Using Abbing’s brand model to develop a service offer

University leadership teams are currently planning what delivery will look like next academic year. A form of blended learning will likely be maintained even if social distancing rules are relaxed. Educational technology and academic development teams will need to restructure their services to provide academic departments with the support they need to transition from this year’s delivery model to a more sustainable and quality-driven model for the future. But what does that service offer look like and how can it be designed to provide freedom for academic teams to explore what this new future looks like?

Author/Copyright holder: erik roscam abbing. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Erik Roscam Abbing’s brand model could be used as a starting point for Edtech teams to create their new service blueprint. The starting point is to map out the team’s own identity, vision, mission, and behaviours. An understanding of the Capability Maturity Model can also input into the team’s desired brand. I have added below my current thoughts on the first phase for my team. If you have any questions or want to collaborate on ideas, get in contact with me on Twitter @samueljtanner. 

Team Identity

We have moved towards a Learning Design skill set in the team rather than the more traditional Learning Technologist. Each member of the group would consider themselves as a ‘techie’ and has an expertise that sits somewhere in the nexus of three core technical skills; Learning and teaching, multimedia and technology development, and design. Learning Designers operate as project managers, follow design thinking methodologies using personas and prototypes, and adopt a scholarly approach to quality assurance and continuous improvement practices.

Vision

We believe in the transformational nature of technology, and that learning and teaching can be made better when technology is used to design student centred experiences. Teachnology allowed learning and teaching to be:

  • Flexible: accessible to anyone that wants to learn, at whatever stage of life they are at, and whatever their context.
  • Personalised: designed to meet students individual goals and provide choice as these change.
  • Active and collaborative: engaging learning experiences that prepare students with the skills they need for the workplace, including problem-solving, teamwork, communication, and resilience. 
  • Redefined: using technology to create student experiences previously impossible with physical constraints.

Mission

By 2025, all students will have a flexible, personalised, and active and collaborative learning experience that uses technology to provide better learning outcomes.

Behaviour

We are: 

  • partnering with academic teams to co-design modules and courses
  • defining what quality looks like and how to get there sustainably 
  • sharing ideas of what is possible and what works
  • building an easy to use and seamlessly integrated technology ecosystem that provides the tools needed 

My ideas will be different from yours

The ideas here are just a brain dump around the direction I am taking my team, but I suggest using the same framework for your institution. Phase two will look at the identity, vision, mission, and behaviour of those teaching at university. My team is a service for academic departments to help them teach students, and so our customers are the lecturers. It is a time of disruption for the role of academics, and the answers to the questions in phase two will be very different now than six years ago when I moved from further education to the university sector. I have some research to do, but I imagine that brand promise will be something along the lines of… 

Brand promise: Your Learning Designer will help you design, develop, and deliver a flexible module quicker, easier, and provide a better student experience than if you had done it independently.

Design-driven companies perform better

The DMI Design Value Index measured design-focused publicly traded companies’ performance against the larger stock market. For a company to be counted as a design-led, it must meet six design management criteria:

  1. The organisation must be publicly traded in the US for 10+ years.
  2. The scale of the design organisation and deployment is an integrated function.
  3. Growth in design-related investments and influence have increased overtime.
  4. Design is embedded within the organisational structure.
  5. Design leadership is present at senior and divisional levels.
  6. There is a senior-level commitment to design’s use as an innovation resource and integrative force.

These criteria assessed whether design was a long term strategic priority, built into the organisation’s structure, and well resourced through hiring practices, facilities, and technologies. Qualifying companies needed a design-focused C-level executive and CEO and leadership team publicly recognising the importance of design in their work and publicity.

Simply put, design is a method of problem-solving. Whether it is an architectural blueprint, a brochure, the signage system at an airport, a chair, or a better way to streamline production on the factory floor – design helps solve a problem.

The Design Management Institute

The DMI, funded by Microsoft, identified fifteen companies that meet all six criteria, including Apple, IBM, Nike, Procter & Gamble, and Starbucks. Results showed that design-led companies outperformed the S&P 500 index by 228% over ten years.

