One New Year’s resolution (for me) was to try and blog more as I am conscious I am being less reflective on things I read, webinars I attend, podcasts I listen to, etc. We will see over the coming months if I manage to keep the blogging up or not!
Obviously, I am at risk of being shouted down here but, in my opinion, there are a few things in this article I thought I would reflect on:
“leave their jobs to get their needs met” and an increasing gap between men and women – are differences between men and women’s needs still so pronounced?
“the economic and personal pressure is higher on women than ever before” – this sounds like a big claim but it may be the case – see my thoughts in the paragraph below*
“burnout as the main reason” – again, is this not a universal issue? What is happening in corporate America!?
“harassment and microaggressions” perhaps answers the question in the last bullet along with “lack of flexibility” and “limited advancement opportunities”. All of these reasons can, of course, be issues for groups beyond women and the suggestions listed – such as “flexible hours” and hybrid work really should be the minimal for most leadership roles in a modern environment.
*Ultimately the issue for all households (whatever the gender) is that we have gone from a situation where many households could get by on one salary (my mum, for example, missed several years of work including a spell of around only 0.2FTE and later my dad was made redundant and had years of part-time work before retirement) to most families needing two FTE salaries to get by. This leads to political issues – for example, whilst President Biden might expect a good run into the election based on a (relative to other countries) strong economic position we are instead in the situation where memes like the below are rife.
The reality, of course, was very different for many people. However, the point about purchasing power of the masses versus the “1%” is clearly a major issue in many countries. Where women are being expected to fulfil traditional roles alone plus economic pressure then clearly there will be severe “economic and personal” pressure (as mentioned in the article – see bullets above).
The conclusion of the Forbes article includes “if companies want to retain valuable talent, they need to create an equitable workplace where women can thrive”. I think it is fair to say we can simply rewrite that as “if companies want to retain valuable talent, they need to create an equitable workplace where everyone can thrive”.
This post is going to pick up some of the interesting bits from this recent conversation (recorded via Zoom and available on YouTube):
Leonard and I were in similar Higher Education circles a decade or so back and he has always been a good person to follow on social media, he was also excellent on the Learning Hack a while back. Guy is, of course, a “must sub” YouTube channel for L&D folks.
Just some of the bits I liked from this conversation (apologies if I’ve captured anything wrong):
The odd UK ignoring of “instructional design” in preference for “learning design”, albeit with little clarity why.
I picked my MSc at the time as it was the only postgrad in the UK that specifically said it was doing ID and not LD or something else.
Around 9:45 – “the mark of a true profession is consistency of terms and definitions” (Guy quoting from a past speech he heard).
Nothing new at conferences etc – partly as need to support always incoming people
I’ve previously suggested L&D conferences/shows could try and have “tracks” for more intro and higher-level things.
I’m always amazed how both Leonard and Guy are able to recall authors, presenter names, etc. Whilst I read a lot of ID theory in my masters I am terrible for recalling a lot of this information – even though a lot is embedded in my practice. For example, I always forget it was Richard Clark with the 70% stat for SME knowledge.
“Task set”
The never ending need to push performance-orientation!
On a weekly call the feedback from other attendees/participants was that they wanted more video-based guidance (in preference to text instruction that is used a lot on learn.microsoft.com).
Were they correct in thinking the videos are more useful?
In my opinion what is going on here is that video, of course, can be helpful for knowing the steps to follow. I, for example, regularly need YouTube to remind me the steps for doing rarely used things in PPT and XLS files. However, videos are often quickly out-of-date and more difficult to maintain than documentation, so it is understandable why a lot of the Microsoft courseware is not video based.
However, text instructions with limited image support is very tricky to use if out-of-date, there are a few examples where I have simply skipped doing parts of the PuP as I am unable to find the start point in the resources. This again is, I think, in part due to the complexities of the setup needed to complete the whole programme and needing to enable free trials of different components.
Keeping content up-to-date
As mentioned above, keeping IT training materials up-to-date is hard. This is why most L&D departs will outsource this for generic tools (like MS Office tools).
There has been one particularly bad example in PUP where the guidance referred to features not previously introduced in the course. When I raised this in the related weekly live Q&A it was revealed this functionality had actually been depreciated – basically meaning a lot of wasted learner time as I, and others, tried to figure out how to follow the instructions, finding that pages found online also didn’t help, etc.
