Category: How to study

How would you go about becoming an expert at designing online learning?

I read a tweet this morning that asked; if you could be in the 1% of experts for any skill, what would that be? I have been building my skills in the design of online learning for several years, so it got me thinking about what expertise looks like in my field. I wrote the following question at the top of a page and started to make a list. 

How would you go about becoming an expert at designing online learning? 

Here are my steps to developing expertise in the design of online and blended learning courses. If you have questions or what to add to the list, message me on Twitter.

  1. Follow a documented set of learning and design principles
  2. Develop a model for estimating effort and costs
  3. Follow a repeatable development process
  4. Know the fundamentals of project management and follow them religiously
  5. Treat the course creator like the hero of the story, support them and collaborate.
  6. Have a Quality Assurance process linked to the design principles
  7. Set clear expectations for students, create metrics to monitor against these, and have interventions in place when they are not met.
  8. Collect and analyse lots of data and user feedback
  9. Iterate, iterate, iterate
  10. Frequently update your learning and design principles, costing model, and development process

Notes: Firstly, I have explicitly focused on the design of courses and separated this from the very different development and delivery skills. Secondly, I have taken some liberties by putting all the learning and design principles into a single step. These two areas are vast and cover everything from accessibility and user experience to psychology and learning and teaching models. Thirdly, within the third step of following the development process, I currently prefer to use the rapid prototyping model that follows the Design thinking steps, including the creation of student personas, and UCL’s ABC workshop for mapping out the course. Finally, this is the first attempt at a list, and I might wake up tomorrow and realise I have missed a whole section of the field and need to update this list. If you are in the area already or are interested in developing your expertise, then I hope this list is useful.

If you have questions or want to add to the list, message me on Twitter. I would love to see other peoples lists for building expertise in the design of online courses too.

Solving problems with the double diamond design process model

Traditional project management starts with a brief, and you go through several steps to get to a solution. In the Double Diamond, this is called the design phase and involves a period of divergence followed by convergence. The divergence and convergence process is done twice, first to go from problem to design brief, and second to go from the brief to the solution.

Divergence and convergence

The most crucial concept in solving any problem is to have multiple ideas and then chose the best. Before committing to a solution to develop, you need first to think up and test multiple ideas to find the best one.

Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions.

Wikipedia

Convergent thinking is the type of thinking that focuses on coming up with the single, well-established answer to a problem.

Wikipedia

You will have done this process of divergent then convergent thinking in school many times. First, you brainstorming as many ideas as possible, not worrying about the quality of what you are writing, then you choose the ones that sound the most suitable and investigate them further. Finally, you select one single idea that performs best in your tests. This process was to train you on how to think about a problem and come to a solution.

Designing things right and designing the right things

Designing things right requires a design process where the problem definition is used to develop, test, and deliver a solution. You collate many potential solutions by generating ideas and then trying them. You can then deliver solutions that work to users and listen to their feedback to refine your solution further. 

The best designers spend time designing the right thing first by researching the problem to create a problem definition or design brief. You need to gain insights into the challenge through exhaustive research and then scope down the focus by exploring this research to come to a clear definition.

The Double Diamond design process model

The British Design Council published the double diamond as a visual representation of the design and innovation process in 2004, adapting it from similar iterative models used by IDEO and the divergence-convergence model. The aim was to produce a simple way to share a strategic approach to a design and innovation project. The Double Diamond was published alongside the Methods Bank resource to define the British Design Council’s innovation process.

The double diamond collects divergent and convergent thinking ideas and design principles and the Methods bank to create an innovation process that you can use in any field.

The design process has four stages:

  • Discover – question the problem and research to identify users needs
  • Define – make sense of the discovery phase findings to create a design brief
  • Develop – develop, test, and refine multiple potential solutions
  • Deliver – Select and prepare a final solution for launch

Design principles:

  • Be people-centred
  • Communicate visually and inclusively
  • Collaborate and co-create
  • Iterate, iterate, iterate

Methods bank

  • Explore: challenges, need, and opportunities
  • Shape: prototypes insights and visions
  • Build: ideas, plans, and expertise 

Learn more on the Design Council’s website.