Motiv and DMI developed eight ways in which a company could improve its performance through design:

  1. The Wow factor
  2. Brand expression
  3. Solving unmet user needs
  4. Develop better customer experiences
  5. Rethinking strategy
  6. Hardware/software/service integration
  7. Market expansion through persona development and user understanding
  8. Cost reduction

If you want to know more, view the DMI’s Design Value Index and it’s Design value system that makes use of the Capabilities Maturity Model.  

Goal setting for inspiration

I have been reading Sir Chris Hoy’s ‘How to ride a bike’ over the last few days. The book is an excellent training manual that I highly recommend it for any cyclist. Hoy starts with the basics, including choosing a bike and road safety but quickly moves to training details. As one of the most successful British athletes of all time, winning Eleven World Championships and six Olympic gold medals, some training methods, such as the clown bike where Hoy would do short high cadence intervals at 320+ rpm are not for the faint of heart. There is no referenced research on the methods to satisfy the more geeky time trialist, but it makes it an easier read and Hoy was at the cutting edge for most of his career, and at the hight of British Cycling’s rise, so the methods have provenance.  

Later in the book, Hoy writes about setting and managing goals. He suggests setting a massive goal that you would love to do, that is a bit beyond you, and is a little scary such as riding a tour du France mountain stage in l’Etape du Tour or targetting a national age-group title. You can then spend time analysing precisely what is needed to achieve the goal and compare them to where you are. You can then create a ‘recipe for success’ planning out exactly what you need to do in your training, recovery, nutrition, and equipment to bridge the gap. Finally, Hoy quotes advice given to him by Chis Boardman, if you are not excited when you read through the plan, then rip it up and start again. 

The big goal acts as a motivation to carry out each day’s plan and develop discipline in your training. Hoy suggests you close your eyes, imagine doing something that excites and gives you goosebumps, then write it down, plan out how you can get there an, and then do it. 

How to choose and manage your cycling goals

  1. Choose a big scary goal so large that you are almost embarrassed to tell people. 
  2. Research and map out each aspect of what it will take to achieve the goal, such as a required power to weight ratio and equipment needs.
  3. Map out where you are now against the requirements to identify what you need to do.
  4. Create a long term plan to bridge the gap between where you are now and where you need to be.
  5. Create a detailed plan for the next four weeks.
  6. Execute the plan flawlessly, ‘controlling the controllable.’
  7. Review at the end of the four weeks to assess if the plan achieved the intended outcomes.
  8. Repeat steps 7-7 until the big scary goal is complete. 

The Charles Poliquin carb test, Dave Brailsford, and what you really want from training

Chances are you eat too many carbs. I know I do. The late great Charles Poliquin had a test for males that want to be healthy; if you are above 10% body fat or can’t see each of your abs, you should be on a low carb diet. Most of the time, eating meat and vegetables, and using clean carbs to fuel and recover from intense training sessions. Once you are lean, you can then add more carbs, such as fruits.

Dave Brailsford, the mastermind behind the British Cycling and Team Sky’s takeover of cycling, did a recent interview talking about his current training. His recent riding focuses on maintaining muscle mass and strength and managing fat levels. He does this by eating low carb and high protein, restricting eating to between 11 am and 8 pm, and low intensity, high torque rides. The low-intensity rides and low carb intake aims to burn fat rather than glycogen for fuel. The low carb diet involves cutting out grains, bread, pasta, rice, and sugar.

At Team Sky and now Ineos, riders have adopted a carb cycling approach, eating low carb on low-intensity days and using carbs selectively pre and post high-intensity rides. The low carb days includes riding on coffee and protein or fully fasted for the first 1.5 to 2 hours of low to moderate intensity. Protein intake is kept at around the same level on both low and high carb days. Dr. Morton, the teams, published details of the approach in a research paper in which he sets the intensity level needing carbs as 85% of v02max.

