Trainer MOOC April-Jun 2012: Week 5 : Creating / Adapting learning materials

I would urge the cohort to focus on creating and adapting learning materials in this week.

Till now we have understood the learning needs, set learning objectives, created a program structure / learning architecture and now it is time to create or adapt the learning materials that fulfil our requirements.

Step 1: Research for existing learning materials.

Apart from books, periodicals and magazines etc the Internet is a important source of information and one that we trainers are increasingly relying on. Therefore our ability to quickly extract the most relevant information from Google is very important.

Resource: http://larkslearning.com/blog/top-skill-for-trainers-how-to-search-for-information/

Step 2: Curate the material that we collect. Here tools such as Google Bookmarks, Digg, Stumbleupon,Delicious etc are useful to curate information gleaned from the Internet. I use Google Bookmarks because I have downloaded the Google toolbar and so it is very convenient. It does not have a social share feature.

Resources:

Step 3: Synthesise the information we have curated. This is a critical skill. Each workshop, program, learning object we create is a synthesis of information.

Resources:

http://larkslearning.com/blog/critical-skill-for-the-21st-century-ability-to-synthesize/

In this step we run the risk of getting carried away with the material we have collected and curated. There are so many interesting things we have picked up.

Carole Fenn had pointed us to this fascinating resource “Understanding by Design by Wiggins and McTigue”. It really helps both trainers and teachers focus in on the essential teaching points and keeps bringing educators back to that focus as they build curriculum and plan educational activities to meet and master learning goals. Please see the videos below for explanation of Backwards Design Lesson Planning (I must warn you the video’s are long and focused on K-12):

Backwards design lesson planning essentially means to ensure that everything we do ties back to our learning objectives. This is many a time a tough one as we tend to get super excited about some things.

Step 4: Ensure content and methodology fitment. From our program structure / learning architecture and now our research we need to see if there needs to be any changes in the original program structure / learning architecture. Here we see if the learning methodologies we initially selected to cover a learning topic is still the right one given our research. We debate the pro and con’s of major training and learning methodologies.

Resource: Instructional design for corporate trainers by Dan Brown.

Step 5: Finalize the learning object. A few things to keep in mind whether creating learning materials from scratch or adapting pre-existing learning materials to suit our requirements :

Use insights gained from learning theories, learning styles, andragogy/ pedagogy etc.
Along with the creation of the learning material decide the assessment methodology
Focus on the logical flow
Chunk the material
Source the material so as to avoid plagiarism

In fact what is unique about Larks “Train the Trainer” program is while all information is available free online through the “Trainer MOOC”, we have “Training Clinic’s” where learning facilitator’s apply the learning to create a learning object / idea and then we provide feedback on the learning object / idea and ideate on alternative method’s to achieve the same learning objective.

Facilitators:

Lovely Kumar – Chief Projects
Anila Rattan – Chief Strategy

Larks Learning

Contact:lovely@larkslearning.com

2 thoughts on “Trainer MOOC April-Jun 2012: Week 5 : Creating / Adapting learning materials”

Creating and adapting learning material is such an important part for a trainer and is the first distinguishing factor between a person who delivers training and a trainer.
In my opinion In India we have loads of people who claim to be trainers….. and as there is no formal education…. ability to speak infront of a group and speak for long durations is the only competence needed.
In approx 1997 when the idea of outsourcing to India geminated in the minds of established multinationals and GE capital …… GECIS was created, the first challenge was how to train this manpower…….so that they can take a call from UK for example and not offend the person and be understood and be able to provide information…..In my opinion, the success actually hinged on training and not on technology because technology was available….. and thats when the hunt for trainers started in India……. till then you needed to have worked 20 years and have grey hair before you could be called Guru and technical training was the real mass in the training industry. This crowd of “Guru’s” were set in their ways and could not be moulded and so as GECIS was located in Gurgaon …the millenium city a hunt for young men and women who have been to UK was started (basically who had an accent)……UK trainers were flown in and hosted in 5 star hotels and MBAs were hired for call center jobs……Call center executives were sent to the foreign countries for orientation and training and familiarization…… and slowly by shadowing experienced foreign trainers a breed of young Indian trainers was being developed…… It was a fun time……With GECIS being successful lots of other companies came….Convergys and efunds and smaller names……as the market was flooded with call centers the MBA became the graduate …then the 12th pass and now the 10th pass……and an army of trainers were needed to upskill these employees…..suddenly trainers mushroomed……
Every company trained a person to repeat the message that they wanted to be conveyed ……. it was a mad rush…. who had time to talk about theories of learning and the bloom’s taxonomy…… we were again setting up a army of babu trainers (a throw back to the education system in India which was set up by the English rulers to produce clerks) …… ironical but true and I was one among this army…..
My advantage was that I had a little experience with the TAJ hotels where training was a serious affair for years.
Most of the people who were enterprising in this lot own training companies today….some small… some big……
In Gecis in 2007 there was a group of 100 trainers on rolls….. training was a department in itself and when the slowdown happened the whole department was hived off

Today we have trainers of every level and competence and still no quality qualification……. people who have choosen this as a career soon realised that either stay in a call center or freelance…..

In all this the material was made by someone else and companies were only hiring the delivery skills……

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Very useful stuff in this week 5. In addition to the 5 steps that may be gone through while creating content, it would also be useful to have a short 4 to 5 point checklist that helps developing a higher quality content.

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2 thoughts on “Trainer MOOC April-Jun 2012: Week 5 : Creating / Adapting learning materials”

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