I have blogged every day for 100 days; this is what I’m learning

I started my daily blog after reading Attempts by Dan John and listening to a podcast with Seth Godin about this new book, The Process. I have always loved the idea of being an essayist, developing ideas about things, being informed, coming to my conclusions on something I feel is important, and sharing them with anyone that might find value in it. I had also just finished Percy Cerutty’s biography, written primarily using Cerutty’s writings, found in his study after he died. There seems to be a connection between great thinkers and a habit of writing. Dan John and Seth Godin’s books kicked me into committing to this practise of daily writing.  

If you know you have to write a blog post tomorrow, something in writing, something that will be around six months from now, about something in the world, you will start looking for something in the world to write about. You will seek to notice something interesting and to say something creative about it. Well, isn’t that all we’re looking for? The best practice of generously sharing what you notice about the world is exactly the antidote for your fear.

Seth Godin

Like many people, I consume a lot of content:

  • I read The Economist weekly paper
  • I get at least one audiobook a month with a subscription to Audible 
  • I read books on Kindle 
  • I view the Kindle and Audible daily deals and pick up more books than I can read
  • I watch a little too much YouTube
  • I always have an online course on the go

I wasted a lot of this content, doing little or nothing with the ideas I found. I relied on my memory to trigger some relevant reading when I wanted to discuss things or solve a problem at work. Regular writing solves this issue; the stuff I write pulls together the things I am reading and my thoughts. Each post is filed away to be searched when needed and used, and the active recall in writing aids in assimilating the ideas into what I already know.

My daily blogging goals are to develop beautiful writing, build a habit for delivering that writing every day, and improve my thinking, mainly related to my work, by putting it out into the world.  

What I did not realise is that people would read it. Today I have one hundred and seven people on my email subscription list and get around twenty unique views per day. WordPress.com’s reader is the main place I get new traffic from via the keywords I add before publishing. I also use the WordPress Twitter integration to tweet links to each post and add two relevant hashtags to help people find the tweet.

I use Grammarly as my word processor to improve my writing. My spelling at school was terrible, and that psychologically stopped me from learning to write well. Using Grammarly premium for the last few years, initially to check my papers at work, and then later for everything I write on my laptop has fixed this. I am still really self-conscious about my writing ability, but the app gives me the confidence I need to communicate my ideas, and the continued use has significantly improved my work. 

My Process

  1. Read a lot to find trigger material
  2. Use the dictionary, Wikipedia and other sources to learn more
  3. Collect my research in Readwise through Instapaper and Adobe Acrobat Online 
  4. Draft an outline in Grammarly
  5. Go back to the source material to filling gaps and details
  6. Copy into WordPress.com and format
  7. Publish with keywords and share via Twitter using two hashtags

Seth Godin suggests committing to 200 days of writing every day to develop the practice as a habit. I have learned a lot, and I am only halfway through. Each post takes me between an hour and two hours in the evening to generate around 500-700 words. For the next 50 days or so, I will start adding some audio recordings of some of my posts and then move to video for my most-read posts in the final 50 days. 

If you like my blog, get in touch with me on Twitter.

The Feynman Technique

Professor Amos Wizrum taught me that teaching someone is the key to deep learning. When learning something new, rather than taking direct notes; read a chapter, close the book, then write a summary from memory. You can return to the text after you finish to pick out the bits you missed. The famous Physicist Richard Feynman had a similar idea.

The Feynman technique

  1. Get out a blank piece of paper 
  2. Write a concept at the top of the page
  3. Start writing
  4. Fill in the gaps
  5. Simplify the language
  6. Add an analogy

Deep learning should be hard. We learn by repeated recall, by continual testing, not by repeated exposure. The Feynman technique is a method that uses this idea to help you understand better.

