Rant Alert No.1

From time to time people in the training community say things that are so wrong, so outrageously absurd that it sends me over the edge into a barely controllable rant. At such times I am told that it is healthier to blog in response than kick the dog, so here goes. (Back to “operationalizing” Rapid eLearning in a later post.)

The general subject of this rant is not unlike that of most of my rants. It is the tunnel vision, myopia, or what amounts to the ideology of many instructional designers, and, worse yet, instructional designers who have been promoted into management. They have somehow deluded themselves into believing, against all common sense and daily observations to the contrary, that “true learning” cannot take place unless the learning experience has been instructionally designed. I suspect this syndrome develops over time from going to too many training conferences, where like-minded IDers congregate and mob psychology takes over free will and individual intelligence and they convince themselves that ID is not just a methodology that should be judiciously applied where appropriate, but in fact should be used indiscriminately to bring enlightenment to an ignorant and heathen world. As my deceased mother-in-law used to say, “May God save us from fools and save fools from themselves.”

OK, back to the incident in question. I had a meeting this week with a manager from a very large and progressive company who had recently been promoted from their eLearning department (where ID has apparently reached an art form) to head up their well established and highly successful communities of practice operation. I say “operation” because this is brilliantly conceived and executed CoP program in the sales operations department that has been, strategically aligned, well funded, well incented, and, until now, well managed. It seems to optimally combine top-down and bottom-up involvement and has been determined through independent research to actually demonstrate statistically positive relationships with explicit and tacit knowledge, job competence, and customer satisfaction. Things would seem to be working pretty well on the CoP ranch…

Having come from recent success from the eLearning department, and having fallen victim of the ID syndrome he now wants to “fix” the CoP program by applying ID to all aspects of their knowledge exchange activities and knowledge capture and delivery system. There is apparently not enough structure to the seemly chaotic knowledge exchange and no evidence, statistical and anecdotal, will convince him that he already presides over a model CoP program. Its broken and must be fixed!

The latest target in the sights of his ID gun is “podcasting.” Podcasting has recently caught fire in some quarters as a new corporate [a.k.a. trendy] learning delivery method with great potential. In this case, it is one more method for delivering corporate knowledge technical in the form of downloadable audio files. So, he wants to ride the wave and be the first innovator on campus to implement podcasting. When it was pointed out to him that he is already the MP3 king, that the knowledge capture and transfer system of his CoP program has been producing MP3s for the last five years, and that there were nearly 4,000 voluntary downloads of MP3 files in the last year alone, he scoffed! Stunned and amazed at his incomprehensible response, I feebly muttered the somewhat obvious questions, “Why do you scoff? Why aren’t 4,000 voluntary downloads, downloads mind you that are not mandated nor tracked in any LMS system, why is that unprecedented level of activity not proof positive that the current MP3 distribution system is already a huge success?”

His response? The current MP3 files were not instructionally designed! People have apparently been downloading them just to have them, just in case they might need them, but it cannot be demonstrated that anyone is really listening to them, let alone learning from them. His answer to this pressing problem? The answer is that, moving forward, he wants to institute instructional design on the structure of knowledge contained in the MP3 files. Although it is equally impossible to determine whether anyone actually listens to or derives benefit from instructionally designed MP3 files vs. MP3s more informally transferred expert knowledge, podcasts with ID will make a big difference.

It will be interesting to see how many ID’d MP3 files will actually be downloaded in the future. MP3s created by CoP members for CoP members must go, and defeat once again must be snatched from the jaws of victory!