When I was a kid growing up in a small town in western New York, most of my friends wanted to be a fireman or a doctor or something recognizable at least. I myself wanted to be a veterinarian.  My point is that I don’t think any of us ever picked Instructional Designer or Performance Consultant in our early career planning. As I heard someone say recently, most learning and performance professionals come to this field by accident. Everyone has an interesting story to tell. It is, however, a profession. Designing learning programs and performance solutions isn’t something that just anyone can do and do well without education and training for the profession. I happened on a Master’s program quite by accident and it was through that experience that I chose to become an instructional designer. The amount of continuing education and professional development that I have had since then is about ten times what I learned at Indiana University. I have had the opportunity to attend many conferences and local ISPI and ASTD meetings to hear other presenters share what they have learned in their careers. I am now having the opportunity to attend these events with my own workshops and presentations to help other professionals learn. Our field is constantly evolving—and not just the technology. Many of the old best practices are still being applied in new ways to meet the needs of today’s designers and consultants. I have met many wonderful people in my recent travels to conferences and ASTD and ISPI meetings.  I have the greatest admiration for all who continue to improve their skills and learn new things. So if you’ve been putting off that Master’s degree, start on it now. If you think you are too busy to go to your local ISPI or ASTD Chapter meeting, rearrange your priorities. Find a good conference and pay for it yourself if you need to. It’s your chosen profession, now. You owe it to those you serve to be as good at it as you possibly can be.

Based on considerable experience last fall with some Virtual Instructor Lead Instruction (VILT), I became interested in the use of webcams and their effect on learning in a VILT environment. My experience involved small class sizes of six learners so we could conduct role plays and hear feedback from the participants and the instructor. In half of the role plays all participants were able to see each other and the instructor via webcam. In the other half of the role plays, we conducted the sessions with audio only. I became so interested by what I observed that I began to look for research on the role of webcams in VILT and their subsequent effect on learning. Not being able to find what I was looking for, I decided to conduct my own research study with the help of a Davidson College Senior, Jennifer Green, who is majoring in Psychology with a focus on methods and Industrial-Organizational Psychology. That’s when Jennifer uncovered several studies about a phenomenon known as "Social Presence." These studies dated back as far as 1976, with the most recent being in 2006. I quickly realized that it was the creation or lack of social presence that created the difference between the two types of learning experiences. The following definition of social presence is taken from a study called "Social Presence as a Predictor of Satisfaction within a Computer-mediated Conference Environment" by Charlotte N. Gunawardena and Frank J. Zittle from the American Journal of Distance Education Vol. 11, No. 3, 1997. Short, Williams and Christie (1976) postulated that the critical factor in a communication medium is its "social presence," and defined this as "the degree of salience of the other person in the interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationships…" (65). This means the degree to which a person is perceived as a "real person" in mediated communication. They define social presence as a quality of the medium itself and hypothesize that communications media may vary in their degree of social presence.  The capacity of the medium to transmit information about facial expression, direction of gaze, posture, dress and non-verbal cues all contribute to the degree of social presence of a communications medium. We found some research measuring the effect of social presence on learner satisfaction, but we did not find significant research regarding the effect of social presence on learning, or actual performance. Our study will focus mostly on the ability of the webcam to affect social presence and whether or not this effect has any bearing on learner success. We are currently looking for individuals or organizations that would be interested in taking part in the study. By doing so you would also receive a free training seminar in the performance consulting skill of reframing a training request. If you would like to participate, please respond in the space below, or email me at dick.handshaw@handshaw.com.