Active recall

By first putting down what you know and remember about a topic you are practising active recall and helping your brain remember the concept in future. Write this as if you were explaining it to someone else that does not understand it at all. After you have everything you can remember out of your head, go back and review what you are not sure about from your notes, through a web search, or in a book, and add to your page. Revisiting source material will fill in the gaps in your knowledge and provide feedback on how accurately you remember the things you wrote down.  

Analogy: a comparison between one thing and another, typically for the purpose of explanation or clarification. 

Oxford Languages

Make it relatable

Once you have written down what you remember and added to this from other sources, simplify the language and have a go at adding an original analogy. As a child, Richard Feynman used to go for walks with his father and discuss anything Richard was curious about. To help Richard understand, his father would use analogies, for example, when describing how big a Tyrannosaurus rex was, Feynman’s father related it to the size of their home, saying if it were standing outside, his head would be tall enough to reach Richards bedroom window. By connecting challenging to understand things to those that his son would encounter each day, he could speed up Richards learning. 

Have a go with something you are trying to learn

Set yourself a time limit of 20-25 minutes, or a Pomodoro. Try to do this once per day; you could even turn it into a blog.

The UK Government support for jobs

The coronavirus is causing UK Unemployment to rise. According to the Office for National Statistics, over 800,000 employees left the payroll in the last twelve months, with a record number of redundancies and reduced vacancies. With the national lockdown continuing the picture is likely to get worse before it gets better. 

Even before the pandemic, the Department of Education has increased its focus on the 50% of people that did not go to university. In September 2020, the Prime Minister announced a significant expansion of education and training for workers to boost productivity, narrow the skills gap, and deliver some details on the promised support for ‘the other 50%. The Prime Minister’s announcement included a Lifetime Skills Guarantee and entitlement to flexible loans for micro-credentials style study.

Degree Apprenticeships have been the flagship scheme to ‘unleash talent’ for those who do not have high qualifications, but many additional services are available as part of the Governments approach. I have listed some of the currently available services to those who need a job or improve job security by upskilling. 

For people looking for work, the UK Government provides:

For people wanting to learn, the UK Government provides:

  •  The Traineeship website to get help and at least 70 hours of work experience to prepare for an apprenticeship or job
  • The Skills Toolkit with access to 70+ online short courses in digital, numeracy, and employability skills provided by educational experts and employers including Microsoft
  • The National Skills Fund is the first part of the Lifetime Skills Guarantee and is focused on adult level three qualifications
  • Skills Bootcamps lasting 12-16 weeks that build sector-specific skills to get people to interview ready
  • The local Jobcentre Plus pre-employment training, work experience placements, and guaranteed job interview.

For people that have lost their job:

  • The Job Entry Targeted support scheme provides six months of personalised support after the first three months of searching for a job
  • Work coaches match peoples skills to available jobs to help get them back into work
  • The Restart scheme from Summer 2021 to provide 12 months of personalised support for those out of work for over 12 months  

For people needing financial help due to coronavirus:

There is much more to be done, but there is now a direction of travel. The Apprenticeship levy and growth in work learning has been positive, but details of the future schemes are not yet clear. However, there is help for people who need it, and there are great jobs for people with the right skills and opportunities to develop these skills for those who want them.

My promise

If you are interested in working in Learning Design or Educational Technology and want to talk to someone for advice, please contact me on Twitter. There is a massive need for people to support the design and development of high-quality online courses, and I would love to give you an hour of my time on a call and help you on the journey from whatever starting point.

The road to El Dorado; the mountains and disposition

When asked why they are studying for a degree, most students answer that they want a good job, lots of money, financial security or something similar. When questioned further students usually have a deeper purpose, usually around making the world a better place through a job that reflects their interests; solving climate change, curing cancer, making people happy through music, looking after animals etc. Quite often, deciding what and where to study comes down to a mixture of these two things.

There are two ways to think about studying, the first is learning to do, and the second is learning to learn. Learning to do, commonly called ‘training’ provides skills to use the current technologies to complete set tasks. These skills are essential in getting a job and adding value quickly to the employer. However, learning to learn is the ability to think critically and adapt to new technologies and emerging problems. These skills are much more critical longer-term and in adding value to society over a career.

