eLearning Roadtrip

Think Like a Product Manager

 "Business as usual" isn't so usual anymore. I'm sure that has a lot to do with questions about the relevancy of learning, elearning and instructional design as we've known them. While I know there are some calls to dump ID and to transform elearning into metaverses and social networks, I would suggest some additional reforms.

In the midst of all of the economic chaos it has become clear that we need to pay better attention to the business side of our business. Tony Karrer had a great blogpost on this topic. Jay Cross has taken this on as his next mission. And of course this is what my co-workers and I do at Sage Road Solutions every day.

Personally, I'm delighted about this change. The shift in awareness and new demands for accountability, value on investment and providing real business value with learning solutions is so palpable you can almost feel it.  It suggests that we are maturing beyond the "craft" model of elearning and performance support where we (had to) do everything ourselves. It suggests we are ready for teams and specialization. It also suggests that maybe we are ready to think about the value that we drive in business terms.

It has always bothered me that a profession that puts so much stake in systematic processes has been built more on the foundations of self-evident truth than on real evidence. "What?!" I can just hear you shriek. "That's heresy! Why, every ID knows that the first thing we do is to ANALYZE! We are systematic. We use ADDIE! We know Kirkpatrick's Four Levels! We follow process models that are based in research and theory!"

What most IDs count as systematic analysis is when we figure out who will be learning, what they will be learning, how long will it take, when will it take place, for how long and how to test for success. These are the basic building blocks of any learning design. But they are also dictated in large measure by the conditions and context in which they are built and deployed. These kinds of things are not typically revenue driving activities. Which means that they end up being counted as costs. Costs without revenues to justify them - and pay for them - are bad.

For better or worse, I learned this lesson long after I had been an ID professor. When I started working at Macromedia I was a lone learning and design solutions market specialist working with a team of MBAs that needed to take learning and education solutions to market. I quickly realized that it really didn't matter that I could tell all about the learning theories I'd used and the instructional design model I preferred, and which level of the Kirkpatrick model I used to evaluate whether I achieved more satisfaction than impact.

My business partner at the time needed me to help her figure out answers to far more important business questions - what kind of demand could we show for the solutions I wanted to develop? What technology features really mattered to our customers? What could we actually sell? Who would buy what I was designing? Really? How much money would my customers be willing to spend for the kinds of things I was thinking about? Which demographic might be most likely to want what I was doing?  What kinds of objections would we need to overcome? How could we best make our case with the customers?

I learned the lessons pretty well - well enough that Beth Davis, my former Macromedia business partner (best known in this industry for bringing a little product called Dreamweaver to market back in the Web 1.0 heyday, along with many other similar kinds of product successes over the past decade) and I decided to continue our unique blend of helping customers drive business value with learning products and solutions here at Sage Road Solutions. We have realized that the way we approach solving our customers' business problems has little to do with process, and has everything to do with dealing with our solutions as products.

Basically, Beth has taught me to think like a product manager. She has helped me understand that learning solutions may function as processes, but the solutions themselves ARE products - they need to be clear, definable, concrete, operational, has boundaries and has a fixed price. and not focusing so much on the processes that get us to the point of use, but more about figuring out how to solve problems. We need real metrics, because if we dont get the market defined right then we have no way of capturing the new and emerging opportunites. And these days, capturing the opportunity is maybe almost as important as getting the learning design right.

There is a point where talking about all the processes and possibilities just gets to be exhausting. For me, getting tangible and real about getting down to business is the most satisfying part of what we do. So much better to show, not tell. My .02.

My Top 10 for IDs

ID is about producing value through the design, development and distribution of learning solutions. Used to be that IDs looked more like psychologists than programmers, but that's not the case any longer. Any ID looking for a job these days must expect to work with technology tools, because so much of today's learning and performance support is enabled / managed / distributed via technology. But IDs are not just elearning content authors. IDs are also engaged in supporting and enabling distance learning's web collaborations. IDs are starting to work more with mobile learning's apps and podcasts. IDs are learning first-hand that game design and instructional design have a lot in common. If only we don't suck the fun out of it...

