Instructional Design Tips

Today's Substack follows on from Tom's comments on last week's ID update with Heidi Kirby, PhD on whether or not AI adoption is a challenge or a categorisation error.

Today's long read Substack article is live! This is the third instalment in our Sunday series on user experience design for learning and development, and this time we're digging into the learner journey map, looking at the emotional peaks and troughs across the various phases of our training programmes. Check out the article on Substack and then let us know what you think down in the comments. Is this something you could use? If so, how might you go about applying it in your next project? 

Every conference talk you've attended has given you at least one phrase you've repeated without its full context. "Happy sheets are useless." "I don't care about completion rates." "Forget strategy; here's what you can do tomorrow." Rhetorical devices land well on stage, but when they travel without the forty-five minutes of nuance that surrounded them transform into bad advice. Speakers owe audiences more than punchlines. And audiences owe speakers more than passive absorption. Today's Substack article explores what I'm calling the soundbite contract: the mutual obligation between the person on stage and the person in the seat. What speakers should be doing to signal the limits of their own one-liners, and what audiences should be bringing to the table before they try to apply what they've heard. It came out of a conversation with Ross Garner and Claire Ford Gibson for the Mindtools Kineo podcast. Thanks to both of you for a great conversation and helping me shape my thoughts on this. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/efB2vC5G What's the most common conference soundbite you've heard repeated as though it were an absolute rule, when the original point was far more nuanced than that? #LearningAndDevelopment #Community #Communication #CPD

Today's Substack, written by Tom McDowall, explores the inherently exclusionary nature of culture and community. The article also explores why this is a good thing when we are sufficiently aware of it. Check out the full article over on Substack! 🔗 https://lnkd.in/enXnCc6Q If you enjoy the instructional design tips Substack, consider becoming a paid member for just £35 a year. Paid members receive an additional fortnightly omnibus edition of the newsletter containing five to six exclusive articles. #LearningAndDevelopment #Community #Culture

If your L&D team is spending meaningful time optimising its Net Promoter Score, what problem you're actually trying to solve? NPS was designed for competitive consumer markets, where recommending something costs the recommender their credibility. Applied internally, the question collapses into "do you like us?" That's not the same as "are we improving performance?" What you measure shapes what you optimise for. There's a teacher most of us remember whose lessons were enjoyable, whose feedback was glowing, and from whose class we retained very little. The approval rating was measuring the experience, not the effectiveness. Conflating the two is an error L&D teams can't afford to make. Being well-regarded is a pleasant by-product of doing the job well. It isn't the job. Today's article explores this in more detail. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eMtZqMfa Does your team have a primary success metric, and if so, how directly does it connect to performance outcomes rather than perception? #LearningAndDevelopment #PerformanceImprovement #LDStrategy #EvidenceInformed #Measurement

In-room feedback after a session is almost always warm, generous, and almost entirely useless as a tool for improving your practice, and that's not the audience's fault; it's simply that they can't tell you what they didn't know they were missing. Today's Substack article reflects on two sessions I delivered last week, one at the Podcast Learning Festival and one at The Learning Network's Data and Metrics Mastery Day, and what the post-event debrief with myself revealed. There are also nine reflection questions at the end, covering delivery, technical execution, and content effectiveness, that you're welcome to steal for your own post-session process. 🔗 Link in the comments. What does your reflection process look like after you've delivered a session? Do you have a structured approach, or does it tend to be more instinctive?

"We're concerned this will go over the heads of most of our employees..." This and other phrases showing a total lack of trust of the workforce kill our ability to design effective training interventions. When we start from the assumption that the workforce cannot be trusted to take a leading role in its own development, we do ourselves to tightly enforced mandatory training and often hold back people who would be performance exemplars, given half the chance. In today's Substack Tom McDowall takes a look at the importance of trusting the workforce when designing training interventions. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eGv4d2Am Check out the short article and let us know what you think down in the comments. #LearningAndDevelopment #InstructionalDesign #HR #TalentManagement #Culture

Today's sub stack article explores goal orientation theory. What it is, where it comes from, and how it informs our work in learning and development. Check out the full article and let me know what you think down in the comments. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/egc9VhGh #LearningAndDevelopment #InstructionalDesign #LearningScience

What development offering do you have for a 60-year-old employee who will be working for another 20 years? Are you, your L&D, and HR functions ready to take on what could be the greatest challenge to talent mobility we've ever seen? Last week, Professor Sarah Harper delivered an exceptional opening keynote at the World of Learning Conference in London. In it, she presented us with some significant challenges around the topic of the ageing workforce. In today's Substack, I've shared some of my initial thoughts and the questions I'm still thinking about. Let me know in the comments what you think of the article and, of course, what you're doing in your organisation to prepare for the significant changes in employee tenure and the potential opportunities for improved performance, increased talent mobility, and greater AI adoption. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eEVv26EV #LearningAndDevelopment #TalentManagement #WorkforcePlanning #Mentoring #WOL26