A year ago, I bought some scales that measure weight, calculates BMI, and estimates your body fat based on a scan. I was 88kg and far above my health BMI of 25. My first target was to get below 83kg to be in the healthy BMI range. The next step was to deadlift 1.5x bodyweight and do ten strict pull-ups taken from the book Fat loss happens on Mondays. My focus then moved to become a faster distance runner.

With my current challenge of getting to a 4 Watts per kilo FTP in mind and reading the Dave Brailsford article has led me to think about what I want from my training. The easiest route would be to focus on losing weight rather than increasing power. If I lived in the mountains or were a competitive cyclist, this would make sense. If I am honest though, I want to be strong, powerful, and look good naked, so focusing on power makes more sense. 

Body composition goals

  • If you want a blunt starting point, aim to get your BMI into the healthy range.
  • If you can measure body fat, a better approach is to get under 13%.
  • If you don’t care about these measures, aim for 1.5x deadlift and ten strict pull-ups. The deadlifts will require you to be strong, and you will need to be lean for the pull-ups.

Daily stand-ups for remote working

From the first day of lockdown in March, I have held a daily catch-up with my team first thing each working day. The main intention was to give the team a feeling of connection and maintain a level of routine. It also helped to get us through a hectic work period moving a university of 33,000 students from campus-based delivery entirely online. 

The daily conversations kept everyone aware of changes, got quick answers to questions, and it allowed emerging problems to get identified and fixed before they got too big. Interestingly, I tested the idea of scrapping the catch-up after planning the new academic year in October, and the whole team rejected it. I wanted to give everyone back a couple of hours of their week, but the team saw it as the best part of their working day. We had a week off the meetings in the end, but they have become the centrepiece of how we plan and run our projects.

A ‘stand-up’ meeting is 10-15 minute informal meeting where attendees stand to force them to keep it short. Queen Victoria introduced stand-ups with her Privy Council in 1861 to minimise her public duties. More recently, it has been adopted by various agile project management methodologies, including Scrum and Kanban. The goal is to increase workflow through collaborative problem solving and signpost things that will soon cause problems. 

How to run a daily stand-up

  1. Book out a daily meeting first thing in the working day. I book mine for 25 minutes to keep some space reserved in the calendar if follow-up conversations are needed. The aim is to have them complete in 15 minutes.
  2. Keep them as conversations but short and to the point. I use the first 5 minutes for social discussion and then a quick update from me including a what I completed yesterday, what I am doing today, and what I need from the team.
  3. Get each member of the group to do a 60-second status update. Ensure each person shares and let some conversation naturally emerge but once it starts to get into detail intervene with “Let us carry this on outside of the stand-up”. Each member should share:
    1. What they are will complete today.
    2. Requests for collaboration.
  4. End the meeting with an opening for questions or issues that the team want to raise. A final opportunity to talk usually brings up a few questions, and so is worth adding. 

We use Microsoft Teams with a reoccurring meeting invite to host the video call. Using Teams allows the chat channel to stay open for social and work conversations to continue for the rest of the day. We set a rule early on that video is needed to make the calls more personal and people stick to it most days. Working from home can be isolating, and the social element of an office is hard to replicate. A short daily call acts as an icebreaker and helps keep the team collaboratively solving problems while having some fun. 

Have a go with your team and let me know how it goes on Twitter. 

Ultra-amateurism

I woke up tired this morning and scrolled through my phone under the covers rather than getting up. I missed my 7 am planned start time for a training session and then needed to help my wife testing some technology before a call. I had an hour and a half ride on the turbo planned, and the daily stand up with my team at 9:30 so the ride move to lunch.

I did not get back to my desk until 14:00 and then spent the next few hours catching up. After work, I had a trip to the supermarket, dinner with my wife, and then a later than planned weight session. I got to my daily blog at 20:30, clean the kitchen and sorted the recycling for bin day tomorrow. I will hopefully be in bed for 22:00 to hit my 7 am training ride in the morning.