This is a big year for the annual conference of the International Society for Performance Improvement. This year’s conference marks our 50th Anniversary. To mark the international flair of our society, you’ll have to have a passport unless you live in Canada. The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada. I am very pleased and honored to have been selected to do two presentations for the conference. On Thursday, April 19th, I’ll be presenting a pre-conference workshop from 8:30 to 5:00 on Performance Partnering. I’ll be presenting the same topic as a 90 minute session at 10:00 am on the Saturday the 21st. The only real difference between the two presentations is that in the workshop, everyone gets to do practice role plays and receive feedback. In the 90 minute presentation we will have time for just one role play for the group to observe and provide feedback.  The role play topics will be conducting a proactive consulting interview with a new client and reframing a training request from an existing client. I have probably observed well over 300 of these role play sessions in the past couple of years and they really are fascinating. Everyone acts using their own personal experiences so the role plays are very realistic and have a high fidelity to real situations. Everyone in the workshop or 90 minute session will learn to provide feedback based on a pre-determined checklist. Participants learn how to conduct the role plays by seeing how the items on the checklist are performed on a sample video role play. They will also view some short videos showing common mistakes. The instructional strategy seems to work well, as most individuals master 6 out of the 8 items on the checklist during their first role play. I will finish my year as Chairperson of the Chapter Partnership Committee as our committee hosts the Chapter Leaders’ Workshop on Friday, April 20th from 8:30 to 5:00. We will launch and test the brand new Chapter in a Box tool for starting or revitalizing an ISPI chapter.  We will do this through a hands-on exercise where participants design and prepare a new chapter for start-up. We will also have guest speakers and an afternoon session in which we will learn about different services that can be offered by chapters. I hope you can join us in Toronto for our 50th Anniversary celebration.

I’m not making the assumption that all Instructional Design teams need transforming, but I have worked with many teams over the years that have made a conscious decision to change. The best way to determine if your team needs to make changes is to conduct your own gap analysis. First, create a vision of what you want your team to look like. Now, take an objective look at your current results and accomplishments. To complete your gap analysis, look at the performance that is yielding your current results and try to identify what kind of performance will be required to attain the results described in your vision. This way you can define your business gap and your performance gap. We see a variety of performance gaps described by our clients. Some have issues with scope creep that require project rework and extended schedules. Some are concerned that training doesn’t really improve performance to levels required by employees’ jobs and want to move away from a content approach to more of a task based approach. Others have issues with measurement of skills with regard to reliability and validity of testing instruments. Many are concerned about doing too much training at too high a cost. There are three steps that we have identified to achieve adoption of new or changed practices in instructional design: The first step is the easiest—skill development. Improving task analysis skills is one of the first ways to close many of the gaps listed above. Writing performance objectives that describe more measureable outcomes is another tactic that will close gaps. Learning to select appropriate testing instruments and writing better test items is another way to improve results. Skill development classes usually need to be followed by some coaching and mentoring on the job, but improving skills is not difficult or time consuming. Perhaps the most important and difficult part of creating change in an instructional design team is leadership. The leader must be able to articulate a vision that will ultimately yield better business results for the organization as a whole. The leader will have to seek to inspire champions in the client base as well as within the team itself. And most important, the leader will have to exemplify the change he or she wishes to make in the team. The third critical aspect of transformation will be to align team members’ expectations and contributions. A common goal of many transformations is to develop some consistency of best practices for designing instruction.  It might be faster and easier to give the team a methodology that is proven and ask them to use it, but this rarely works. It is more time consuming, but far better to let the team develop the best practices they will use and hold them accountable for using it and improving it. After all, the people who are going to have to use the process day in and day out are the best ones to develop and improve the process. Ownership is a key to success and the team will really enjoy the process of creation.

This is one of my favorite quotes from my friend and mentor, Jim Robinson. It came to mind this morning as I was talking to friend and associate, Chris Adams, just as we walked out of a session at the 2012 ISPI conference in Toronto. A lot of us find our way into the learning and performance improvement field quite by accident. Most of us perform our jobs quite well without advanced degrees or formal training in our chosen field, but how long can we keep that up? Most of us will agree that professional development is important, but we are especially busy in a world when we are all doing more with less. Sometimes we feel we have little choice but to give our attention to the urgent deadline, the problems at home, or the next meeting. There comes a time when our career planning calls for something that will improve us and make us better equipped to prioritize the urgent and to handle it better. Because of my job, I attend lots of conferences. At this ISPI conference, I am reminded again how much work and discovery is being done in our profession every day and how important it is for me and my associates to keep up with discoveries and research in order to give the best advice and work to our clients. Dick Clark, the still living one—one of the greats in our field, reminded us how important it is for us to question new fads and ideas until we see evidence that these new practices actually do bring about the results for which they were intended. You won’t learn about these things, things that may surprise you and change the way you approach that looming deadline, unless you take time now and then to learn more about our profession and become a better performance improvement professional. Do some planning now. Find a conference to go to next year. Better yet, check out your local ASTD or ISPI chapter and find out what educational events they are offering in your own area. Invest a little time in yourself. Thank you ISPI for a truly excellent (even if under-attended) conference. I hope next year more people will put the urgent on hold for three days and attend the 2013 ISPI Conference, On the Road to Reno. And congratulations, ISPI, on your 50th Anniversary. What a rich legacy your members have left us.

