Darin

Using Cognitive Hacks for eLearning

I remember the first time I heard someone speaking a language other than English. I was eight years old. My family and I were visiting Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza, and we had stopped by the Classic Cup Café to have a refreshment. As we sat together on the patio, I heard the people at the table next to me speaking a different language. I loved that experience.

As I studied other languages, I have often used the Pimsleur method since I have had great success with this program. One of the secrets to Paul Pimsleur’s methods is that he designed the courses to include cognitive shortcuts in order to maximize retention. These shortcuts can be utilized in any form of education, including eLearning.

Among the many techniques or hacks people can use to better remember information is spacing. Spacing utilizes “spaced” repetition in order to achieve maximized memorization. Instead of focusing on the same concept/topic/idea for a set period of time (e.g., rout memory), you would focus on the subject then focus on something else. After a set period of time, you would need to recall the previous information.

I utilize spacing when I am designing fact-heavy material. For example, as I design training on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), I will present a fact (e.g., “HIPAA was enacted in 1996 and provides data privacy for safeguarding medical information”), move on to something else (e.g., my company has a 99.97% HIPAA compliance rate; there are various HIPAA additional rules including the Privacy Rule and HITECH; etc.), and then focus back on the original information in the form of a short survey question. I will continue doing this until I get to the end of the module, in which I will have a graded measure. Typically, learners will do well on this measure due to the spacing of information.

Another hack I use in complex topics involves the elearner to “train” someone else. This hack promotes information retrieval. While it is easier to do in a classroom or lecture-based course, there are some interesting ways to do this in instructional design. I prefer to have the learner write out the main components or learning objectives in a way that a 5-year old could understand it. This focuses the learner to engage with their creative faculties. This can be challenging for many, but it does go to demonstrate if the learning objectives have been met. What I have done in the past is for the learner to write their answer in a private forum. After I review/grade it, I then make it public for other learners in the class to see.

There are so many other cognitive hacks that can be used. What have you had success with?

3 Tricks to Overcome the Imposter Syndrome in Instructional Design

Have you heard of imposter syndrome? Originally coined by clinical psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978 (Clance, 1985), the term describes the self-doubt that they are underqualified. People experiencing the imposter syndrome often feel they do not deserve the respect or recognition they receive. Instead of attributing success to knowledge or skill, these individuals incorrectly attribute it to good timing or luck. The imposter syndrome was originally thought to only occur in women, but researchers have found these feelings also impact men at equivalent rates.

Self-doubt is hard to overcome. (pixabay)

For many instructional designers or learning/development professionals, we often utilize our own knowledge, understanding, and experiences to build out courses and lessons. We may not be experts in project management or performance management, but we are able to leverage our understanding to make these subjects trainable. Many of us also must train others in person or online. While we may be subject matter experts, our knowledge does not always prevent us from feeling underqualified.

These self-doubts may manifest themselves when in the planning phases for instructional projects. We may often over prepare for meetings with experts, stakeholders, or clients. We may mentally rehearse our response when someone asks about our credentials or challenges our design methodology. It can be overwhelming.

So, how do you overcome these feelings? Here are three tricks to overcome the imposter syndrome.

Authentically represent yourself and your knowledge. In Hamlet, Polonius says “This above all: to thine own self be true…” This is great advice to follow in all aspects of your life, but especially when attempting to overcome the imposter syndrome. Whether you have a PhD or a high school diploma, you are in an instructional design role for a reason. Whatever your background or experiences, you will do better in life if you are authentic about your skillsets.

As a word of clarification: There is a phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect in which, eventually, a person with more knowledge becomes humble about their knowledge. Being humble is different than the imposter syndrome.

Have articulable backup. Having quantitative support is always better than not. Utilizing pre- and post-training measures to document improvement can showcase your instruction’s reliability. Having subject matter experts complete your training and give you critiques can increase your instruction’s validity. Knowing both and how to articulate both can be the difference between a new contract and a hard pass. This will help you demonstrate your worth when faced with imposter syndrome doubts.

