Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

Instructional Designer & Consultant

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ATD ICE 2016 – Session Recaps – Day 2

Keynote

The keynote this morning was incredibly inspiring. Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action and Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, spoke with us about leadership and why some organizations thrive, and others fail.

Session 1

First off – I got to meet Patti! So that was awesome – we led the charge on searching for session 1, eating lunch, and attending session 1.5.

I had intended to attend Your Brain on Creativity: The Secrets to Making Creativity Work for Your Business, but couldn’t for the life of me find the exhibitor’s session! And I wasn’t the only one. Ah well. It gave me time to wander around the expo and pick up some materials.

The next session I wanted to attend, 10 Practical Principles for Creating Impactful E-Learning, was full…so we stumbled across the hall to sit in on What Caused it? Techniques to Isolate the Effects of Your Programs, with Patti Phillips.

Results are important, but my mind does not work well when confronted with Return on Investment (ROI) speak. Initially, my pants were confused off. She explained the ROI process, identifying some guiding principles and results-based solutions. Techniques were provided to isolate the effects of programs, which seem very comparable to techniques used in most academic research (using control groups, trends, input, etc.).

Full disclosure: I had to leave the session – there was too much math, and there were other sessions that were more closely aligned to my business.

Session 1.5

I ducked into How to Boost Your Career Well-Being with Beth Cabrera, and came in just in time for a 2-minute meditation…MUCH more therapeutic than doing math. Phew! The first portion was about mindfulness, and how to incorporate it within your career. The next part was about gratitude – intentionally looking for what is good and taking note of it.

She had us write down three good things:

  • Hiking the mountains in Breckenridge, and getting to share that experience with people I care about
  • Meeting new people within the e-learning industry
  • Finding a session that’s more closely aligned to my career and personal interests.

She explained that an organization had individuals do this (writing down good things), for 3 weeks, and noticed increases in levels of gratitude and happiness. She discusses how doing this activity can help reprogram your brain to intentionally scan the environment for good things. You can easily change the tone of a meeting by starting a meeting going around the table to talk about one thing they’re excited about. It sets the tone for gratitude.

If we create a culture of gratitude, individuals will become more successful, because they will be surrounded by positivity. Looking at a situation like grocery shopping, you can look at the negative of having to go to the grocery store (the act of shopping), but you can reframe the situation by appreciating that you have the ability to go to the grocery store, and have the money to purchase healthy food.

She talked about strengths – focusing on our strengths allows us to become happier, feel more successful, and have a sense of meaning and authenticity – you’re doing what you naturally do best. You will be more efficient, and it’s good for overall performance.

Strength spotting:

  • Enjoyment – We love doing things we enjoy doing
  • Ease – Something is natural to do and comes to you with ease
  • Energy – What we do energizes us
  • Advocate – Push yourself to use your strengths more

Once you figure out what your strengths are, and save them for when you don’t have as much energy (e.g. after lunch, when you’re usually more tired).

Locate complementary partners. Find people who have strengths that complement your strengths, and partner with them to create extraordinary organizations.

Recognize the impact you make. If you didn’t wake up each day, people would be missing out on what you offer! Understand your importance, even if you feel small in a very large world. To recognize impact,  complete the following:

  • Task:
  • Who Does This Help?
  • Who does This Help?

Essentially, you will be able to see the larger landscape of who you’re helping by doing task x/y/z

Modify tasks or change interactions to use your strengths to best help others to make their lives better/easier.

Session 2

The final session I attended today was Women in Learning Leadership: Lessons From the Field. I like listening to others talk about their experiences, and this session had an all-star panel: Cammy Bean, Jane Bozarth, Trina Rimmer, Koreen Pagano, and Pooja Jaisingh.

This session began with each panelist identify themselves and their learning backgrounds. All panelists are all heavily weighted in technology. Cammy asked the audience “how many of you feel imposter syndrome?,” which was a great question, because I know I certainly feel that way sometimes – it kind of ties back to the last session, and the concept recognizing your impact. There are many days when I feel unsuccessful, and unqualified, but on many stages I’m overqualified and even considered an expert. It makes me truly realize that I am a successful woman, and I really need to recognize the impact I have on my clients and readers.