After the wonderful ISPI Conference in April, that will be a tough month to beat. This year’s conference was my favorite one I have ever attended. If you are thinking about a conference to go to next year, think about ISPI in mid-April in Reno, NV. It is THE conference for anyone in the performance improvement profession. My first stop for the month of May will be on May 10th in Chattanooga, TN. There is a very enthusiastic ASTD chapter there that is also interested in performance improvement. I’ll be doing the very same 90 minute session on "Performance Partnering" with them that I did in Toronto for ISPI. I hope they like it as well as the Toronto group did. If the conversations I have had with two of their chapter leaders are any indication, I’m really going to enjoy this one. The risky part about the session I’m going to do for them is the impromptu role play where I ask for two volunteers from the audience to role play a reframing conversation. Reframing a training request the right way can be a bit challenging and I’m always worried I won’t get any volunteers, but I’m pretty sure this group will come through. On May 17th, I will be participating in a webinar for the eLearning Guild. My topic for that is a new presentation called "Instructional Design: Demonstrating Value through Results." I have never been a fan of webinars until I attended a session done by Karen Hyder from the eLearning Guild a couple of years ago. Thanks to her session I tried a couple dozen webinars with clients last fall. Those were small group sessions and were quite successful, but I still have not had real success with a larger session of sixty or more people. I’m about to get my chance. The best thing about doing a webinar with the eLearning Guild? They are very organized and they give you a coach! They are not going to take any chances that their presenters are not going to perform to their high standards. And the best part for me—I got Karen Hyder for my coach. I have learned a lot, she improved my session tremendously and I am really looking forward to this session. If you are interested in attending, please click here to learn more about the series of webinars they will be hosting on May 17th. I hope you can join us.

During the Development phase of each project, we build a prototype of the courseware and test out our instructional and assessment strategies with a small group of our target audience in a "Learner Tryout" (LTO).  This process never fails to provide us with valuable and critical feedback that helps us ensure our final deliverables will be as effective as they can be.  However, while the process is down to a science, the art of the LTO is a different story.  You’re bound to encounter at least two of the following "Murphy’s Laws of LTO:" You’ll never have enough time to build the prototype.  You could estimate how long you think it’ll take to build, add on a week, and you’d still be wrestling with it at the last minute before the LTO.  That’s because during the prototype, you’re ironing out your process, hammering out the technical details of your development tools, wrestling with content for the first time, and sorting through a few hundred other details.  The good news is you’re preparing for a smooth ride ahead.  Just keep this fact in mind during your schedule planning and try to build in any extra time you can afford. If it can go wrong, it will.  Even if you’ve tested your prototype thoroughly before the LTO, you’ll show up for the LTO and something will "break."  Sounds bad, but you’re actually testing out a piece of the final courseware in the client’s environment well before implementation, so you can work out technical details now instead of on the day it’s released to thousands of learners.  When something does not work as expected, get creative about work-arounds, explain the situation to your participants (who are usually more than understanding), and try to keep your technical person on-hand and available by phone. Expect the unexpected.  Something will always take you by surprise.  You could go over your design and prototype with a fine-toothed comb, but the minute you place the prototype in front of an actual learner, you’ll discover something new.  Often it’s something obvious that you observe with the first participant, like the participant tries to Tab through the fields and your simulation requires them to press Enter.  Discoveries like these are LTO gold. Depending on which of these you encounter, conducting a successful LTO can require flexibility, patience, creativity, and more, but you’ll always walk away with something of value. Beth Hughes is a Senior Instructional Designer at Handshaw, Inc. She takes projects through the entire process of instructional design and development, incorporating learning principles, instructional needs, and methodologies into the best learning solution for each client. Beth earned her M.Ed. in Instructional Systems Technology from UNCC.