The mountains and disposition

My Introduction to Economics Professor at university, Amos Witztum, told a story on my first day of class. He compared the journey we were starting on, studying for a degree, to the search for El Dorado, the fabled city of gold. He said that you needed to learn how to walk and then train to walk long distances to prepare yourself. 

This training will help you be strong enough for the journey, but if you start climbing and all you know is to walk, you will not get very far. You need to raise your head and look around, and you need to learn how to navigate and route find. When you get to the top of the first mountain and see the next, much bigger, mountain, you need the strength to keep going. Learning to learn will help you find the city of gold at the end of the adventure. 

Discipline and motivation are dependent on your own expectations.

Amos Witztum

He ended with some advice. He said that you might be standing atop a mountain, scanning the horizon, along the way in your search for gold and see some new and undiscovered treasure. In your search for an assumed goal, you may find something more extraordinary and change your path. Keep your head up and don’t get too focused on the destination that you miss out on the treasure along the journey.

Have a big audacious goal but if on the journey you discover some other riches, seize the day. More importantly, in the absence of your own dream, don’t be worried about picking one that others see as worthy, and work on improving your ability to think and learn, and be ready to pivot when you discover your own path to greatness.

You can watch a version of the speech given by Professor Witztum on Youtube. It is a later year, so it is not exactly the talk that inspired me but worth fifty-three minutes and twenty-six minutes for the knowledge and wisdom. 

Economics is not a science, it is a language, and without it, you can’t be a part of the conversation.

Amos Witztum

The moving University; Learning on your commute

We have had snow here in Leicestershire, England. My wife has been using my car recently and asked me to drive her to and from work. It turns out that a 3-litre supercharged rear-wheel-drive car is not the easiest thing to navigate slippery roads. While driving home and then back again on my own, I got the chance to listen to an audiobook. 

I used to have a 40-minute commute that gave me 80-90 minutes five days per week. I don’t miss the commute, but I do miss this learning time. There is something about listening while driving particularly on regular routes when you are almost on autopilot. I still listen to audiobooks on the turbo trainer or while doing housework, but something about driving seems to help me retain the information. 

Audiobooks for myself and other listeners do not tend to replace reading but rather augments it. Nielsen Book and The Publishers Association suggest that audiobooks listeners tend to be those who do not read much such as 25-44-year-old urban-dwelling males or audio is used for convenience, and when print reading is impossible. Audiobooks, and podcasts, are an art in their own right and can be more engaging for reluctant, struggling, and developing readers as listening to a human voice provides a stronger emotional response.

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower.

Naval Ravikant

Research from the National Literacy Trust suggests that audiobooks benefit children’s reading skills and enjoyment by widening their access to books. Listening to the books performed, deepens their understanding of tone, pronunciation, accents, and dialect. Further studies on reading comprehension in adults found no statistically significant differences in comprehension and recall between audiobooks and text ebooks either immediately after reading or two weeks later. However, reading dead tree versions of books is has shown to be slightly better for understanding, but more research is needed to know why. This difference is possibly due to the visual cue of how far you are through a narrative not present with digital books, or that print words are located in a specific place on a page to help people remember it.

Learning with Audiobooks

  1. Listen at normal speed don’t speed it up to get through the book quicker, be selective in your reading, give you brain space to process the words, and enjoy the experiences. 
  2. Listen to selected parts such as the introduction and conclusion if the book is bloated, you don’t have to listen to the whole book.
  3. Use Audible across multiple devices – mobile, kindle, laptop app etc. and use the Wisperlight feature between an audiobook and kindle version.
  4. Make some notes or set a bookmark once it is safe. Write a book summary once you have finished. Recalling the ideas, and putting them down in a document helps you retain the information.
  5. Share what you learn and have a conversation about it to reflect on what you’ve learned. Playing with the ideas in different contexts helps you not just remember the information but better understand it.

Generating ideas with brainstorming

Brainstorming is the commonly used method to generate ideas. It is a group activity where the group’s collective thinking is used to come up with many ideas—booking a specific time allocated to brainstorming highlights to attendees that they have a defined period to generate ideas, and that the evaluation will come later. The technique first appeared in Alex Osborn’s 1942 book How to think up.

