge and solution), sharing best practices on the job (ideal for mobile options), flipped lectures for training moments (e.g. case study before training hours, role play during workshops…), best practices for audio recordings … these learning basics can be so many things, depending on the training that needs to be created, but it needs to be set up collaboratively. If stakeholders feel they will benefit from training, and they are involved in setting up some ground rules and best practices, they are involved. It all comes down to: which type of learning is needed, what does this mean in terms of pedagogical options available and known, and what do the learners need and use.