For better or worse, I don't think about ID competencies as a supervisor or a professor needs to think about them. I think about ID more in terms of what I hope to see from our emerging professionals - the ones that will be strong enough to take technology-mediated learning to the next level. I would hate to lose the learning part of what we do. I do think we need better business skills. I think we need to stop thinking about instructional design as a process and to think about what we do as product development. We need to be more assertive, more focused on the so-called business of our respective businesses. Maybe head in the clouds, thinking of new solutions...but definitely feet on the ground. It's the only way to get things get done.

So. My fantasy. Ellen's imaginary ID-cathelon. MY Top 10. It's not ADDIE. It may not even really be instructional design when you get right down to it, maybe more like ID Life Cycle Management. Whatever. Don't tell me about your favorite learning theory du jour (although I do expect that you have one). I don't really care which model you use, although I do hope that you use one. What I really care about is whether or not MY ID can do these things:

1. Determine real opportunities /consequences. Show me how a learning intervention can drive sales. Increase revenue. Open new markets. Create new lines of business. Attract new customers. Save money. Even if you are working in education or non-profits.
2. Propose solutions that respond to real problems/opportunities. Help me see what my alternatives are, give me scenarios to consider and help me make a good decision for moving ahead.
3. Socialize proposals with key stakeholders. Do you believe in your plan enough to pitch it? Can you persuade funders to your point of view? Can you articulate value, make the pitch, create some buzz?
4. Analyze solution requirements. What are you going to build? For whom? what does it need to do? How does it need to work? What platforms will you use?
5. Analyze customer requirements. This is much much more than thinking along the lines of whether one is a visual learner or an auditory learner. This has more to do with defining the attributes of the target market. The kinds of distribution and management requirements that need to be met, Funding cycles. Hiring cycles. Platforms. Networks.
6. Create Prototypes. More than a clickable model. Calls for research. Content development. Scripting. Storyboarding. Rough cuts. Final cuts.
7. Field Test solutions with stakeholders, customers. Collecting real data describing real life experiences of real live customers/users. Factoring in what people want.
8. Develop and produce solutions. Or finding the people who can produce it for you. It's product management, pure and simple. Developers, Coders, DB analysts. artists and programmers.
9. Launch the solution, get organizational buy-in and get systems online. Knowing how to get the word out, how to go to market. How to successfully socialize and roll out a new learning intervention. How to determine if everything is working and ready to rock and roll. Keeping the power on. Keeping the LMS up and running.
10. Evaluate, Summarize, Document. Building the assessments. Validating the screening tools. Summarizing costs, comparing to benefits. This also means having a handle on statistical methods, survey methods, evaluation methods as well as basic budgets and financials.

Whew. That's a lot. Maybe too much for one person. But maybe not. That's what's so great about thinking of this as an ID-cathelon. It's not for everyone. Only the best.

Join us for Learntrends, April 21-22

Ellen Wagner is Principal Analyst with Sage Road Solutions, LLC. This is her blog.

Please join me, Jay Cross, Tony Karrer, George Siemens, Marcia Conner, Clark Quinn, Charles Jenning, Curt Bonk and many others for a 24 hour global discussion on the future of organizational learning.

What is April Learntrends?
Learntrends is a series of online conversations among people with an interest in improving the process of learning in corporations and government. It’s the April installment of Corporate Learning Trends and Innovation.

Who may attend?
Learntrends welcomes anyone interested in organizational learning. We are expecting a diverse mix of newbies, old hands, managers, practitioners, specialists and generalists. We hope to have storytellers and provocative thinkers joining in.

When does Learntrends take place?
The conversations begin at 9:00 Pacific time on Tuesday, April 21, and conclude 24 hours later at 9:00 Pacific on Wednesday, April 22. As Jay has noted n his FAQ, at any given time, some participants will be in their pajamas, others will be huddled around conference room tables, while others will be enjoying a cigar on their yachts after sumptuous dinners.

My session at 11 am, where I will be joining Charles Jennings and Curt Bonk for a discussion on the profession, will be coming to you direct from the Red Carpet Club at the San Francisco International Airport. Please see the main event page for the schedule. No cigars or yachts for me this time.

For more information about Learntrends please take a look at Jay Cross's FAQs for participating in the April, 2009 event.

Here is the link for joining the Elluminate session. You don't need to register, just be sure to check your system before logging in, and you should be good to go.