Utilize your support network. We all have both friends and colleagues. Use them. If you are really having a bad day or really being impacted by doubts, talk to them. Their encouragement is often what is needed to help you overcome these fears.

Have you experienced imposter syndrome before? How did you handle it?

How to Failsafe Your Core Training

Have you ever been in this situation? Last Monday, a new employee started with the company. My colleague who usually conducts the first-day onboarding was out of town, so I was filling in for him. The morning goes by great. The new employee onboards in our payroll system, which, consequently, doubles as our learning management system (LMS). I hop into the LMS administration portal to assign her the new hire courses, but she is not there. I wait for a few minutes, but still does not show up. Finally, I call our vendor and find out the LMS cloud provider is having trouble. Any new users in our system will not show up until the LMS system is working properly. My usually stress-free Monday suddenly changes.

I’m sure I am not the only person to be the victim of an LMS system glitch. While we would like to believe that everything will work exactly how it is supposed to work, that is not always the case. Hard drives die. Systems fail. Power outages occur.

In my former life, I traveled around the country providing trainings for various groups. I requested these training venues to have certain computer and A/V setups. Sometimes these requests were not honored. I prepared ahead of time.

When it comes to SaaS and cloud-based LMSs, we often do not have a backup plan if something fails. Here are three ways to failsafe your core training:

1. Build a repository of your SCORM and TINCAN files. This is so simple, yet can be daunting is a company has more than one content or instructional developers. I suggest this as an industry best practice. At my current company, we use a shared network drive with backups for every course we have created in our LMS.

Having a repository of SCORM courses can serve as a quick backup plan. You can easily unpack the ZIP file and access the web-based launcher (often named story.html) if the LMS fails. In my recent scenario, this is exactly what I did. While I was not able to get an accurate time for course completion, I was able to document the new employee’s score for the core curriculum. Being able to access these backup ZIP files helped save the day.

2. Curate print-out or PDF archives of the learning content. This is something I learned when I worked for a nonprofit and needed to document my activities. Having a PDF copy of the LMS can be invaluable, especially if you may have to use it to conduct the training off the printouts. This is also a best practice for instructional design creation, as I find I like to printout and review/edit content by hand.

I also do this for any presentation that I am going to give. I have been saved many times from technological failures by having print-outs of PDFs of my learning content. It is also useful to do this when you are conducting hybrid training, as you can write notes or comments on your printouts.

3. Design a CD of your core curriculum courses. Instructional design programs like Articulate provide the publishing capabilities for CD creation. While CDs are nearly obsolete, most Windows-based computers have a CDROM disk drive. And, of course, this medium and it being ubiquitous will pay for itself if your computer or network drive crashes. The other, more millennial way of doing this is to have a USB drive with the complete course content.

“I love it when a plan comes together” – Hannibal Smith, The A-Team

Having a plan before a technological failure is the key for success. You can rest easier if you have one or two guaranteed failsafe methods. Of course, you also want to ensure you have the learning objectives and other course components documented elsewhere. It is great to have a backup of your content someplace, but it will not be as useful if you do not know which course trains which subjects/objectives.

What about you? Do you use another method to failsafe your core curriculum?

Using CIA Tradecraft in the Real World

Imagine a daunting assignment: You need to create an employee development training course on problem-solving skills. Sounds easy, right?

It should be easy. After all, you have been solving problems your entire life. Maybe you have a Masters of Business Administration and excel at managing employees. Maybe you have made some great decisions and consider yourself successful. Or, maybe (like me) you have actually completed multiple analytical courses or the intelligence community advanced analyst program. Whatever your journey, there is no doubt you have developed a problem solving process.

How do you do it? Is it different from the way I solve problems?

I have always thought problem solving skills have an individual-specific component. We all don’t see the world the same way, so why would we all solve problems the same way? While I still believe this to be the case to a degree, I have had to concede that there exist universal analytical steps that can make problem solving easier.

The Sherman Kent School is the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) analyst training, development, and proving ground. One of their textbooks is available online: A Tradecraft Primer: Structure Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis.