While I was putting off the inevitable cold outside of the covers, phrases from sportsbooks I had read teased me. Schedules matter, as soon as one thing is late, the rest of the day is late too. If training starts at 7 am, you are ready at 6:50; you give yourself the leeway to fix it if you have a problem. You treat yourself as a professional in terms of preparation, attitude, and skills. You develop a personal regime and culture of professionalism. I am impressed by professional athletes who reach the top of their sport, but I am more impressed by the ultra-amateurs, like Roger Bannister. They achieve exceptional physical feats but are dedicated to their work in a profession and treat training as a secondary pursuit.

When your main focus is your profession, your training has to fit around your job. Training is put before everything else for professional athletes, but most of us do not have that life, and if we are honest, do not want it. So we wake up a 6:00 to training before work and then again after we finish, and save energy and time for our family and responsibilities. But in that hour or two when we train, we focus on nothing else.

I choose to ride and lift and write. I choose to focus on being great at my job. I choose to spend time with my wife. I choose to have a clean kitchen every night before I go to bed. Training is not a job for me, but it is more than a hobby. There is something deeper to the pain and the effort than getting a 6-pack and staying young for longer. The physical goals I set myself and the training I go through to achieve them become a part of me but when the next day comes around it is my role as a husband and an educator that matter. The pain is just a bonus.

Email lists and course enrolments

The primary tool for independent knowledge workers building a portfolio job and interacting directly with their customers is the email list. Even if the target is 1000 true fans, the email list will likely need to be much larger. Regular, quality content will attract an audience, and that audience can lead to a living. With this in mind, the first job for an independent creative is to build and cultivate an email list by giving away content that people value.

Many subscribers will be interested in free content but may not want to buy anything or might be highly price-sensitive based on their circumstances. Converting subscribers into purchases requires build relationships through regular interaction, so they value and trust the content that will eventually come with a price tag. Teachable advise those course creators who follow their marketing process have achieved a minimum of 2% conversion rates from their email lists to enrolments on online courses, but this could be much higher for established email lists with cultivated relationships.

Teachables Course launch goals calculator

Revenue goal = (Total email subscribers x Conversion rate) x Price for your course

Teachable recommends that creators aim for a premium price for their course to allow the instructor to spend time creating and running a great course and making it easier to reach any target revenue goal. Teachable’s top ten instructors’ average course price is $272 (£200), but some courses can cost over $1000, where significant interaction with the instructors are a feature.

If our revenue goal is £10,000 from the first run of our new course, and we price it using the average from Teachable’s top ten instructors, we need to sell to 50 students (£10,000/£200). Using the goal’s calculators conservative estimate of 2% conversion rate, we first need to build a list of 2,500 email addresses before we market and launch our course.

The Course launch calculator is based on real courses data, but it is not meant to be an exact formula. Teachable’s aim is similar to Kevin Kelly’s objective with his 1000 true fans idea, to demystify the process of making money on the internet and encouraging people to start creating content that someone somewhere will love. 

Regularly create and release content someone will value, collect the email addresses of these people, interact with them, and over time you will be able to make a living working for yourself. 

Project Management Basics

The first step towards a mature development process for developing online courses is to introduce some project management basics. According to the Project Management Institute, a project is a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. For a set of tasks to be a project, there must be a start and end date and produce a one-off output. The three core tasks for managing a project are cost and effort estimation, task allocation, and risk management.

Resist the ad hoc. Announce that this is a project, and that it matters enough to be treated as one.