Ideation: the formation of ideas or concepts.

Oxford Languages

Brainstorming is a problem-solving process used to activate prior knowledge, develop possible theories or hypotheses, and identify things to research further. The session’s aim should be to construct a shared model to explain the problem and provide a clear direction for what to do next. Design Thinking, Design Sprints, and Problem-Based Learning (PBL) all make heavy use of brainstorming as a collaborative idea generation method. 

In PBL, once questions have been identified from the trigger material, the group brainstorms what they already know and identify potential solutions. The group then analyses and structures the brainstorming session’s output and uses missing knowledge to create learning objectives. Each group member then independently researches the objectives, and then they come back to discuss findings.

The Interaction Design Foundation rules for brainstorming

The Interaction Design Foundation has eight rules for running brainstorming sessions: 

  1. Set a time limit.
  2. Start with a question, a plan or a goal – and stay focused on the topic.
  3. Defer judgement or criticism, including non-verbal.
  4. Encourage weird, wacky and wild ideas.
  5. Aim for quantity.
  6. Build on each others’ ideas.
  7. Be visual.
  8. Allow one conversation at a time.

The key to generating new ideas is a challenging question or problem statement, get that right, and the rest is down to the people you get in the room. Have a single, specific problem statement that expresses a point of view or a question that challenges the groups’ assumptions. 

Do not let anyone evaluate any idea or answer as they are created. Coming up with ideas needs to be dynamic so shorter sessions of up to 60 minutes work best and force people to focus on new ideas rather than evaluating them. If you choose to go longer, never have more than 90 minutes without a break. 

Encourage as many crazy, wacky, and alternative ideas as possible; it is a quantity session, the quality will be developed from the ideas at a later session. Whiteboards with markers or post-it notes on a wall make it easy for people to follow and inspire more ideas, so prepare the room before you start. 

Switching between the two modes of individual and collective ideation sessions can be seamless—and highly productive. Alex Osborn’s 1950s classic Applied Imagination gave advice that is still relevant: Creativity comes from a blend of individual and collective ideation.

Interaction Design Foundation

Brain dumping – the brainstorm for individuals

Brainstorming is a group activity whereas the brain dump is its solo equivalent. By dumping all your ideas about something onto a page and out of your head, you open up mental space to more creative ideas.

You can use individual brain dumps and group brainstorming together for even better results and make sure everyone contributes. Getting each group member to do a brain dump at the start can help quiet group members contribute and free up everyone’s headspace for new ideas. You can use brain dumps after a brainstorming session to continue the conversation after the group session. Allocate five minutes at the start of the session for each member to write questions or ideas on paper or post-it notes and then share their thoughts, put these in a visible place and group together any duplicate ideas.

Try the better brainstorming technique

Hal Gregersen published a three-step method to better brainstorming sessions in the Harvard Business Review. The technique focuses on questions rather than answers to get group members excited about the challenge presented and avoids the negative traps present in many ideation sessions.

Step 1: Set the stage

Select a challenge you care deeply about and invite people that will see that challenge from fresh angles. Set our the problem in a maximum of 2 minutes, this will keep it high level and avoid constraining the questions with too much context.

Set two rules

  1. Questions only
  2. No preambles or justifications to questions

Step 2: Brainstorm the questions

Set a timer for 4 minutes and ask a group to generate as many questions as possible within this time. Aim for 15 questions in the 4 minutes to keep the pressure up and the focus on questions only. Once complete, check with the group about how they feel about the challenge, if needed, rerun the 4 minutes until the group is excited.

Step 3: Identify a quest – and commit to it

Study the questions and select a few interesting ones. Try to expand these questions with a set of follow-up questions related to them. Once the challenge is fully understood, and multiple approaches have emerged, commit to at least one pathway.

Let me know on Twitter if you give this a try. I will be doing a brain dump and then group brainstorm for my project 4W/KG in the coming week and will share the outcome.

