Putting things into practice (a ridiculously long post)

Originally published to eBridge on Saturday 3 November 2012

Yesterday was an interesting day as my anti-bribery, fraud and corruption e-learning finally went live, a little more than four months after first inception of the project. There were a few complaints from people who failed the test first time, including one colleague was a little abrasive to me on the phone! However, the test was designed to be challenging, and most of the failures seem to have been a result of people rushing in without reading the questions carefully. Some learning experiences have to be painful I suppose (Wheeler, 2012), although it's probably not advisable to use this as an off-the-cuff-response! I made some amendments to the feedback to make sure that people could understand exactly why they have gone wrong, and updated the materials live, so hopefully I can rest easy during my week off! In terms of completion we're off to a fine start, with over 100 of our 1,200 employees finishing the compliance training on the first afternoon, and a similar amount who have at least made some progress.

I was intially approached for advice about buying something 'off the shelf' back in June, but it quickly became apparent that this kind of stuff lacked any real context, and so I went to meet our HR stakeholder for some initial action mapping (Moore, 2008). From this I was able to start designing trial scenarios, building upon previous forays into branching scenarios (Shepherd, 2011), and aiming to go a little further towards a game-like approach to make the decisions more engaging. After some input from stakeholders and final tweaking I had two good working scenarios, with scattered ideas for two more that had to be abandoned.

Next came the design of assessment questions, though on reflection I think this should have been done first. Rowntree (1997) encourages us to start with this every time, and after being asked to do some heavy revisions to my initial question set I can see why. I had designed my questions using Dror's (2006) principle of getting learners to make judgements about the material rather than factual recall, and in the quest to produce convincing 'wrong' answers I had strayed into excessive detail, which might have been kept in check if I had started with the assessment and stuck to the desired behaviours identified in the action mapping process. Still, I think this has been a valuable learning experience in developing effective learning, based on some of the more positive feedback I've had!

I'll be interested to see how things have progressed when I get back from leave...

References

• Dror, I., 2006.  Shall I remember? How learning technologies should facilitate, but too often hinder, memory. A paper for Learning Light. Available at: <
• Moore, C. (2008).  Be an e-learning action hero. Cathy Moore: Let's save the world from boring e-learning! [blog] 12 May. Available at: <http://blog.cathy-moore.com/2008/05/be-an-elearning-action-hero/> [Accessed 2 November 2012]
• Rowntree, D., 1997. Designing and assessment system. Milton Keynes (UK): Institute of Educational Technology, Open University; no date. Available at: <http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/D.G.F.Rowntree/Assessment.html/>
• Shepherd, C., 2011. A practical guide to creating learning scenarios: part 4.  Onlignment.com blog, [blog] 8 June, available at:<http://onlignment.com/2011/06/a-practical-guide-to-creating-learning-scenarios-part-4/> [Accessed 2 November 2012]
• Wheeler, S. (2012). What is learning? Learning with e's [blog] 9 July. Available at: <http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/connected.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/cYWZ+(Learning+with+'e's)#!/2012/07/what-is-learning.html> [Accessed 2 November 2012]