Talk to you in a few!

Walk Before You Run

Ellen Wagner is a learning industry analyst with a passion for sustaining innovation and accelerating enterprise adoption of technologies for education, training and performance support. This is her blog.

I closed my last post by saying that, when I envision my ideal instructional designer, my ID looks a lot like a decathlete. As part of this visioning exercise I had planned to think of the top ten events designed to demonstrate the levels of excellence of what I think the quintessentially excellent ID should achieve. My reason for this is simple - If we want to ensure that ID as we the practice defines it will be relevant in the  RIA-driven, cloud enabled, UGC-powered, multi-dimensional learning metaverse then we're gonna have to know what to do, and we're gonna have to show that we know what to do.

I'm not using the ADDIE model to frame my thinking. Not that there's anything wrong with good old ADDIE. It was always intended as a way to teach people about the processes that instructional designers use in their work. With all due respect to those who use it, it serves as a reference model for newbies. Looking forward, it is going to take thinking differently about what we do if we ever hope to get different results than the ones we've always had.

ADDIE is used something like this - "First, you analyze the situation. Then you figure out how to design your idea, then you produce (develop) it all of the things you need for your idea to work, then you implement it, and finally you evaluate it to see if it did what you wanted".  These are not a bad things to think about, especially if you have to start planning for a class project, or a grant proposal or a beginning brainstorming session where you don't have to worry about external constraints. If one is trying trying to put instructional design to work in a "business" setting - and my that, I mean any kind of situation where there are stakeholders to be served through your efforts - then there are a a lot of other things you need to be thinking about BEFORE you start planning an intervention, as well as after you put it in place. ADDIE ends up being one of a number of process models linked together over an extended learning value chain.

And that really is the place that ADDIE is insufficient. It's simply one link in a much longer chain. Practitioners need to know that there is much that comes before, and much that will come after, that has more to do with the ultimate life or death of an idea-as-solution than will the instructional design. If ADDIE falls short, it's because we expect it to do more than it was ever intended to do.

So maybe, before we jump from ADDIE to the TOP 10 ID COMPETENCIES OF ALL TIME  and start getting too focused on what the ultimate performances of our practice should be, that maybe we can start at the baseline requirements one must meet to metaphorically qualify for the events. Pre-ADDIE stuff that anyone who has held down a few ID (and related) jobs can tell you. Some things that every single one of us should be able to do.  Then maybe with each level of competition - e.g. whatever analogy we can come up with for regionals, sections, divisions, leagues, etc - we can start raising the metaphoric bar for the performances we expect.

I started making a list of all the things I think a competent ID should be able to do, and I have to tell you that my list looks very little like ADDIE.

More on that in my next post.

Getting down to business

eLearning has been a relatively bright light in the economic downturn, particularly in essential vertical markets such as education, government and health care. When travel dollars gets cut, when services are needed but there are fewer people to provide them, when it's time to get serious about developing new job skills, it is no longer a hard sell to get decision-makers to see that elearning offers solutions for getting smarter faster in a variety of different technology-mediated ways.

Even so, it's a relatively difficult environment to get business decision-makers interested in doing work differently if there isn't a good business case for implementing changes. Many of the IDs I know have not had much experience working with line of business operations, annual plans, budgets and forecasts, revenue and expenses, so we lack the language and the skills to effectively communicate with business owners. It's hard to change a business owner's mind when we talk about learning, change or professional improvement. For better or worse, if one can speak intelligently about year-on-year growth or opportunities for new customer segments, it's a whole different conversation.

From my perspective, IDs owe it to ourselves to be more effective at flexing our business muscles. For all of the conversations, and books, and lists and surveys describing all the things that IDs do - content analysis and storyboarding and web production and video production and assessments and the like - one of the things that IDs rarely address is developing any business acumen.  It never really entered my mind that I would need to know financials until I found myself running a growing ID company and spending a lot more time on things like pricing and cost analysis, building bottoms up budgets and revenue forecasts, worrying about pipelines and lead conversion. It made me come to realize that questions really need to be answered before diving into the middle of an audience analysis -- such as "How many people out there are likely to care about this?", and "what other alternatives exist" and "What are the problems that my innovation can solve, and how much is it worth it for me to solve it?"