Seth Godin

Here are ten suggested actions to get you started with managing your projects:

  1. Set a start and end date and identify your critical path; each task’s last possible completion date allows the project to hit the end date. Identify the dates by work backwards from completion and take into account tasks dependent on the completion of another. Track task completion against this critical path, and do what is needed to hit all the deadlines, so the project ends on time.
  2. Develop a way of estimating the cost and effort involved in your projects. Understand how complexity, size, and reuse impact these estimates. Start with what you can find in literature and then review and update it after each new project is complete to improve its accuracy over time. 
  3. Keep a list of risks, possible consequences, and likelihood and introduce ways to reduce the chance of them happening to minimise disturbances during the project. Considered project risks that affect the schedule or resources, product risks affecting the final course or module, and business risks that affect the university.
  4. Assign a Project Leader responsible for the project; this should be someone who controls the critical resources such as the Academics line manager of Head of Department. Regularly communicate with the Project Lead and get sign-off from them on crucial decisions. 
  5. Produce a project schedule that includes all the tasks to be completed and their due dates, any key milestones, and gates where the key project team members get sign-off to progress. Add the critical path and start and end dates and get everyone to sign it off before work begins. Update it as things change.
  6. Send out weekly project highlights to the Sponsor/owner and Project Leader. Use a traffic light system to help them identify if they need to intervene. If in amber or red, add a brief note saying why it is in trouble and what is required to bring it back to green. 
  7. Make all your work visible and share it will the whole project team. Show the critical path, the estimates, the risks, and the schedule. Keep a record of all the weekly highlight reports and the other documents in a central location that the project team can access. Produce regular prototypes in various forms as soon as possible and regularly afterwards, share it with the intended students for feedback before the course launches.
  8. Write down everything. Record everything that people expect and everything that people promise. Let everyone know you have recorded it. Keep a log of what you’ve done and how. You will need it when things go wrong or when planning the next project.
  9. When working on multiple projects, keep a complete list in one place. Use the weekly highlights traffic light system and record the next action to move each forward. If you manage a team, get the members to do the same and keep a central list of all the projects and their status.
  10. Evaluate your projects when you sign them off. Create a lessons learned document and get the project team to list what worked and what didn’t. Integrate any changes into the process for next time.

CMM and online learning development process design

Universities need to significantly increase their capacity to develop high quality online and blended delivery through the recruitment and training of Learning Designers. Institutional scale requires a shift from focusing on individual Learning Designers’ capabilities to concentrating on the organisation’s capabilities for designing learning. First, universities must consider how Learning Design projects are managed and implement sound project management principles. Next, they need to implement a structured development approach through research, evaluation, and peer review, the creation of rigorous quality standards, a formalised development pipeline, a strong community of practice, and progressive professional development.

Good project management of course design and development projects keeps them delivered on time, on budget, and within scope, and ensure a high standard for the student experience. Most learning development models are in their infancy, with few standards defined. If institutions want to produce novel and innovative online courses, they need to borrow design and development techniques from other fields, including software engineering.

The Capability Maturity Model (CMM), developed at the Carnegie Mellon University for large software projects, evaluates a product development processes level of maturity. It is focused on standardising the process of design and development and so counter to many agile methods but will work well with established teams in large organisations. CMM accepts that design and development processes are idealistic and do not represent most projects’ messy and improvised nature, but that tightly controlled and fully documented processes are better. The messiness level varies from project to project, and CMM aims to categories these into five levels of maturity.

Learning Design teams can use CCM’s five levels to improve their operations and assess how individual Learning Designers perform. Teams work through the levels in sequence to standardise their process to produce consistently high-quality online courses no matter the team working on it. The highest level would be represented by a clearly defined process that can be taught and learned, with clear quality metrics that lead to near-zero adverse outcomes. It includes mechanisms for capturing innovative practice and incrementally improving with each course iteration.  

The five stages of maturity

All stages above level two subsume the standards of the previous level.

Level 1: Initial – an ad hoc process which can be chaotic. Each Learning Designer follows their version of a basic process. This is the starting point for using a new or undocumented repeat process. 

Level 2: Repeatable – each project includes cost scheduling and basic project management practices. Some processes are repeatable, with some consistent results. 

Level 3: Defined – the process for managing and developing courses is standardised and documented.

Level 4: Managed – measurement is made of the process and course quality. These measures are used to control and improve practices. Effective achievement of the process objectives can be evidenced using metrics.