Many panelists spoke about exhaustion, sacrifice, and being taken seriously. I can definitely empathize with these feelings. My first year of business was incredibly exhausting, and I sacrificed a lot of my social life when I was doing my graduate studies, writing books, and starting my own business. Being taken seriously is something I still struggle with – when I first started out in Instructional Design at a corporate gig, I found it hard to get clients to take me seriously, but I think this was less because of me and more because of them and the hierarchy. Now that I run my own business, my clients take me seriously, because if they don’t, then what’s the point of working with me?

Pooja identified a huge challenge: staying on top of the latest technologies. As learning leaders, there’s added pressure to stay on top of the latest technologies, and because technology is constantly evolving, it can be exhausting to stay on top of technology!

When looking for a mentor/boss/ally, most panelists don’t want to be told what to do, they need more of a guidance-based motivation to do the task at hand. Not directions. They look for managers that aren’t looking to take the easy way out, are straight forward, and who want to make progress. Great managers are those who enable you to become your best self (professionally or independently).

When interviewing, women tend to hide portions of their personal lives (e.g. having children or being afraid to ask for the compensation they deserve), but it’s important to be upfront, and if the organization doesn’t support you or want to pay what you’re worth, is it an organization you really want to work for?

You want to work with people who look up to you, not people you need to prove yourself to. – Koreen Pagano

Overall impression: This was a great panel session, and I certainly think that many of the experiences discussed can also be applied to men, so the panel wasn’t only of interest for women – it’s a shame that more men weren’t in attendance (but shout out to all those who were!).

ATD ICE 2016 Session Recaps – Day 1

This is my first year attending ATD ICE, and it has been equally overwhelming and exciting! But at first, mostly overwhelming because I’m just one little person in a sea of Learning and Development professionals.

Session 1

The first session I chose to attend was e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, with Ruth Clark, because my Instructional Design journey began with Canadian Military, and Training Development Officers (TDOs) in the Canadian Military LOVE them some Ruth Clark. I figured that after hearing so many rave reviews and reading e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, I had to meet the person behind the book.

First impressions? She’s the littlest lady I’ve ever met! But she seems incredibly friendly, chatting with random audience members.

Session overview: There are three main additions to the 4th edition of the book, including:

  • Evidence on Learning Games
  • How to Leverage Online Collaboration
  • Boundary Conditions

Everything in e-Learning and the Science of Instruction is evidence based, which is awesome! Games can be effective, but the data needs to be analyzed as academic evidence. For example, Ruth explained that first-person shooter games have been shown to increase perceptual attention, but there have been no studies as of yet to indicate that games have been shown to increase reasoning, motor, and memory skills.

The speaker looked at whether online collaboration was effective for learning, and found that collaboration is more effective when working together on a difficult problem (vs a simple problem – the transactional effort has a better ROI when working on a difficult problem). She also found that completion rate declines with asynchronous assignments, whereas there tends to be a higher completion/response rate when participating synchronously.

In discussing boundary conditions, Ruth identified situations where certain instructional strategies work better than others. Novice individuals may benefit from words + text, whereas Experienced individuals may do better with just words. Adding visuals increase the retention between both groups of individuals. There is no correlation between what learners like and what is best for their learning – just try not to make learning disruptive (coherence principle).

Overall impression? Ruth Clark is a pretty informative lady. I can definitely see why DND was so interested in her, and I would definitely recommend picking up the latest edition of e-Learning and the Science of Instruction (I originally read the 2nd edition).

Session 2

Next up, I wanted to check out Connie Malamed’s Crash Course in Visual Design – 1, because I enjoy reading her blog and following her on Twitter, and 2, because I think she has some pretty good information about visual design that I should really be absorbing.

First impressions? She seems well-organized and has some jokes on hand – “Whats the difference between a pizza and a musician?” – “A pizza can feed a family.” – THAT STING, THOUGH!

