One of the things that Larry has been really interested in learning is how to design e-learning courses, but his excuse has always been that, to start with at his organisation they already use off-the-shelf courses for delivering their mandatory learning. Plus they don't have any licenses for articulate storyline, adobe captivate or Lectora, probably the most popular set of e-learning design software. But Larry knows deep down that is just a pathetic excuse. He recently read somewhere that you can actually start learning how to create e-learning courses using PowerPoint. Yes, he'd always listened to those guys who said that PowerPoint was really rubbish for creating courses and he believed them until he read Tom Kulhman's posts on The Rapid E-Learning Blog for, and you won't believe this, Articulate. Actually Tom does work for Articulate but he uses PowerPoint a lot. After reading a couple of his posts and taking a free rapid e-learning design course over at The Ministry of Instructional Design Network he decided to give it a go. Larry started with an e-learning version of his company's corporate induction for the Mental health services. The course he designed is currently being reviewed by the Head of Mental Health Services. His second attempt is at designing a course for one of the support tools called Recovery Star used to work with people who use the mental health services they provide.
Just yesterday Larry was doing some work on the course and he wanted to try something he hadn't done in the induction course. Larry wanted to design a scenario as a way of starting off the course, instead of just introducing the course with necessary, but at times boring learning objectives. So he thought, "Where can I learn to create scenarios?, Off course Tom's blog!" And off he went to the Rapid E-Learning Blog on the Articulate website and in two clicks found the article he needed, read it and put the scenario together in PowerPoint.
Larry had learnt a crucial lesson going through this process - the value of performance support. What he had just demonstrated in a way is how performance support works. In performance support there is something called moment of apply. This refers to the exact moment when you need to apply learning to get something done. You may have attended a training course or done some e-learning related to the task you want to do, but if you are like most people you've probably forgotten most of what you're supposed to have learnt. But what if in just three clicks you could come up with some form of performance support such as a job aid or some digital content that can immediately give you the information you need to get the job done? Wouldn't that be great? That's exactly what happened to Larry. He needed to design a scenario, he remembered exactly where he read about how to do it, in three clicks he retrieved the information and successfully designed the scenario with the support of the information. In other words he was able to access the right amount of information, at the right time to support him to do the job he needed to do. And that is precisely what performance support is about.
As Learning practitioners what if we could provide the people we support with that level of performance support? What if we could ensure that at least 60 to 70 per cent of the time they have access to resources that will help them get tasks and jobs done on the spot. Not only would our jobs be easier but we will be more effective and seen as adding much more value to our organisations. Larry learnt the value of performance support, have you learnt it yet?
