Nuts and Bolts: Upskilling

New mediahas brought with it new challenges for instructional designers andfacilitators. Where just five years ago we were still primarily concerned withthings like authoring tools and content management, we now face new demands formaking programs more inclusive of learners and building a farther reach for theL&D department.

This speaksto the need for new skills. While every designer won’t need to develop every skill,it’s important that you become familiar with most and, depending on your role,start working toward ways of building the new skills for yourself, or buildingnew approaches into programs that others might facilitate or deliver.

Pavinginformal paths

Helpinglearners find one another and information they need is a new critical role forL&D. Connecting pockets of learners via interest areas, topic discussionboards, and microblog chats, and supporting communities of interest and communitiesof practice are critical. New tools let us create truly useful, evolvingdigital libraries of Podcasts, video clips, photos, RSS feeds, and readingmaterial to support learners as they go about enacting their work. Creating agood library requires architecture and organization skills (no point having thearticle stored away if no one can find it) as well as curation skills:

Curation. An effective curator helps thelearner manage information overload by serving as an effective filter. Like themuseum curator, the effective content curator works at aggregating, selecting,and annotating content around a particular theme or point of view. It’s notjust a matter of compiling links, but serving as the source for finding and feedingnew, relevant content to a group or community. And as we’ll see later, thecurator doesn’t always have to be you.

Inclusion. Making good use of new mediais about inclusion, not just distribution. The designer or facilitator willneed to find ways to help learners contribute, question, and learn from eachother. It will be critical to build in opportunities to collaborate via toolslike wikis or blogs, to talk and share via tools like social profiles ormicroblogs, and to learn through the community rather than in isolation. Lookfor obvious alternatives to traditional approaches, particularly opportunitiesfor employees to learn from each other. One strategy: help workers generateinstructional materials. For instance, back in the “old days” the L&Ddepartment would create a video showing exemplary performance of a task. How docompanies do this now, in an era of collaborative learning and much moreaccessible video technologies? Companies like the Cheesecake Factory offerquick videos of exemplary performers demonstrating a skill.

Participation. Effectively using newmedia is not something you will do to others. You’ll need to learn to use themyourself, and then help others learn to contribute, question, generate, and redirectand enhance, often in new group configurations and new power relationships. Thisisn’t just for end-user workers, but applies as well to facilitators, trainers,supervisors, or whomever at the local level participates in choosing learninggoals. Part of your development will be learning to help facilitators develop.

Community management. Supportingcommunities requires more than just setting up a site, and involves all thethings already listed. Nurturing, feeding, growing, and sometimes weeding acommunity is not the same as controlling or directing it, and it takes time andskill to get it right. One challenge here is that organizations have fallen inlove with the word “community.” In many ways it is synonymous with“communication.” If employees aren’t talking to each other now, or operating ina culture of fairly open communication, setting up an online group won’t changethat. And note: you can’t create and force people to participate in communities.Top-down direction as often as not will result in some sort of organized workgroup, but it likely won’t be a community of shared learning and practice.

Finally…it should have been part of ourwork all along to help the learners be better learners, to make learning (or atleast finding learning opportunities) easier for them and more timely anduseful for organizations. It’s important to realize with much of this that theskills are something you need, but much of the work might be something youpartner on or delegate. In short: you may need to identify others in theorganization that can support yoursuccess. Look around the company for those already making extensive use ofsocial tools and informal learning opportunities. Who are your “lifelong learner”types? Who are your writer types? Who’s already participating in online orother groups talking about work or work topics?

Want more?

On paving informal paths, seeresources on social and informal learning at Jane Hart’s Social Learning Centre:https://sociallearningcentre.co.uk/

On curation, see Beth Kanter’s blog post “Content Curation 101”: https://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/

On the Cheesecake Factory’s video café: https://www.bersin.com/News/Details.aspx?id=14676

On communities, see Katja Pastoors’scomparison of types of communities of practice as well as the dynamics oftop-down v. bottom-up communities of practice: https://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1585429