Session overview: First up – she’s threatening to send a note home to our parents if we fail the visual design pop quiz. She’s tough!

Connie identifies a shocking, but common, issue: employers often don’t understand the importance of investing in graphics/visuals for learning materials, but “50% of the brain’s cortex is devoted to processing visual information,” so visuals really are important, and we have to make the case for visuals – the ROI is there! The picture superiority effect dictates that we have a better memory for pictures than words, especially when it comes to retaining concrete knowledge.

When you see something beautiful and well-designed, you have an aesthetic experience. That’s how I felt about the mountains when we were in Breckenridge yesterday – it illicit a positive emotion, which is beneficial to learning.

Anyone can improve at visual design, because it’s not art – well thank goodness, because I will never consider myself an artist. But the design needs to be effective. It needs to work, or what’s the point? Visual design = the arrangement of visuals and text in graphic space.

There are 8 key points of visual design:

  1. Align visual design (with your audience/content/organization)
  2. Organize your graphic space
  3. Consider all of your image options
  4. Simplify fonts
  5. Consider colours
  6. Create a visual hierarchy
  7. Direct the eyes
  8. Transform bullets to visuals (and she promises we’ll kiss her after she explains this)

Overall impression? Connie knows a lot about visual design, but there was a lot of ground covered, and I think folks are either going to be rushing to buy her book in the bookstore, or will be scouring the internet doing their homework on visual design. Her 8th point of visual design seems to have been kiss-worthy for the majority of session attendees…the military taught me to hate bullets (because they often cram them down your throat), and the phrase “bullets are too verbose”, so I learned this lesson quite awhile ago, but it’s a good one!

 

 

Instructional Designer Origin Story

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The lovely Kristin Anthony interviewed me last week for her podcast, Dear Instructional Designer (which is bananas – thank you, so much!). After our recorded session, we had a little informal chat about my path, and she asked something to the effect of ‘have you ever blogged about that journey?’. I had to think about it for a moment, because I’ve blogged about it a lot but in several different posts, so it’s a bit disjointed. In any event, I figured I would take the time to let my readers know about the path I took to get from novice Instructional Designer to my present day self…maybe it will become my origin story and I’ll get paid as much as Hugh Jackman in Wolverine…maybe I’m delusional?

Like many, my road to Instructional Design was accidental. I had just graduated with a BA in Linguistics and Psychology, my friend (a former K-12 teacher) told me her company was hiring and that they needed warm bodies and she thought I was smart enough, so I interviewed and got the job (which I’m pretty sure was because the VP at the time was super impressed with my background in Linguistics, thinking I spoke multiple languages…a moment in my life where staying silent was a good thing).

I slogged around there for about 5/6 years, in a training company with very little training, worked on a lot of really cool projects, met a lot of great people (many of whom I still play softball with each year), and completed my Masters of Education (Post-Secondary Studies). At the time, I had freelanced a bit, but it was bumpy.

Initially, my goal was to pay off my student debt, so I took on really random projects (proofreading PhD thesis, transcribing audio interviews, etc.) that I really felt kind of gross about – some were alright, but many were a huge rip off. When I paid off my student debt, I vowed off freelancing, because that was a horrible experience. After about a year or so, I went back to the freelance game, but with a target in mind of providing Instructional Design and e-learning development services. After cultivating a small regular client base, I jumped corporate ship and haven’t really looked back since.

One of my early contracts was with the university I now work at full-time. Yes – I’m not a full-time business woman in the grand scheme of things, but my passion was higher education, so I couldn’t really turn down an offer of full-time employment at a university. Since accepting that offer, I’ve scaled back my business in terms of which contracts I choose to work on, but believe me, I’m still as busy as ever, essentially working two full-time jobs, but I love what I do!

Working in an academic environment is a very interesting experience, much different than working with military personnel, but that’s for another post…

Working two full-time gigs is rewarding because I get my fill of analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation at the university, where my role is predominantly project management, but independently, I get to work develop e-learning for clients that I really love working for! It’s the best of both worlds. In the last year, I’ve been able to take my business in a more strategic direction. Instead of working full-time and having 20+ contracts a year, I’m working full-time at the university and full-time for my business, but I’m working with much fewer clients with more repeat business. It’s been great!

