Musings

‘Gita, where’s the tomato sauce these days?’  Gita’s husband stood in their kitchen, frowning and breathing heavily, a plate of chips on his plate.

It's the final few weeks of a project; the audio, subtitles and downloads are integrated and it's time for the final review to commence!

What always amazes me when you have someone else reviewing work that you have checked, rechecked, double checked, and in the middle of the night sneaked up on to check that there are no little gnomes changing things behind your back, they still manage to find things that are so blindingly obvious you say: “doh” or the equivalent thereof. The technical term I coin for this is ‘snow blindness’.

So rather than not share it, dig some trenches, and hope for the best, we share the final review amongst as many people as possible. And it is amazing what people find. Everyone notices different things; some at the high level, some at the detail. It can be punctuations, the alignment of graphics, the narration, or good old fashioned technical facts that are incorrectly written.
So you always end up with a huge list of things that people would like to change.

The final step in this standardised process is to decide the changes that will be implemented before it goes live, and which to keep in reserve until the first planned maintenance overhaul.

And lets not forget the users themselves. They will always give feedback on what we could do better or different. So the final review of a project never stops. It keeps on going!

Anyway….when you work in an organisation where most people have got many, many years of experience in senior positions within multinational organisations, I can say with certainty that everyone here is an SME in one field or another. We even have an SME in fields (ok, maybe not fields, but allotments!).

So the challenge is not can we find one; but which one do we engage on this project?

On the last project, we chose two people, who were available to support and answer any queries that we had. This worked really well, and between them we developed modules that hang well together and tell a good story.

As you remember, we have cans full of SME’s, so how to engage the remainder? Well, on specific issues we identified specific SMEs and got them to review those parts. This also meant that we shared the workload, and developed a common understanding within our system of the new project.
So high ownership leading to high engagement and acception. Before we start the next project I am looking forward to opening a few cans to celebrate!

In a previous life before e-Learning I knew that in the business world SME stands for Small Medium Enterprise, based on number of employees and turnover. So it was quite funny when we started the first e-Learning project and a supplier asked: "Who will be the SME on this new project?" SME? Why would we want another company involved? We had just appointed a supplier?

It was then explained what it meant within the learning design world…"Subject Matter Expert:"  People that have the highest level of expertise in a field or topic. ‘Ah....yes, we have got quite a few of those within our system; how many cans would you like me to open on this project?’

So I realised that SME is a “homonym TLA”. Look that one up...

Last Thursday I was talking to Rich at e2train Uncovered 2008 and he asked me if I’d write a piece for the essential.genius blog. “Great!”, I said, “sounds fun!”. I didn’t have a clue what to write. Just got to make sure it’s vaguely about e-learning I guess.

So taking inspiration from Rich’s previous post I thought I’d go for a run. It’s when you do your best thinking you know. So off I went with my shiny new trainers on, 5-month-old chocolate Labrador in hand and set off around the town.

I started to think about what part of e-learning I should write about and was just getting some ideas floating around when I suddenly reached a section of pavement with a load of scaffolding over it. Alfie (the puppy) ran the wrong side of it a full speed, the lead tightened, and he swirled round and round cartoon-style until he came to a stop at the bottom of the post. “Ah, poor Alfie” I thought after giving him the once over, “Still, it’ll be funny to write in the blog”.

It wasn’t until 5 minutes later when he had pulled the same stunt around a lamp-post and we started running down a tree-lined road that I thought, “Sod Rich and his running/thinking method. I’ll brainstorm when I get home!”.

Anyway, back to the point.

The most recent essential.genius development project is to create a ‘games-based piece of e-learning on the Lean 5 S principle’. Now normally when we get a brief, the subject matter expert (SME) has a pretty good idea of what they would like the final course to look like, which is great on one hand but really restricts the content developers with the amount of creative input they can have.

I’ve had countless projects in the past where the client has said, “We’d like a 30 page e-learning course on <insert generic e-learning subject here> with 4 drag and drops made in Flash and an assessment at the end with a bank of 20 questions.” Whilst this means that we can build the course in a much quicker time, it really does mean that the final product is much less interesting than it could’ve been.

essential.genius on the other hand operate a pretty open development process and said, “Right, here’s the learning concept, this is what we’d like learners to achieve. Give us some ideas.” This is a content developers dream. It meant that we could go back with a range of ideas, from a simple page-turner with assessment course, right up to an all out interactive 3D environment with inbuilt scenarios and a whole host of characters.

My point is that whilst it’s great for SMEs to have an idea of what they want. It’s so much better to give the content developers a wider scope to unleash their creativity because in the end, even if you don’t go for the wackiest idea the content guys give you, the course will undoubtedly be much more interesting, learners will be more engaged and therefore pick up the learning objectives that much better. As you’ll see in a few months time with the Lean Collection from essential.genius!

