ATD International Conference & Exposition

ATD International Conference & Exposition

Workbook Guide

2017 International Conference & Exposition

May 20, 2017

Atlanta, GA

Talent Development in the Digital AgeDesigning Learning Environments

Workshop Number 9

Catherine Lombardozzi, Ed.D.

Consultant and Founder

Learning 4 Learning Professionals

302-994-0451

Talent Development in the Digital AgeDesigning Learning Environments

Greetings!

In the modern age, talent development professionals are being urged to limit the creation of formal training events and to instead take advantage of emerging tools and technologies as well as abundant internet-accessible resources to support ever-changing learning needs. Modern learners, we are told, want little to do with course-based solutions and instead plan to rely on curated resources, social learning, and on-the-job learning to develop needed knowledge and skills.

At the same time, many learning strategists have observed that giving people access to the internet doesn’t fully help them to cope with their constant need for learning, and employees are not all as capable of managing their own learning as we might like. Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown suggest in their book, A New Culture of Learning, “the challenge is to find a way to marry structure and freedom to create something altogether new.”

Learning Environment Design is, in my view, “something altogether new” – one of the ways that we can actively support learning in the digital age. I welcome you to this workshop, where we will talk about L&D’s new role as learning strategists who fulfill our commitment to supporting people who are developing knowledge and skills in a challenging work environment by curating resources and supporting engagement.

Welcome!

Links and resources for this workshop can be found at

Table of contents

2
3
4
5
6-10
11-13
14-15 / Framework
Components
Strategies
Process
Learning Environment Design Challenge
Social Learning Success Factors
Self-Directed Learning Support Strategies

Learning Environment Design | Framework

Learning environment design is a practical approach to supporting learning in the digital age. It provides a strategy for aligning many ways that people learn – informal, formal, social, developmental, and experiential – to address specific knowledge- and skill-building needs. It allows for the flexible, do-it-yourself learning that many people appreciate while setting out useful recommendations as to the resources that are most relevant and engaging for the development need at hand.

A learning environment is a deliberately curated collection of resources and activities to support the development of a specific knowledge base or skill set.

The resources that might be curated for a particular need go beyond internet links. Talent development professionals could also out company-specific resources, “go-to” people, industry experts to follow, available workshops or courses, books, equipment, department-based learning activities, and more – all kinds of materials and activities that are specifically relevant to developing a particular knowledge base or skill in a given organization’s context. If learning strategists can achieve that – provide rich resources that are specifically relevant to developing a particular knowledge base or skill in a givencontext – they add tremendous value and enable the kind of just-in-time learning that modern organizations demand.

A learning environment strategy supports the performer capability element of an overall performance environment. Resources that are useful for learning are also often useful for performance support, and there is a great bit of overlap between a performance environment and a learning environment as will be described here. Still, there are aspects of learning that are best approached outside of the performance environment so that learners have the time and interaction they need to learn more deeply and process their learning for action.

This workshop is designed to walk you through the learning environment design process for a specific project of your choosing. Along the way, we’ll be discussing several important practices and concepts – curation, social learning, and self-directed learning – all of which play an important role in the success of a learning environment strategy.

All materials in this workbook are based on Learning Environments by Design (Catherine Lombardozzi, 2015) and additional research and writing since the publication of the book.

Learning Environment Design | Components

A learning environment is a
deliberately curated collection of resources and activities
to support the development of a specific knowledge base or skill set..

Learning Environment Components
/ Resources /

• Performance support
• Personal knowledge management
• RSS feeds and other filtered information feeds
• Shared documents and wiki spaces
• Online databases and knowledge management systems
• Books, articles, internet resources
• Job aids
• Podcasts, video-casts
• Briefings (communication; content delivery without activities)
• Procedure manuals and technical manuals
• Tools to support learner content sharing

/ People /

• Peer support systems
• Social media connections (blogs, microblogs, social bookmarking, etc.)
• Group forums or discussion boards
• Expert directories
• Communities of practice
• Mentor relationships and developmental networks
• Coaching
• Professional networks (live and online), e.g. professional organizations, user groups
• Conferences and professional meetings
• Tools to support interaction

/ Training
and Education /

• Courseware and seminars, internal or external, in any delivery format
• Formal coaching after training
• On-the-job training
• Academic courses and degree programs; MOOCs (massive open online courses)
• Certificate, certification, and licensing programs
• Follow up activities and exercises designed to support learning and application (e.g. enrichment activities, reflection activities)
• Tools to support delivery of engaging learning activities

/ Development Practices /

• Action learning programs
• Stretch assignment management
• Rotation and other experiential learning programs based in workplace activities
• After action review practices
• Supervisor support, feedback and coaching
• Communication activities to influence learning readiness and application
• Career coaching and development

/ Experiential Learning Practices /

• Learning by doing
• Engaging in critical reflection
• Experimenting
• Collaborating
• Self-monitoring and analysis of outcomes and feedback
• Creating personal notes, job aids
• Teaching and creating resources for others

/ Learner Motivation and Self-Direction /

• Desire to learn
• Belief in link between learning and performance
• Confidence in ability to learn
• Self-directedness

Learning Environment Design | Strategies

A learning environment strategy is useful when knowledge and skill development can’t be neatly addressed with a singular instructional approach. Here are some of the scenarios that lend themselves to broader learning environment supports.