Enabling trainers/community managers
Many of us will have been in training sessions where the trainer has been hamstrung by permissions, sandbox restrictions or some other kind of technical issue. The champions, who hold the weekly PuP calls, are clearly knowledgeable but have difficulty demonstrating items in the live Q&A as they have their own accounts, setup for their own businesses that are tricky to demonstrate to people using the trial versions.
These champions/MVPs are clearly knowledgible but fall into many of the traps experienced facilitators know to try and avoid – like using acronyms, jumping around tech interfaces without explanation, etc. I doubt Microsoft has provided them with basic facilitation training and instead I presume these are volunteer MVPs doing this for their own CVs rather than being fully supported to do the job.
Ultimately I stopped joining the weekly calls as they were not hugely helpful for some of these reasons.
LMS/system setup
The first blog post mentioned some trickiness in getting things setup. Some of the weeks material has been particularly confusing – for example a video that specifically ends with “let’s get started” and explaining the week’s activities was actually the last thing in the LMS menu for that week. Personally this was very confusing in trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing – only to watch the video when I had effectively thought “I’ve given up on this topic”.
Possibilities vs Process vs Practicalities
The step-by-step instructions on how to do things in most of the course have not been hugely helpful in trying to work out if any of these tools would be useful in my own workplace scenario. There have been some examples shown but I could have done with a real focus on this to show the possibilities of the tools, with the processes being replaced outlined to show the practical benefits. Again, this is perhaps a classic example of IT training being focused on the tools, UI and making things work rather than than answering the “why”.
At the end of the week by week materials there are some interviews with three people who have transitioned into (no/low code) developers. These were inspiring, for example a Heathrow airport security guard who transitioned into an IT role. However, I still couldn’t see why these solutions worked over simpler options I could think of.
I am going to fail
As I have been unexpectedly busier at work than I was planning and have some travel planned, that I was not anticipating, I am almost certainly going to fail the course.
I have got through all the materials but I am unlikely to finish the assignment in time.
The assignment is actually a nice scenario asking you to put together some solutions for a fake business scenario and related issues. The instructions are pretty clear as are the assessment criteria.
However, receiving the task about half through the programme means there are early modules I struggled to follow (either due to technical or me issues) that I will have to revisit in detail to pass the assignment.
If I don’t manage to finish it will be a shame as the certification in this case would have been nice (given it is a more robust programme than just going through the Microsoft Learn components) even if I am critical of certifications at times.
24/7 live support is the only answer to really handhold someone through new tools when they are new new – i.e. a new concept, with new processes, etc. and not just new UI over a word processor, image work or something else the user is already familiar with. With ChatGPT and other tools we may perhaps be in a position where we can offer true 24/7 support which helps people get through learning experiences and tackle issues. For example, where trying to use Virtual Agents I just kept hitting this error without any clear reason why (I later found a document on the LMS about setup but for some reason this document did not show by default when using the “next, next, next” option in the LMS):
Conclusion
Ultimately we would hope that IT tools are becoming easy to use and intuitive. However, my approach for a number of years now probably remains the same – roughly being:
(1) everyone needs an overview of the process,
(2) they need an idea of the possibilities and benefits from the change and you can
(3) then focus on the “click here click here” type instruction – which, depending on how static the development of the tool is, may be best served in a number of ways (e.g. training if going to be used straight away, ongoing support resources, etc).
I have recently been accepted into cohort 3 of the Microsoft Power Up Program (MPUP).
Microsoft Power Up Program enables non-tech professionals to successfully advance into a new career path in low-code application development using Microsoft Power Platform
I have played around with a few of the no/low code tools in O365/M365 (and some non-Microsoft tools) so I am looking forward to this program to learn more and formalize skills in this area.
Setup
The initial setup is not as easy as might be expected. Rather than using my corporate M365 account, or my personal one for that matter, I received a new account just for the MPUP. Due to the difficulty in switching between M365 accounts, I have setup using the MPUP’s platform in a different browser to what I normally use. The temporary password having to be changed before accessing the platform.
This is of course a well known issue for anyone working in learning tech – you need to make things simple and, sometimes, SSO options can actually complicate things (less of an issue for a control audience like internal staff in a corporate L&D environment).
