Reflection

Although Gagne (1974) has written much about the principles of Instructional Design he admits that an enormous amount of learning occurs outside of the learning environment by means of books, magazines and newspapers as well as radio and television programmes.  From this he suggests it is apparent that “special means of instruction do not have to be provided in order for large amounts of learning to occur” Much of the reading I have encountered during this module has suggested that you can only design for learning you cannot guarantee learning.  So why are we putting all this work into planning our training interventions?

I checked You Tube recently to find out how to edit a pdf document.  I got my answer in a 3 minute video that explained everything to me.  Our guest speaker from Google has suggested that we replicate this type of learning where videos or podcasts are created by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) with some guidelines from the Learning & Development Dept.  Could it be this easy? In an environment that is heavily regulated and there is a requirement to have training content factually correct I’m not so sure.  The culture of the organisation will also have an impact on whether this type of training could ever succeed.  From an employee perspective the culture of learning through collaboration and sharing is not something that is present in our organisation.   At the moment there is a tendency to think that when it comes to training the only people who should do that are trainers.  In addition it can be difficult to get managers and employees to attend training sessions as usually there is the excuse that they are too busy I can only image what the reply would be if we asked them to create training content!

Shortly we will have the facility that employees across the organisation will be able to view video and hear audio on their desk tops. It will be possible to access video and podcasts without any difficulty.  So does the example of creating quick simple screencasts come from the Learning and Development Department to start off? Should we start taking the video camera into our training rooms and asking trainees to create short videos to explain a topic to their colleagues?  Due to regulation I don’t think we could ever have a situation where training content is uploaded to a central repository without some form of review before publishing.  Maybe we need to have some kind of incentive for staff to create content and share knowledge? Whilst the culture is not currently present I think with some incentive it would be possible to get people to start creating content.  Once they start I think they will see the value of this type of informal training and they will want to contribute on a regular basis 

November 2011