Change through challenge: the university course in running a marathon

Bobby Maximus, a strength coach and author, says it takes 130 hours to build a base level of fitness. He developed this idea through training high-performance individuals to achieve impressive feats of strength and conditioning. In his book, The Maximus body, he provides two examples of how one hundred thirty hours can be completed; through one meaningful hour per day, five days per week for six months or over twelve weeks, two hours per day Monday to Friday and one hour on Saturday. The vital part is 130 meaningful hours of training, and some attention paid to quality nutrition and recovery. Budget your time, set your schedule, and do the work. 

A college business module learning to run a marathon

Andrew Johnston, a GRIT and Business faculty member at RRCC and marathon runner, developed a similar idea but with a different target audience. Johnston created Change through Challenge, a 22 Week course for students that had never run before, with a final exam of running the Arizona Rock n Roll marathon. With a classroom session, a group run, and three individual runs per week; the training commitment probably came close to 130 hours. 

In Johnson’s introduction to business class, his students asked local business owners for their keys to success; the most frequent answer was developing character and life-skills including a passion for work, work ethic, persistence, determination, and grit. According to Angela Duckworth, who wrote the book by the same name, grit is passion and perseverance for long-term and meaningful goals. As a keen distance runner, Johnston decided that his students’ best way to develop grit was to train for and then complete a Marathon, a challenge that, if you do not put in the necessary work and training, you are not going to finish. 

Starting a business is a big goal that often requires the creation of a detailed, written, and time-denominated business plan that breaks it down into small weekly tasks to achieve the goal… That’s identical to a marathon-training plan.

Andrew Johnston

Each of the 22 weeks has a Monday classroom seminar, a Saturday morning group trail run, and three runs per week that students do independently to achieve the weeks running goal. The Monday night seminar covers three elements; Diet, training, and the discipline of the week. The twenty-two disciplines include goal setting, the power of consistency, and dealing with setbacks. Each is then related to the students’ schoolwork, business, and life. The Premiss of the course; all the life-skills needed to succeed in education and business can be acquired and mastered through training for a marathon.

My Change through challenge module

These two examples of time-based courses have me thinking about my next challenge. Can I package a physical challenge into a module? In my work, we typically package modules into 200 hours of learning, and I like the idea of going beyond the base level that 130 hours suggests and achieving something more significant. As I will be teaching myself, it makes sense to make this a problem-based learning module where I start with an open-ended problem and work through a series of steps, with other people to solve it. As an endurance athlete, I will set myself a training target of at least 10 hours per week, giving me around 20 weeks to complete the challenge I set myself—more on this to come.

You can learn more about Change through challenge through Andrew Johnston’s Tedx talk. Let me know on Twitter if you want to start your 200-hour Change through challenge module, and we can all create a group.

If you build courses for a living, you should be taking courses for it too

I believe anyone working in online learning should be a serial student of online courses to master their craft. Obsessively taking classes gives a learning designer two powers; the first it allows them to understand how excellent and poor courses are put together, the second is they get empathy for the students that will take the courses they build. 

Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.

Bruce Lee

Knowing the learning theory, research, and technology is essential. Applying design principles will maximise the return of these three skillsets. Still, nothing will give you the sensitivity like being an online student.  

There are lots of great online courses that you can find for free that are doing some exciting things such as KhanAcademy.org, Brililiant.org, the Youtube creators academy, and the free sample modules of Quantic.edu. Udemy has some great courses that can be reasonably cheap if you catch them in the sale, and the Interaction design foundation courses are essentials for any aspiring learning designer.

Nothing is quite like a cohort-based course though, so budget to do at least one per year or get your work to pay for it. Learning in a cohort can be much more attractive as an experience than self-paced courses and more rewarding, and building an online community is an art form that takes time to learn. An MIT course on the Get Smarter platform was the last one I took. The short course can be bundled together with other MIT online courses to get a Postgraduate certificate from the world-class University. 

Get in touch on Twitter to let me know any good courses you have taken and what they have taught you about learning design.