Platform
Microsoft’s potential impact on the learning tech market has been a topic ever since I starting working in learning (15+ years). The potential that 100s of commercial LMS could be destroyed by a real MS market entry has presumably been in the risk section of many such corporations’ long term planning. More recently, the Viva Learning approach has suggested something of a hybrid model with a MS approach (Viva) bringing 3rd-party LMS content/experiences into Teams and elsewhere.
Therefore, it is always interesting to do MS courses/online learning and see what their approach is. In this case it would seem they are using Adobe products (I’m not sure if this is a common partnership across other things?). Therefore in relation to first impressions this post relates both to the Microsoft approach but also Adobe’s service – under the auspice of “https://cpcontents.adobe.com/” (I presume these are Captivate Prime URLs?).
The introduction section included a number of videos outlining the curriculum structure. This outlined the self-study (videos, exercises, quiz, etc) and synchronous (online Q&A) structure. The video introducing the LMS is nearly 12 minutes long (!). Ultimately this feels way too long. There is then a whole video on how discussion boards work – now I appreciate discussion boards might not be familiar to all (especially younger) web users but my oh my this is a way to till kill interest in a learning experience.
The next step was then to setup Power Apps access. The course includes a workflow chart to explain the 3 accounts you will need to have and how you will need to be working between 2 browsers. No doubt this is natural to MS admins but the need for a workflow graphic just to explain access would suggest this is all a bit overwhelming. Ultimately you end up needing a “learner” browser for the LMS and a “developer” browser for the Power Apps access. However, you are soon then into using learn.microsoft content which is ANOTHER system. I appreciate this is reuse of content but its a mess of a user/learner experience. Even worse, I am pretty sure I have done some of these Microsoft Learn components before but that was on a different machine/browser. Worse again the Learn content has a mix of approaches – in some areas you get a VM to work on via a login process, in other areas you are expected in login to a PowerApps system yourself.
Hopefully things will get smoother now up and running…
I travelled for work earlier this month, I think this was only the second international work trip in something like 8 years (when I was previously travelling internationally quite a lot). This absence of international work travel has been due to different factors, including different scope of roles, the covid pandemic closures, etc. However, being back in environments I have not seen for a while (airport lounges!) got me thinking about my personal profile again.
“Full stack”?
I have tended, for a decade or so, to think I am a fairly “generalist” L&D person – whilst I came into learning through libraries and eLearning I have moved away from those specialisms into more of a general L&D role. I have noticed of late a few references to “full stack” instructional designers – this seems to be an attempt at saying someone who does a bit of everything, not just a designer but working across ADDIE (the top Google result is to this Medium page from a few years back). Is this IDs looking to be seen as full L&D pros or something else?
The idea of “full stack”, as far as I know, is coming across from IT industry language:
A full stack web developer is a person who can develop both client and server software.
In addition to mastering HTML and CSS, he/she also knows how to:
Program a browser (like using JavaScript, jQuery, Angular, or Vue)
Program a server (like using PHP, ASP, Python, or Node)
Program a database (like using SQL, SQLite, or MongoDB)
I would personally say this does not really work in an ID context unless we mean “full stack” in terms of being a programmer of the systems and not just a user of GUIs to develop learning solutions.
Nonetheless an interesting development given that IT has taken the use of “information” from other domains/professions and we might now reach the point of maturity where IT terminology starts getting adopted in other areas (“Agile”, or at least “agile”, being an other term where this has been usurped outside pure-IT communities I guess).
CMALT
Thinking about the “generalist” vs “full stack” vs “something else” language impacted on my decision not to renew my CMALT status as of the Jan 1st renewal date.
I was an early CMALT holder, number 53 I believe, having completed my portfolio and application when the CMALT list was just a doc on the ALT website Now it is a nice searchable interface and has effectively become the standard to achieve for UK learning technologists.
CMALT (and the other activities of the Association of Learning Technology) were important to me when working in Higher Ed. This all remained useful when I moved to working in more general L&D areas. However, I have not really engaged with ALT very much in the last few years (beyond completing some reviews of CMALT applications). Therefore, I opted against renewing as it seemed somewhat false to maintain my status when not really engaged in this community (albeit that this is in part a problem with ALT as the focus seems to have been too much on UK HEIs).
This is interesting as, like when chose to drop my Chartered status of CILIP (MCILIP) at the end of 2016, in can be seen as something of a epoch in my professional focus. However, I ended up working in a library service again after dropping MCILIP so who knows what the future will hold.
Whose Education Is It Anyway? 