Level 5: Optimising – processes are continually improved through quantitative measures and testing innovative ideas and new technologies. (Few developers are considered to be at this level). 

The next three to five years will see massive growth in online learning, and universities core delivery will keep much of the changes they have implemented over the last ten months. Departments responsible for supporting online and blended learning should be spending time now on process improvement to optimise their design and development model to prepare for this rapid growth.

Get in touch with me on Twitter if you want to discuss the process of design and development of online learning.

The 100-Up Exercise

I have been searching for ways to increase the amount I move since I began working from home, and my walking reduced significantly. The best movement practices are short to fit between meetings or tasks, require little or no equipment, and can ideally be carried out without changing outfit. If the movement makes me faster at running or on the bike, then even better. 

The 100-Up exercise is a short movement practice that you can do daily to improve running form, strengthen muscles, including the heart and lungs, loosens the limbs, and increases your daily movement. It can be done anywhere and in regular clothes, making it perfect as a movement break while working from home.

Walter George created the exercise and published it in a short book in 1880. George was an English middle-distance runner born in 1858, a holder of the mile world record between 1880 and 1893, and with a personal best time mile time of 4 minutes and 12 seconds. He worked from 7 am to 9 pm each day with a one hour break for lunch, and needed a way to supplement his training and keep active whilest at work. He would regularly perform the movement throughout the day when he moved around his workplace, creating opportunities to do 20 to 40 repetitions. Walter George credited his speed and stride length to the daily practice of the 100-Up.

Percy Cerutty in ‘Athletics: How to become a champion‘ suggests that runners should ‘run on the spot at terrific speed’ as an indoor activity if it is not possible to get outside. Many articles and books about his athletes also comment on regular, if not daily, ‘running in place‘ for 10-15 minutes to improve form and stamina. It might be possible to create smoother running form and a longer stride length by merely adopting the 100-Up exercise as a supplementary daily activity.  

The 100-Up exercise

The 100-up has three stages; each stage needs to be perfected before moving on the next. The exercise’s primary focus is as a carryover to running, so perfect form is required; knee to hip height each time and return the feet to the line without moving forward or backwards. At any point, if this form breaks down; the exercise should be paused.

You will need two parallel lines for all three stages, eight inches apart and 18 inches long. My floorboards are a perfect width, but you could put some tape down, or find another marker if needed. Your feet start with the balls of your feet on each line pointing directly forward and each rep your knee should reach hip height. Arms should hang naturally and remain by your sides for the first two stages.

Stage 1: Preliminary

Start by slowly lifting one leg ten times, trying to control your balance while getting your knee to the required height and returning your foot to the starting position for each rep. Do all the reps on one leg and then repeat with the other—progress when you can perform 30 reps on each leg correctly.

Stage 2: Minor

Repeat the preliminary exercise but this time alternate the leg you raise each rep. Start with ten reps – five with each leg, and progress over time to twenty, thirty, forty, and eventually one hundred. Start slow and gradually get faster as your strength and balance improves—progress to stage three when you can perform 100-Ups correctly. 

Stage 3: Major – The exercise proper

The final stage is the full exercise. Start with your feet in the same position but raise your heels, so you are on the balls of your feet. raise your knees to hip high and alternate leg each rep but perform the movement with good pace. Use your arms to mimic the running form, with relaxed shoulders, lifting the opposite arm to the raised knee and brushing your rib with your hand with the lowered hand. Try 20-Ups the first time – ten for each leg and concentrate on your form. Steadily add more reps over time as your stamina improves until you reach 100-Ups.

A long term pursuit

Treat mastering this exercise as a long term pursuit and do at least one set every day. If you run and have a GPS watch, see if your stride length is improving over time along with your competency in this exercise. If you are not a runner, the 100-Up exercise is an excellent way to add extra movement into your day and possibly get you interested in starting running as you learn the correct movement from the comfort of your home.

Have a go at the 100-Ups progression and contact me on Twitter with your progress.