The Missing Link between learning content and instructional design in Corporate Learning

As learning and the way in which people learn becomes more and more important, companies still struggle with online learner engagement, despite big investments in Learning Management Systems and Learner Experience Platforms. Still, after many initiatives to ‘listen to the learning employee’ and ‘putting the learner at the center’, it seems that people do in fact learn, but not in a corporate environment. Too many old and already obsolete assumptions lie at the basis of this issue. In this article, I will discuss how these assumptions are limiting Learner Experience and how to find a way out of learner non-commitment.

Many large and medium-sized companies regularly face challenges in L&D, where they have to train the entire workforce of that company on topics that have an impact on the entire workforce. New regulations and compliance rules or new ways of working require the companies to train as many as 100000 people in a very short amount of time.

The approach for this usually is training done in a ‘car wash’ or ‘production line’ type of learning intervention; that means that there is only one approach to have people learn something, and to make things worse the training is made ‘mandatory’ and to be validated if an employee actually has taken the training.

The effects of doing training in this ‘one size fits all’ way, are:

-      Non-engagement with the learning content

-      Learners spending more time in tricking the system than actually learning something

-      Finishing the training with the least amount of effort becomes the main focus of the learning effort

Even if you can measure that many people have completed the training, the actual value of the training and measure of what they have learned is highly questionable.

What’s Wrong?

In my opinion training like this is based on a number of wrong assumptions:

-      All learners are the same; they are learning the same and in exactly the same way

-      A ‘zero state of knowledge’: when starting the training a learner knows nothing about the subject

-      Learners need to learn everything; the learners are required and obliged to follow the training in a sequential way from A to Z

-      People are willing to spend time outside of their work schedule to learn something

Many of these assumptions are debunked already based on research both in the corporate world and in areas of cognitive science. Still, a surprising amount of companies are doing exactly what has been described above and maintaining it very stringently.

Back to Reality

The real world is very different. People don’t just learn in the way that companies assume they will learn. So, what is this reality at the moment?

-      People learn when they are experiencing moments of need, meaning that people only learn when there is a change in their current status quo. For instance, when they are moving between jobs or they take on a new role or a new function.

-      People create their own learning journeys. This is what is called the YouTube effect, where people are motivated to search for learning content on their own terms in their own time and in a way, they find most convenient for them

-      People only want to learn what they don’t know. Adult learning research has shown that people are almost insulted when they have to learn things, they think they are already mastering, and are often upset when they feel that the company they work for doesn’t know this.

 Of course, a training system has a very hard time determining what people know and what they don’t know because they don’t measure it

So how do I fix it?

In the below part of this article, I want to show you a case I have worked on as an L&D consultant recently.

The situation was that a large company needed to train its employees in a certain way of working. This had to do with how the company works financially and wanted to educate all the employees on how financial processes and workflows were used in this company. Experts in the field had a large volume of content and their initial design principle was everybody should learn everything there is about this topic.

Now, of course, this sounds very familiar! The typical instructional design for these courses would be the ‘We know it is mandatory, but we are going to make it fun’- type of learning intervention. Needless to say, this type of training training would mostly be online, and would be designed along the lines of:

-      making the training visually and aesthetically pleasing

-      using cartoons, videos, and graphs

-      making the training material available on mobile devices.

The more audacious learning designers would create a gamification system with the purpose of motivating people to move through the course, by setting micro-goals and making the training material available on mobile devices.

But this time we wanted to take a different approach, so we created a number of design principles before we started creating the learning intervention.

-      The learner has autonomy and decides what to learn

-      Learning is based on previous and existing knowledge of the learner

-      It is possible to access specific content at moments of need

-      Training should be supportive of someone’s day-to-day work and should be able to be accessed in day-to-day work

The Missing Link

It is here that we found the missing link between learning content and the instructional design in corporate learning - true personalization.

Of course, personalization is not new. The concept of personalization has been around for a long time. Surprising is the fact that many of the current trainings today do not possess any form of personalization, especially the large volume trainings.

To be able to personalize the training, the L&D team I was working with, took a two-tier approach:

First of all, we created a number of ways the learning content could be accessed. We came up with four ways of accessing it. These were:

-      Access to a learning journey on the basis of the actual job you were performing in the company

-      Access to a Learning Journey on the basis of previous knowledge of the subject

-      Access to a Learning Journey on the basis of browsing and searching for very specific topics at moments of need

-      The regular sequential ‘learn everything’- way

The second thing we did was to group the learning content into blocks. We call them content packages. A content package would be a set of learning objects, that are contextualized around a topic, grouped together. A content package usually consists of a mix of text, video, graphics, articles and web links:

We then determined:

- which learner would be benefiting from which content package.

- what was the threshold for guiding learners to a certain content package

- in which work scenarios learners would be needing what content

The mechanisms for determining this were:

-      A short quiz to ‘test out’ of certain topics

-      A short series of questions, with a 3-part scoring system (high – medium-low)

-      A question on which job/function a learner would have 

Based on the answers, a calculation (call it an algorithm if you like) was made, to connect a specific learner to a specific content package.

This thinking and concept resulted in a matrix where we could see which type of learner would benefit from certain content groups.

Some of the questions we asked to make this happen were:

-      What is the absolute minimum of knowledge that a specific person in a specific job role should have?

-      What are some of the obvious questions for a person to ask from the perspective of the learning content?

-      What would some of the obvious situations be, where a person would need to know certain information from the training?

-      What would be times that a person would need to learn something (Moments of Need)?

This analysis lead to the following distribution of content, based on an individual person's profile:

Of course, the algorithms can be made more advanced, by combining Roles, previous knowledge and Moments of Need. This would lead to an even more personalized learning experience.

The formula would then be: Job type + Work scenario – previous knowledge = Learning Content

Formulas like these open the door for automation of assigning learning content to specific persons in the company, preventing that all employees have to learn the same set of learning content, and only learn what they need to learn.

Only after creating these matrices and algorithms, we started working on the instructional design. We still used text, videos and created simulations of certain processes, much in line with ‘how to…’ videos on YouTube.

A typical UX first screen could like something like this:

This would immediately give the user a sense of choice and control and would enhance engagement right from the start.

The benefits of this approach were:

-      It is still measurable, and actually is more granular

-      The perception from the learner is that ‘we don’t waste their time’ by only teaching what they need to know

-      It is more sustainable because it can used as a reference system

-      And the most important was that the training is not perceived as ‘mandatory’ and actually is fun to take.

Initial responses during the testing phase showed a significant increase in employees willing to take the training, when they were made aware that they were in control of their learning path.

Final Thoughts

All people are intrinsically motivated to learn if there is a benefit in it for them. Even in a situation, where a person needs to learn something, extrinsically motivated by a company, there are many solutions to make the learning purposeful and valuable for the individual.

Personalization is an often talked about concept in L&D and Corporate Learning, but the reality is that the underlying assumptions and misconceptions about learning are preventing it.

The missing link between learning content and instructional design is to conduct a research phase and think analytically about who needs to learn what content, and contextualize the content into groups of learning items, addressing moments of need, experience and existing knowledge.

I have been working in L&D for over 10 years as a trainer, facilitator, Learning designer and Learner Experience manager. I am based in The Netherlands and has designed and delivered successful learning interventions for companies in the Financial Services, professional service provider and retail industry.

If you want to continue the conversation about how to make learning interventions successful, please send me a connection request or write to me at martin@mbcreativity.com