I’m attending PMI’s Lean Workshop in November as a delegate, so being the good student I am, I thought I would refresh my knowledge of the PMI Process Essentials Series before the course and work my way through the e-Learning this morning.  The Process Essentials Series is set in a fictional company “Presto Pizza” and takes you around the entire PMI Improvement Cycle as you see the Presto Pizza team at work.  An electrician had arrived to change some lights and I had warned him that I was doing some online learning so not to worry about the additional voices emanating from my office. I’d just completed the ‘Flowchart process’ module when the electrician left.  His final words to me were, “Couldn’t help overhearing that training you’re doing!  Isn’t it amazing the lengths that these pizza companies go to these days for their staff?  We don’t get anything like that in my job!  Hope you don’t mind me saying though madam, you don’t look like the typical pizza delivery staff we get round our way!”  Now there’s a thought, I always fancied getting a scooter!

This is interesting though as it raises the question of why we use Pizza as our case study subject.  The reasons are twofold; firstly, food retail is an environment that everyone can understand and relate to.  This helps them to concentrate on the learning rather than the specifics of the environment.  Secondly, food retail is the ultimate customer facing environment and has a mass of both “transactional” and “operational” processes to use as examples.  It is this key choice surrounding examples that dictates the effectiveness of the learning, i.e. can users understand and relate to the environment without getting hung up or distracted by the details in order for them to be focussed on the learning content and objectives. 

Anyway, I must get down to the scooter dealer...

I do some of my best thinking whilst in the gym; I regularly annoy other gym users by stopping suddenly and staring into space. What looks like an absent moment is usually a flash of inspiration as the resolution to some problem or other becomes clear. Recently, I have been trying to work out why working out helps me to work things out...(stay with me, I have a point!)...I’m no biologist, but I do know that the mind is stimulated by physical activity. Whilst the body is engaged in the routine of the mechanical, the mind is free to explore other things. I have come to the conclusion however, that it is the lack of distraction that really allows me to tackle the day’s problems. So rarely in life am I free to focus on one thing without my cell phone chirping, e-mails flying in, the phone ringing, websites calling etc. This has moved me on to pondering the issue of "learning space"; everyone understands the concept of "thinking space" but what about learning? In an age where learners are bombarded from every direction, how do we capture their attention and allow them "learning space" to focus on the learning experience without being distracted? In the e-Learning arena, essential.genius attempts to tackle this through our three-element learning approach. A key part of this approach is recognising that a multisensory method is now essential to effective online learning. This is still an area that requires more gym time; however, I’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts on the matter - drop me a note to learningspace@essentialgenius.com

We’re not ones to sit back and relax, no sooner have we finished one development project, we’re on to the next... we have just kick-started two very exciting new projects; to develop e-Learning for Lean. We’re applying the proven essential.genius three-element learning approach in putting together a world first for the business improvement industry – Lean e-Learning that doesn’t bore the pants off you! Some familiar faces from Presto Pizza will be on another journey, this time a Lean one as they focus on making improvements in both the transactional service and manufacturing based environments. Completing the series is a first for us; a brand new format application currently code named Project 111, it’s so exciting that if we told you any more about it we’d have to kill you, and we really don’t want to do that!

Trust me, I’m a consultant… Our parent company, PMI, is famous for developing people in the use of process improvement tools and methodologies. PDSA, Deming, system of profound knowledge, control charts, and all the rest. One of the things that makes essential.genius different is that we use these tools in our learning and technology development process and in spades! On the recent project to develop the PMI Process Essential e-Learning Series for example, we planned in advance, did pilot studies, listened to the voice of the customer, control charted the process measures, and an awful lot of reviews. Proving, if proof were needed that we really do walk the talk. Did you know that all of our people are Six Sigma Green Belt qualified as an absolute minimum and many of us are Six Sigma Black Belts too?

So how do we create all of the character voices for our e-Learning modules?

Well… the recipe is as follows. You take one recording studio, with a cheerful recording manager and two professional voice over artists. You feed them bacon butties and gallons of tea. Next show them screen shots from the relevant content and then inject a dose of user feedback. Hey Presto (Pizza)… all the characters are developed! Within 3 hours we can do about 6 modules, have happy smiles on our faces and pain in our stomachs from laughter! (try to say "qualitative and quantitative attributes" fast 10 times!)

India, China, South Korea? Who knew that genius can spread this far in just a few days? With the essential.genius website still in its early stages, the international reach has amazed us all and Google Analytics has helped satisfy our nosiness. So far we’ve had 90% of hits from Europe, with 10% already coming from the Rest of the World. I wonder what we’ll see next time I check… anyone out there from the South Pole?