To repeat the point I used to close the last post - An innovation without much likelihood of adoption may be a great intellectual curiousity, a worthy candidate for a research project. But during times when "just the right app" may be just the right thing to spark new business success stories, we need to know how to figure out "who cares" and "how much" right along with "what if". Metaphorically speaking, it's all part of learning to skate to be in just the right place at just the right time.

Skating to where the puck is going

I have been thinking a lot about Kendall Whitehouse's March 18th interview with Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft, in the recent issue of [email protected] . Having connections to both men help make the interview particularly enjoyable; I had the pleasure of getting to know Kendall and his team from the Wharton School when they were the rock-star, go-to team for telling the Macromedia Flash platform story in education and I have continued to be an avid reader of their [email protected] e-zine since those days. Stephen was our EVP of the worldwide field organization at Macromedia when I started working in solutions marketing, and my boss, Penny Wilson, was a direct report of Stephen's, so I have my "close to greatness" connections here as well. I have positive memories of Stephen's leadership at both MACR and ADBE, so it was great to catch up on what he is doing up in Redmond.

In the interview, Stephen shares a great point with Kendall, about how in tough economic times it is incumbent upon smart companies to think about where they want to be when things improve and to make investments in those areas to build future capacity. I do remember his talking on this topic in a number of education customer meetings - when there's no market for your goods, don't spend your money where it won't matter. Instead, invest in where you want to be when the markets turn around. This was regarding the Macromedia decisions to focus on Flash research. One direction, looking at RIAs Flex and AIR, is now the daily bread of many a developer. The other direction, Flash on mobile, is now coming into its own as an issue for North American businesses to attend to, finally.

Stephen's point is reminiscent of the advice that was supposedly given to Canadian hockey legend Wayne Gretsky by his father when teaching his son how to play the game. Walter's advice included to "skate where the puck's going, not where it's been."

Two parallel thoughts. One relates to the ongoing discussion I've been having with industry friends over the past several weeks about how now is the time for forward thinking individuals and enterprises to consider how to take advantage of the great economic and market changes that are going on around us. The other relates to my recent diatribes on the topic of rethinking professional preparation for instructional designers so that this profession has a shot at ongoing relevancy.

I think it would be enlightened self-interest to demonstrate the value of crawling beyond the online course management swamp, sharpen our learning, programming and production skills and reach out into the metasphere, the game zone, the mobile web and the cloud. We owe it to ourselves to learn how to flex business muscles. Big questions really need to be answered before diving into the middle of an audience analysis, like "How many people out there are likely to care about this?", and "What are the problems that my innovation can solve, and how much is it worth it to them for me to solve it?" An innovation without much likelihood of adoption may be a great intellectual curiousity, a worthy candidate for a research project. But during times when "just the right app" may be just the right thing to spark new business success stories, we need to know how to figure out "who cares" and "how much" right along with "what if". Metaphorically speaking, it's all part of learning to skate to be in just the right place at just the right time.

Culture Gaps, according to Carl Berger

Let me begin by saying that I am a member of the  Carl Berger fan club. Carl's work has been an inspiration since I found myself being drawn into the world of learning objects back in the mid 90s. His involvement with the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, NLII (now ELI), IMS and Sakai has given all of us a foundation for implementing enterprise learning technologies in higher education...one of my favorite examples of sustaining learning technology innovation on the road to broad adoption.

I heard Carl speak at the April 2005 University of Missouri Apple Digital Campus Leadership conference. I'm not even sure what the topic of his speech was anymore. I just remember that there was a point where he compared and contrasted the things that academic institutions and corporate enterprises care about. I knew he was talking directly to me. Carl articulated some of the big value differences I had encountered in my job (at the time I was the Sr. director of global higher ed solutions for Macromedia.)  I scribbled a bunch of notes from his slides - and eventually used his remarks as the basis for some work I was doing at the time. It proved to be a very effective way of explaining some of the differences in how our customers viewed the world to my corporate co-workers, both at Macromedia and later at Adobe Systems.

I have since added a few things to this graphic, and no longer can remember which of this comes from Carl, and what comes from me riffing off Carl's ideas. As he helped catalyze these insights, I am happy to give him all the credit. (If you click on the slide graphic it will launch as a full screen image, so don't even try to squint and read the text.)

