A good lesson plan or eLearning storyboard may look linear – with one starting point and one ending point – but between the start and finish are a lot of layers. You may see an activity on your lesson plan or storyboard, but what’s beneath that activity? Is the activity built upon a solid foundation of adult learning? Is the activity directly connected to your learning outcomes?
In today’s podcast, I spend a few minutes talking about those layers and diving into the various categories of layers – or elements – that can go into a learning program to make it more engaging, effective and successful.
Introduction
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Train Like You Listen, which is a weekly podcast about all things learning and development in bite-sized chunks. I’m Brian Washburn, I am your host. I’m also the Co-founder of an organization called Endurance Learning. And today it’s just me – no guests. Our podcast is going to take a look at the different layers that go into creating an effective training program. It’s not enough to just keep adult learning principles in mind. It’s not enough to know the technical ins and outs of using things like triggers and variables in a branching eLearning scenario. But we’ll get to that in just a minute or so.
The first thing I do need to do is to share with you that today’s podcast is brought to you by Soapbox, which is an online tool that you can use for 5 or 10 minutes, and you can take care of about 50 or 60% of the work when it comes to developing a live, instructor-led training. So basically you go in, you tell the computer how long your presentation is, how many people are going to attend, is it in-person or virtual? What are your learning objectives? And then Soapbox will instantly generate a training plan for you. That training plan will have clusters of training activities. If you don’t like one of the activities, you can swap it out for another – there’s about 200 different training activities in Soapbox’s library. If you like the activity, you just enter your own talking points for your content. And think about what you could be doing if Soapbox saved you four hours of development time on your next training session. At $29 a month, it might be worth it to save yourself a few hours of work on every training session that you create. If you want, you can go ahead and try it out for free for two weeks by visiting www.soapboxify.com.
The Elements of Training and Instructional Design
Okay. Let’s get back into this idea of different layers that go into a training program. Today’s podcast, it really does stem from a book that I wrote called What’s Your Formula? Combine Learning Elements for Impactful Training. And the book itself uses the metaphor of a periodic table of learning elements to introduce various concepts of training and instructional design. If you wanna check it out, or if you wanna check out the periodic table that I’m talking about here and see the 51 elements that are outlined in the book, you can find an interactive periodic table of elements online – it’s totally free – if you go to www.51elementsoflearning.com. That’s the number 51 and then the words “elements of learning .com”.
The Layered Structure of Training Programs
When I was first designing this periodic table, I was simply brainstorming different aspects or different elements of engaging training design. And then the thing that really began to dawn on me was that a lesson plan may be linear or a storyboard, if you’re creating eLearning, may be linear, a training agenda may be linear, or a facilitator guide may be linear. They all have a starting point, and you walk through it until the ending point. But effective and engaging training has a lot of layers of things that kind of happen all at once, and they kind of happen one on top of the other.
- It’s one thing to have an engaging activity that gets everyone involved, but is it designed to meet your learning objectives and outcomes?
- Is your entire lesson plan or your entire storyboard rooted in a foundation of adult learning principles?
- Do you have a vision for how the learning will live on after the training session or after the eLearning module has been completed?
All of that stuff happens at once. These were all questions that needed to be answered, and they helped me organize a hodgepodge of learning design elements into five different categories. And I’m gonna talk about those really quickly here.
The 5 Groups of Training Elements
The “Gas-Like” Learning Elements
So what are those layers or groups of training elements? When you look at the periodic table of elements of amazing learning experiences, you’ll see that the elements are color coded into five different categories. So the first one, the gas-like elements, it may be the most fundamental. These elements – there are things like adult learning principles, gamification, change management – these are theories and principles that are generally rooted in research and years of observations that are foundational to effective learning experiences. And just like oxygen, so a gas, these elements are often invisible, but also like that gas oxygen, if these gas-like elements were suddenly sucked out of the room, you’d notice it really, really quickly. These elements really do make up the foundational layer upon which the rest of a training program can be built.
The “Liquid” Learning Elements
Next in the periodic table are liquid elements. These are practices that, like liquids, they take the shape of the vessel into which they’re poured. In this case, the vessel is generally the organization, sometimes it’s a team within the organization. These liquid elements – there are things like supervisor support or assessment or follow up. They may look different in different organizations or even in different teams across an organization. So if a team or an organization finds a good way to use these practices, that team or that organization, they may wanna freeze these practices in place so they’re repeatable. Or if the team finds that these practices are getting to be a little stale, they can always melt them down and reimagine them.
The “Solid” Learning Elements
Another group of elements are solid elements, which are training tools, basically. And they can either be digital tools like quizzing or polling software or things like rapid authoring tools. They can also be physical, like lesson plans or flip-chart markers.
The “Radioactive” Learning Elements
A fourth set of elements is known as radioactive elements. These elements, they can be extremely powerful, but if they’re used incorrectly, they can blow up or they can lead your participants to have a meltdown. These are things like lecture or PowerPoint or icebreakers or eLearning.
The “Interactive” Learning Elements
And then the final group of elements is known as interactive elements. These are digital or social media tools that can be used to get in touch with and engage the participants before, during, or even after a training experience.
Combining the Elements of a Training Program
So in sum, a training program is multi-layered. It is the tools that you use, the theory upon which you’re building, the activities that you’re designing. Are you using them in the right way? The good news and the bad news is that, like the title of my book What’s Your Formula? There is no one formula that’s going to prove effective and successful every time for every situation. It’s a question, the title of the book is a question: What’s YOUR Formula? The fun part is finding elements, experimenting with those elements that are going to work for you as a training designer and for your learners.
Thank you so much for listening. This was just a little bit of a taste of the idea that there are different layers that need to go into a training program. If you want to make sure that you are notified each time there is a new podcast, all things learning and development in bite-sized chunks, when it’s hot off the press, go ahead and subscribe at Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Even better would be if you were to give us a review, to give us a like. It’ll just take you a minute, but it’s how other people find out about the podcast. If you’re interested in learning more about these different elements, you can go ahead and pick up a copy of What’s Your Formula? Combine Learning Elements for Impactful Training at www.amazon.com. Just go ahead and search for Brian Washburn. Until next time, happy training everyone.
This week’s podcast is sponsored by Soapbox. Sign up today for a free demo below.