While my daily problem solving is usually used to decide when is the best time to get groceries, CIA analysts have to provide recommendations for decision makers on national security topics. A mistake in my problem solving means I wait in heavy traffic; a mistake for them often means people’s lives are disrupted. These analysts solve problems by following a step-by-step analytical process as shown above (from A Tradecraft Primer, page 38). If you have some time (say, like a few days off for a holiday, perhaps), this is a quick and easy read.

When someone follows this guide, they would go from defining a problem, identifying assumptions, and brainstorming to red-teaming, devil’s advocate, and analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH). The analytical tool chosen depends partially on the problem. But, there are inherent challenges with these techniques in everyday life. Most of these techniques work best in group settings, require hours to complete, and need information that is often unavailable.

While this is all great, is this how we solve real world, private sector problems? I would say “yes”. I would argue that we all utilize elements of these steps in our daily lives. We may not always title the steps the same, but I believe we are generally involved in these processes to a certain degree. It is only when we face larger problems that we try more structured techniques. (Think about a young person deciding between colleges or a person evaluating which car to purchase.)

Back to my original question: How do you train people to solve problems better?

I’m still working on the details, but I have settled on developing curriculum with these deliverables:

(A person, after completing this training, will be able to…) Explain the identifying characteristics of a problem that will require greater concentration and effort to solve;
Demonstrate performing a “self-check” in which they 1) clearly articulate the problem and restate it if necessary, 2) brainstorm potential solutions, 3) identify their own assumptions regarding the problem, and 4) critique any implicit biases they may have regarding the problem, the people, or the potential solutions;
Describe the benefits and challenges to using a structured analytical technique like red-teaming or ACH; and,
Role-play using devil’s advocacy to find a solution for a simulated client problem.

This potential curriculum is still in the creation stage, but I am actually quite excited to give this a try in the near future. However, I am open to suggestions. Does anyone have other thoughts on how to teach people to problem solve better?

Applying Learning Styles to Electronic Health Records (EHR) Training

In the educational world, learning styles can be a taboo subject. The learning style field is filled with nearly a dozen distinct models all claiming to encapsulate and categorize learners. As an education professional, I frequently must modify teaching opportunities to my students and their various learning styles. This can become overwhelming – you must plan material that is compatible with the various learning style types.

In my current position, I am responsible for training new employees on the various electronic health record (EHR) systems (there are dozens of them). A specific health information management (HIM) employee may start their day using a Cerner system, move before lunch to an e-Clinical Works (eCW) system, and then end the day with the NextGen or AllScripts EHR. Not only do these HIM professionals need familiarity with the various systems, everyone supporting them (e.g., their supervisor, manager, quality assurance professional, etc.) must also be proficient in the systems. And, I am responsible to better develop training to educate HIM employees on these various systems.

I have not, to date, identified more than a few ways to teach something like an EHR to someone. The learner can read about it, hear about it, watch it, practice on it, or teach it. This is also the logical progression for how a person learns about a topic. Currently, I have structured training to involve portions of reading, listening, watching, and practicing on the EHR. I am always looking for a better way to train; therefore, I start reviewing over learning styles again.

Among the various learning styles is the Felder-Silverman learning styles model (1988). has four dimensions: active vs. reflective; sensing vs. intuitive; visual vs. verbal; and, sequential vs. global. A typically learner would fall somewhere on each of these planes. An active learner, for example, would want to work in a group more than a reflective learner, who would generally prefer to work individually. For me, it really depends on the materials or topic what type of education I prefer.

Similar to how we compartmentalize people with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), I believe we can utilize a similar model to understand the aspects of learning styles. By breaking down each dimension, we could create quadratic categorizations with brief descriptions on an activity that would best operationalize the specific learner. So, I tried to do this. That is, I sought to produce 16 different activities, each geared toward a specific Felder-Silverman learning style. As a caveat, I had to rename “sensing” to “direct” and “verbal” to “words” in order to come up with the included guide. Here is my view on this topic: EHR Training FSLMS