Given the past few posts, it seemed like a good way to illustrate a few of the big differences in what is valued in different parts of the elearning value chain. As you can see from the very first comparison on the list, innovation - that is, going forth where nobody has gone before - is highly valued in academic settings. From a perspective of the vendor community, volume is more important than innovation. It is far more important for more people to buy than for fewer people to buy, under any and all circumstances. It also shows the differing interests for using data - from the vendor perspective data supports decision-making, whereas for academics it is more for demonstrating the tenability of a construct.

During that same Apple Digital Campus meeting, then University of Missouri System President Elson Floyd warned us that "culture eats strategy, every time". It's time to figure out how to bridge a few of these culture gaps to see about maximizing the probabilities of our own success.

Business vs. Education

From my experience, one of the biggest gaps to be minded on the journey toward sustaining innovation in technology mediated learning is the one found between education and business.

Today, we are as likely to describe learning using terms such as “competitive advantage” and “strategic imperative” as we are by such terms as “cognitive capacity” and “modality preference.” While psychologists, teachers, and trainers continue to view learning as a change in human capability, businesspeople recognize that learning products and solutions represents new commercial opportunity. By actively seeking innovative strategies and tactics for realizing new value from and for learning, the business community has created a new awareness of what learning can mean for individuals, organizations, communities, and societies.

It seems self-evident that academic and business stakeholders would want to collaborate in the process of evaluating theories and principles to provide algorithms and heuristics for creating new commercial value from learning. However, the reality of such collaborations is usually far less satisfying than the expectation. Learning professionals and businesspeople often discover that they hold completely divergent views on the role, purpose, and value of learning. They find that the unique perspective each brings to the conversation can result in very different interpretations of what is actually being said. Despite our best intentions, learning professionals and businesspeople interested in creating new value from learning often find themselves at cross-purposes.

It seems to boil down to a basic difference in what is valued: the role of an academic expert is to explore and research constructs of a discipline with the intention of finding new ideas and contributing new knowledge to the field. In business, the point is to provide value to customers that is important enough for them to give you money for the products, solutions and services to secure access to that value.

Creating tangible, commercial value from learning is a very different proposition than codifying theories and practices of teaching, learning, and human performance improvement to preserve and promote our learning culture. Being responsible for codifying the body of knowledge related to learning
means never questioning the value of learning, because that value is absolute.  The study of learning and the ensuing codification of knowledge represent value in and of themselves. Business opportunities that arise from learning aren’t the point. On the other hand, business stakeholders of learning are more concerned with pushing the boundaries of the possibilities of learning than they are with maintaining the status quo. Furthermore, their intent in pushing those boundaries has everything to do with cultivating new commercial opportunities rather than creating new knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The more that education stakeholders of learning call for methodological rigor, the more resistant and irrelevant they appear to business stakeholders, especially when commercial possibilities seem so obvious. Conversely, business stakeholders’ fascination with determining new ways of leveraging the commercial value of learning smacks of opportunism when viewed through the eyes of academic stakeholders, who have dedicated their careers to learning about learning simply because they believe it is the right thing to do (and because they want to be credited with new ideas that emerge from those explorations.)

Lest you think that I am being a bit melodramatic about this "separate silos" situation, let me offer a concrete example. Let us consider EDUCAUSE, the higher education IT organization. During the past several years when I worked for commercial software companies I was not allowed to submit a presentation proposal for consideration for the annual meeting program. Being a vendor, I couldn't be trusted not to slip in commercial references, or to pitch my wares.  Around the office we used to ruefully laugh about being treated like "vendor slime". On a personal note my relationship with this organization is stellar, but it makes me kind of cranky to know that as a vendor I am a second class citizen in this world.

Unless we appreciate the factors that shape the role and importance of learning from the perspective of each stakeholder group, the value that learning holds for one is increasingly irrelevant to the other. Rather than learning from one another, we work only with those who think as we do. The more we find ourselves inhabiting separate conceptual silos, the greater is the risk that we may stop trying to learn from one another altogether. These days, with resources being cut and with common wisdom underscoring that we will not survive if we continue to do business as usual, we simply can't afford to NOT mind this particular gap.