Blended Learning Hub / Knowledge
Exchange / Learning Resource Portal / Collaboratory
Layer additional resources around a formal learning event / Provide a way for people to access and exchange
ideas related to
a body of knowledge
and procedural skills / Recommend vetted, relevant resources on a topic or skill set / Provide space for collaboration,
knowledge creation,
and advancement
of practice
Potential Purpose:

• Provide ongoing support for developing routine skills
• Support application (performance)

/ Potential Purpose:

• Support exchange of explicit knowledge
• Capture and spread new knowledge
• Provide database of information to quickly access as needed

• Nurture a community of practice

/ Potential Purpose:

• Improve learning efficiency; guide to most useful resources
• Support building of deep knowledge base or skills

• Improve craftsmanship

/ Potential Purpose:

• Share and develop knowledge
• Rapidly advance practice
• Provide support for solving problems

• Support exchange of tacit knowledge

Learning Environment Design | Process

Scope of Processes in Learning Environment Design
Envisioning Processes / Determining the need for a learning environment
Defining learning environment purpose and context
Getting to know the learners
Solidifying the topic and scope
Crafting a blueprint
Finding
Processes / Gathering current resources
Researching additional resources
Encouraging learners to contribute
Curating
Processes / Filtering
Categorizing and tagging
Adding value by contextualizing and highlighting
Making connections and generating discussion
Assembling Processes / Determining how learners will access the environment
Incorporating learner-friendly functionality
Envisioning the look and feel
Opening the gates
Cultivating Processes / Establishing leadership for the environment
Expanding and improving the environment over time
Building a learning community
Pruning and keeping the environment fresh
Evaluating a learning environment

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Learning Environment Design Challenge

Learning Environment Design Challenge

As we go through our workshop, I invite you to try your hand at drafting a learning environment so that you can test out these ideas. You solidify your learning by applying it in a real situation, you’ll have the added advantage of getting suggestions and feedback from others.

The project can be on a topic related to something that you are doing in the context of your work, something you yourself are learning, or something that holds interest to you such as a social organization, a cause, or a hobby. The project will require an identifiable set of learners, a learning need, and a reasonably scoped topic. As well, you want to be confident that there is likely an array of resources for learning about the topic (inside or outside your organization, or both).

Options

If you don’t have a real project that you wish to work, then you can make one up. Here are some suggested scenarios that might be appropriate for a learning environment strategy:

• Imagine your local ATD chapter wants to band together to provide members with a learning environment about emerging technologies. The aim would be to provide information and room for discussion around new and popular learning technologies and apps.
• Imagine your organization wants to support mentorship by giving people resources about the roles, responsibilities, and skills needed to be an effective mentor, and to successfully benefit from being a mentee.
• Imagine your organization is about to offer Adobe Connect as a meeting tool of choice (or use another familiar technology as your imagined tool). You want to provide technical information and how-toson its functionality as well as resources on good meeting presentation and training practices using the capabilities of Adobe Connect. You also want people to be able to share ideas and get help from peers when they are working on meeting plans.
  

Challenge I: Project Parameters

Project.Describe your project briefly, including purpose and background highlights.

Learners. Describe your learners. Share any relevant characteristics (number, geographic dispersion, job role(s), degree of tech savvy, etc.).

Topic and Scope. Name the knowledge area or skill that will be developed by using the materials and activities in the site.

Context. Describe the context in which your learners will apply their learning – the job tasks they need to accomplish using the knowledge and skill being developed and note relevant aspects of the work environment (e.g. access to computers, space considerations).

ChallengeII: Curation Working Session

Use your computer for this challenge, and tag and organize potential components using your favorite tools.

Find. Brainstorm and search for possible components across all categories of the Learning Environment Component chart (found on page 3).

Filter and Curate. Evaluate the quality of the components on your list and curate the most useful for inclusion on your learning environment.For the purposes of this exercise, try to have between two and twenty items in each category of the learning environment framework (resources, people, formal training and education, development practices, and experiential learning practices). The Resources category frequently contains many more items. The People category may also be quite a long list if you have a topic with an active social media community. If it makes sense, feel free to re-categorize components in a scheme that makes more sense for your project.

Challenge III: Notes on Assembling

Use this space to make notes about assembling your learning environment. Note characteristics of interest from our workshop discussions. Capture thoughts about tools you may want to use. Start a list of categories for organizing your learning environment.

Challenge IV: Notes on Cultivation

Make notes about your cultivation plan here. Some questions for consideration:

• Who will be the leader of the environment, and what exactly will leadership’s responsibility be? (Could be more than one person.)
• How will you facilitate keeping the environment active and fresh by adding new recommendations and pruning out the outdated ones?
• How might you facilitate learner interaction and build a learning community? (Review success factors and recommendations on social learning, pages 11-13.)
• In what ways will you need to scaffold readiness, and how might you do that? (Review the readiness factors and recommendations regarding scaffolding self-directed learning, pages 14-15.)
• How do you plan to monitor and evaluate the success of your learning environment strategy? How will you determine if the environment is achieving its purpose?

