ATD Webcast Recap

With all of the options available to accommodate individual learning objectives, many practitioners assume, “Oh! I’m only creating microlearning. I don’t need ADDIE or SAM or any complicated framework.”

However, when thinking about flipping your classroom to a more modern program, our team offers one critical reminder: instructional design becomes more important than ever. Standalone courses do not exist anymore, and neither do standalone training resources. Everything connects to everything else, making thoughtful design a critical piece of your blended learning puzzle.

During her recent ATD Webcast Blended Learning: A Five-Dimensional Puzzle, Jennifer Hofmann shared the factors she considers when embarking on a new design project. Whether you design, facilitate, or manage training programs, these three elements provide a foundation for understanding modern blended learning.

Organizational boundaries keep growing and becoming more fluid, and as our learner base disperses around the globe, training programs have to adapt appropriately. That’s no small feat in the face of multi-cultural classrooms, emerging technologies, and stakeholder expectations of learning success.

Multi-method delivery, or the simultaneous support and instruction of non-co-located learners, provides a popular and effective solution in the modern workplace. Organizations managing remote and in-person learners have had success with this approach, as they’re able to balance the needs of both groups, while successfully engaging all participants.

Ready to incorporate multi-method delivery into your modern blended learning methodology? Make sure you implement the four factors required for success!

Picture this: you’re facilitating a live training session for your organization, and it comes time to ask for learner input. You open the floor for contributions with the common phrase, “A penny for your thoughts?”

And you get crickets. Your previously lively cohort goes silent. Some participants look utterly confused.

What happened? Your figure of speech may have confused your global learners.

Here's a radical idea: maybe we've been thinking too small when it comes to instructional design.

Relying on proven principles while purposefully expanding the scope of our vision can help us accomplish organizational goals and empower learners to better navigate their modern workplaces. We believe in a more thorough model so much that we practice and preach perpetual learning design.

Our new video explains the concept in under three minutes - click here to view. 

When designing and delivering content, we need to balance five elements of the learner experience: technology, design, people, place, and time.

In order to achieve this balance, we need to focus on the learner experience. We need to define and leverage how learning is structured, including when it is taking place, where it is taking place, and how it is being delivered.

Are your organization's programs ready for the future? Has the instructional design approach you use evolved to support and actively engage modern learners? What implementation process works best when introducing this innovative, flexible methodology? 

Ultimately, effective blends rely on addressing all moments of learning need and modeling the way work happens today. And while learning professionals and researchers alike have identified proven benefits, stakeholders correctly point out that risks logically follow widespread change.

I'm pleased to collaborate with eLearning Guild to answer these questions and address these realities in my new report, Blended Learning in Practice.

Do you remember the first time you experienced a non-traditional approach to learning? For most of us, we didn’t learn important life-lessons inside a classroom. For Jennifer Hofmann, classic Saturday morning programming introduced her to self-paced learning, and the rest, as they say, was history.

Jennifer recently shared the surprising connection she made between her love of popular Schoolhouse Rock episodes and modern blended learning in this short (but insightful) video: https://youtu.be/Hd-ITHrroXc

It’s very exciting to learn about and invest in the latest trends in educational technology. Who among us hasn’t been swept up by the allure of gamification, the promise of curation, and a desire to embed microlearning at every conceivable moment of learning need? 

No matter how enticing these new ideas might be, we are always (rightly) concerned about adoption. If we don’t implement well, these new technologies and instructional strategies will seem like just the latest trend, easily ignored while we all default to our normal, familiar learning mode: instructor-led. 

And, people are generally happy with that. We know how to learn in a classroom. We know how to teach in a classroom. 

It takes a modern learning culture to support modern educational technologies and instructional techniques. Unfortunately, many organizations are living in the past. While training success doesn’t depend on deploying the latest trends, and outdated learning culture can hinder employee, program, and organizational success.  

What do you know about the changing demographics of the United States? Pew Research Center found that, “Americans are more racially and ethnically diverse than in the past, and the U.S. is projected to be even more diverse in the coming decades.” With the U.S. becoming more diverse, and with this shift in the population demographic, comes the need to diversify learning solutions. 

As L&D practitioners, the demands of our job now require us to not just expect different faces in the room, but learners with different needs and abilities, both in person and online. The popularity of blended learning has increased exponentially over the years and is now being heralded as one of the most cost-effective ways to distribute information and impact behaviors across organizations. 

How can you ensure your blended learning strategy meets these diversity demands?

The term blended learning has come in and out of vogue in corporate training for the last several decades. For so long, in fact, it feels like an old-fashioned term. A term that is not modern enough for the current learning landscape.

The reality is, modern learning strategies, techniques, and technologies seem to be custom designed for blended learning approach. But we need to stop thinking about designing a blend only after the so-called “important” content is developed. As I state in my new book, Blended Learning: What Works in Talent Development (ATD, 2018):

"…modern blended learning is more than sequencing different media and activities that happen to be related by topic. It is about aligning learning objects with the most appropriate instructional strategies, techniques, and technologies, while meeting the needs of the organization and modern learners."