That takes me to present day – I’m getting ready to hit up some professional development opportunities at ATD ICE (for my independent professional development), and CAUCE-CNIE (for my institutional-self), so if you’re at either of those conferences and run into me, please say hello and ask me anything you want to ask! I won’t promise to have all the answers, but I’ll try to be as helpful as possible.

Terminology Tuesday: Integrative Learning

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I’m ramping up to attend ATD ICE 2016 next week, so I’m busy planning my conference map, deciding which sessions get to make the cut for my attention. One such session is being presented by Shannon Tipton on the 21st-Century Toolbox. Today, she tweeted about the session with a link to a brief article she wrote last month. It’s here that I came across a term I hadn’t heard in several years; a term that took me back to my graduate studies, and one which I here said every now and again: Integrative Learning.

Integrative Learning

The idea behind integrative learning is that it is learning designed to allow learners to connect information and enhance understanding of topics across disciplines. When I do hear this term tossed around, it’s usually in the context of K-12 education – why? Because K-12 education, at least around these parts, is largely based on curriculums that have been carefully crafted to created integrated learning experiences. However, integrative learning is happening in many other places. For example, any higher education course that’s been offered has usually undergone a behind the scenes development to ensure that learning objectives and learning outcomes are closely linked with appropriate assessment measures.

We also see integrative learning in procedural training, where learners are taking theoretical concepts, such as their knowledge of lug nuts, and applying that knowledge to a task at hand, such as connecting the lug nut to the 1/4 inch screw (full disclosure – this was a horrible example – I know nothing about lug nuts or screws, I’m sorry). Or, their prior knowledge of how their cat will behave when they try to clip the cat’s nails – in this context, the individual is integrating their prior knowledge of how their cat will react with the steps they take to proceed, such as first wrapping the cat tightly in a towel in a burrito-esque manner (that was a better example, yeah?).

What I’m trying to say here is that integrative learning is happening all around us, albeit, we may not be thinking too much about it. If you’ve experienced a traditional K-12 education, you may especially be oblivious to it because it’s just ‘the way it is’, but now that you know a little bit more, you’ll likely begin to notice integrative learning happening around you a bit more often!

3 E-Learning Communities You Should Be Participating In

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I’m often asked where I find clients and/or e-learning support, and my answer is always “E-Learning Communities”. I’ve learned so much from my peers, and have found many fantastic clients by participating in e-learning communities, so I recommend joining any of these:

  1. Articulate E-Learning Heroes – The E-Learning Heroes Community has by and large been one of my greatest support systems, particularly when I was first starting out as an independent contractor. The weekly e-learning challenges have helped me grow my development skills and my portfolio, the community members have provided continual support – from reviewing my e-learning and providing feedback to helping me troubleshoot projects in a pinch, and I’ve met many of the Articulate folks at Community Roadshows and conferences – all of them are incredibly fantastic and supportive. Another great thing about the E-Learning Heroes Community is the new(ish)-fangled Job Board – there are LOADS of e-learning jobs being posted here all the time, so if you’re in the market for clients, you should be trolling this board regularly
  2. The Online Network of Independent Learning Professionals – Patti Bryant started this group on Linkedin, and members meet every Thursday (live and online!) to chat about pointed topics or have community hours. Usually, one member will present on a given topic, and then a panel will be available to answer community member questions. Each session is recorded, so if you can’t tune in live, you can watch/listen later! This group has such a wealth of knowledge and I would consider participating – even if it’s only passively listening to the sessions – to be essential for any learning and development professional.
  3. The Instructional Design Sub-Reddit – Fellow E-Learning Heroes Community member, Rachel Barnum, keeps this sub-reddit moving like a well-oiled machine, and there always seems to be readers kicking around asking questions, providing feedback, posting jobs, and offering support to folks new to the industry.