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Social Learning Success Factors

Social Learning Success FactorsRecommended strategies for promoting social learning

The benefits of social learning are quite well known, and learning professionals are often called on to support social learning in their organizations. In most instances, it wouldn’t be advisable to requirepeople to engage with one another in specific ways, but there are activities that learning leaders can initiate to encourage and support productive interactions. The idea is to form a partnership with those who need support to advance social learning.

Five factors provide a fertile environment for social learning:

• Intention – the degree to which the organization and the people whose learning you want to support have identified learning and performance goals
• Individual propensity and skill – the extent to which people have the interpersonal and technical skills to engage effectively in social learning, and the motivation to do so.
• Relationship strength – the extent of positive relationship dynamics among the people who are engaging in social learning.
• Activity match – the degree to which the activities being encouraged and enabled are in alignment with people’s needs, and the degree to which people are engaging effectively with those activities.
• Tool functionality and accessibility – the appropriateness, availability, and ease of use of the tools being offered.

These factors and support recommendations are based on decades of research on social learning, and you can find more information about the research on which this framework is founded at L4LP.com/social-learning.

Recommended Strategies for Promoting Social Learning

The following pages provide specific recommendations for actions that learning and development professionals can take to encourage and support the kinds of rich interactions that help people to learn. Learning professionals can fill in details for these actions based on their own situations and organizational culture.

To use this job aid, consider a particular group of people with whom you want to partner and their specific learning and development needs. With that in mind, consider the five factors and determine the degree to which the elements listed in the left column are present. Where the elements may be weak, the right column provides suggestions on what learning leaders can do to promote social learning in collaboration with the group itself.

Intention
To strengthen these elements
Business goal
or initiative / Engage with potential sponsors and champions
Communicate alignment between business goals and individual goals and values
Learning and Performance Goals / Find pockets of real need for performance support
Offer help to people who have already identified a need for themselves
Desired Learning Interactions / Encourage specific kinds of learning interactions
Design learning environment for specific learning and teaching activities
Individual Propensity and Skills
To strengthen these characteristics
Motivation / Define purpose of social learning in consideration of people’s needs and values
Develop marketing campaign for social learning activities
Social Savvy / Invite exemplars to engage
Make introductions among learners
Interpersonal
Skill / Model the needed skills
Provide development resources for needed skills
Time / Value outcomes
Allow dedicated time for learning
Relationship Strength
To strengthen these characteristics
Rapport / Provide robust member profiles
Encourage photographs and videos
Highlight member backgrounds and tell positive stories about them
Actively introduce new members
Trust / Attribute postings
Encourage working out loud
Role
Engagement / Assign roles (e.g. sponsor, contributor)
Name community manager and ambassadors
Connect people actively
Describe roles and responsibilities (e.g. mentor, subject matter expert)
Compatibility
or Appeal / Invite external perspectives
Highlight experts and connectors
Grow and diversify the community
Culture / Encourage leadership engagement
Minimize competition among learners
Recognize contributions
Moderate issues
Activity Match
To increase engagement with these activities
Socializing / Establish welcome rituals
Encourage conversation with compelling content and discussions
Storytelling / Post articles or videos about specific projects and people
Encourage sharing of success stories, fumbles and lessons learned
Information Exchange / Pre-seed content areas with valuable documents and links
Strategically curate content to keep it fresh
Run barn-raising events to rapidly build learning assets
Encourage working out loud
Invite blogging as a way of sharing information
Recommend posting of resources that are shared among individuals
Post project documentation
Encourage networking and cross-team interactions
Recognize contributions
Q&A / Ensure timely responses
Invite guest experts
Assign people to answer questions
Highlight questions of the week
Mentoring and coaching / Assign roles
Recognize efforts
Allot time
Group Inquiry
(Co-Learning) / Plan learning activities
Run book club or article discussions
Engage active conversation via Twitter, chat, or discussion forums
Devise micro learning events
Joint Effort and Collaboration / Assign projects to people with varying skills
Encourage working out loud
Enable communication and virtual meeting tools
Enable collaboration tools
Tool Features and Accessibility
To increase productive use of these tools
Document repository
Posting tools
Collaboration tools
Chat tools
Discussion boards
Virtual meeting tools / Enable appropriate tools
Use tools that people already use if possible
Make tools easily accessible in the workflow
Improve findability with categorization and tagging
Allow people to create new spaces and forums
Provide how-to directions and tipsheets
Troubleshoot issues / 
Work environment / Encourage conversation
Provide a variety of meeting space configurations (groups, one-on-one)
Design flexibility for reconfiguration
Design spaces for serendipitous encounters

Authored by Catherine Lombardozzi, Learning 4 Learning Professionals
Scaffolding Peer-to-Peer Learning in the Learning and Performance Ecosystem, Learning Ecosystems Conference 2017
/social-learning