June is a great time for a visit to our nation’s capital and I’m really looking forward to my time there. On the 12th, I’ll be visiting the Potomac ISPI - Greater Washington Area chapter and will be presenting "SMEs: It’s a Marriage for Better or Worse." As the title suggests, all of us who develop training rely heavily on our Subject Matter Experts for success. We can’t work without them, but many of us find challenges working with them. I called on Handshaw, Inc. clients and employees to find out some of the toughest issues they experience working subject matter experts and successful strategies for resolving them. I will also use the experience of my audience as we discuss the Top Ten issues based on my research and their potential solutions. On June 14th, I will be visiting the ASTD Maryland - Baltimore, MD Area chapter. I’ll be presenting, "Doing More with Less: Shortcuts Don’t Work." In order to run a profitable learning business for the past 28 years, we’ve learned what shortcuts work and which ones don’t. Most of them are not very effective. It seems there is no substitute for just doing things right the first time. In this presentation we will first examine the true cost of developing learning and take a surprising look at where most of the expense goes—and it’s not where most organizations think it goes. Then we’ll look at several shortcuts that don’t work and a few that do. We’ll wrap up by discussing some strategies that will help you do more with less. Don’t expect any silver bullets here; just a good dose of reality. In closing, I’d like to thank the members of ASTD Chattanooga for a great turnout and an enthusiastic reception during my visit last month. I presented "Performance Partnering." As usual, the live reframing role play was the big hit of the presentation. Special thanks to the two volunteers who participated and helped make this session a success.

I enjoyed a great trip to Washington DC on the 12th of June when I spoke to the ISPI Potomac chapter at the National Science Foundation.  The best thing about this meeting was that I didn’t have to do all the talking; I may not have even done most of the talking. The membership was very vocal with their experiences and opinions about working with subject matter experts. Even though not a lot of people talk about this topic (I know Daryl Sink does) it always sparks a lot of debate. All instructional designers rely on subject matter experts to do their jobs and they may not always get enough of our attention.  Thank you to the Potomac Chapter for your insights and opinions on the matter. On Thursday the 14th, I visited the Baltimore Area ASTD Chapter at a very nice University of Maryland campus near the Baltimore Washington Airport. Our topic was something I haven’t talked about in a while, "Doing More with Less." Just because I haven’t talked about this topic in five years doesn’t mean things have changed. We are still being asked to do more with less. If anything, the pressure to do more with less has only gotten greater. The topic must have resonated with my audience because once again, we had a spirited discussion allowing me to do a lot of listening as well as talking. My bonus for the day was getting to Baltimore in time to visit the Inner Harbor for the "Sailabration" which is part of the celebration for the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. Seeing all the tall ships in the harbor was a nice unexpected benefit. What’s Next? On Thursday I’ll be talking about "Doing More with Less" again, this time with the Armed Forces Chapter of ISPI.  I’ll be leading a webinar on the 28th of June at 1300 hours. I’ll be joined by my colleague and producer for the event, John Wyville, Program Chair with the Armed Forces Chapter. If you are a member, please join us. I would like to thank the Armed Forces Chapter for inviting me, and especially, thank you for your service.

If you look at the Events tab you’ll see that I am in Jacksonville and Orlando, Florida on the same day. It’s not a typo. I’ve done multi-day workshops many times. I even did several two-day workshops in the same week in different cities in Nebraska once. Last month I did presentations in Baltimore and Washington in the same week. This month, we are trying something different. I’ll do a 90 minute presentation on Performance Partnering for ASTD in Jacksonville during a lunch meeting from 11:45am to 1:15pm. Then I’ll drive to Orlando to do an evening meeting from 6:30 until 8:00 for the newly formed Central Florida Chapter of ISPI. I’m glad to be able to share this presentation with both groups and also glad I don’t travel home until the following day! The large volume of activity I’ve had with the Performance Partnering workshop and presentation tells me that people are interested in becoming consulting partners to their clients, rather than being order takers. The Robinsons, who inspired me with their books, workshops and presentations for fifteen years, have retired but there seems to be plenty of interest in their work. Although the design of my presentations and workshops is entirely my own, the methods, strategies and tactics I use are derived from their work and what I have learned from them. I consider their work to be a great legacy for all of us and I am doing my best to carry on their work while I add my own thirty years of experience. Performance partnering is not magic and it’s not difficult. Any learning professional can learn and implement the eight principles I use in both proactive and reactive consulting. By using these skills and applying the simple process of creating a "gaps map," we solve real performance problems much better than we can with learning solutions alone.  Not only is this welcome to the bottom line of our organizations and to the careers of our colleagues, but it makes learning professionals far more valuable and less likely to disappear in hard economic times. As you can tell, I’m looking forward to a busy day in Florida.