Enspire’s design and media arm, Houndstooth, collaborates on all our learning and edumarketing projects, but also does fantastic work  (check out the work on their homepage) for clients outside the learning industry. Last month HT collaborated with BarkBox to create film bumpers for BarkFest 2014. Sponsored by BarkBox and presented by the Madison Park Conservancy on July 26th, 2014, BarkFest showcased a number of creative, dog-focused films in the free, outdoor venue of Madison Square Park. Not surprisingly for an event termed "BarkFest", this  was an (extremely) dog-friendly event. New York photographer Brian Eden (@brianeden) did a great job capturing a compendium of canines which you can see on his site here.   The post Friday Spotlight > Houndstooth appeared first on Enspire.

Learning technologies — like any other tool — can be put to good or wrong purposes. Often we put a tool to "wrong" purposes when we use that tool in ways that don’t match its natural affordances. I like the analogy of a pencil: it’s a great tool for writing on  paper, but not such a good tool for punching holes into paper — although I can recall using it for such purposes back when paper was popular ;-). To be sure, you can punch holes into paper with a pencil, but those holes are apt to be ragged and misaligned. That’s an example of a technology being extended beyond the affordances of its design, beyond its purpose. We understand tools to be utilitarian objects created and applied to problem-solving. The history of human innovation is not the result of invention for its own sake, to discover appropriate uses later, but invention for the sake of specific problem-solving activities. We must approach learning technologies this way too. Like the pencil punching, we too often try to shoehorn learning technology into places it doesn’t fit well. Ask yourself: what problem am I trying to solve? What are the action possibilities of the tool? How can we use lit to mitigate learning problems? Facilitate group learning? Enhance or enrich an individual learning experience? Put to purpose, learning technologies help us in one or more of the AAA learning tools categories: ACCESS: for just-in-time learning and information retrieval ASSISTANCE: for performance support and augmented communication tools ADAPTIVE: for personalization, individual pathways, targeted remediation, and accommodations for people with disabilities or learning differences. The post AAA Learning Tools appeared first on Enspire.

What is at the heart of any training initiative? The ability to make a difference. That could mean an employee able to do their job with more efficiency, consumers buying a product after understanding the value, or preparing a university student for success in a course to pass that final exam. Training is done for a lot of reasons, but the one thing we all want to know is: Did it work? Let’s look at how we can find out. First, let’s look at a brief overview of some standards for any training evaluation project. Most people in the training industry use the Kirkpatrick levels for training evaluation. I’ll break them down for you, below. Level 1:  Did they enjoy the training experience? The first thing most people want to know is if the people who took the course enjoyed the experience. This is important to know because if you have a group of people who were bored, angry, irritated, or frustrated the technology didn’t work, any impacts of the training aren’t going to be seen if all of these blockers stand in their way. So how do we find this out? Most people do a survey that is emailed out after the course, or pops up as part of the course at the end. Level 2:  Did they learn what they were supposed to? So next, we want to know if they actually gleaned what was intended from the course.  Did they understand the material? After they took the training, could the learner describe or remember what they learned? How do we determine this? Usually by a knowledge check or test at the end of the training. Level 3:  Were they able to use the training? After they learned the critical objectives from the training course, we want to know if they actually did something with it. For example, say Company B is training its employees to push Button X instead of Button Y at the end of the day. Now that they are outside of the training environment, and back at work, did they actually change the way they behaved? Did Button X get pushed or were people still pushing Y? How do we determine this? This one can be a little tricky. So if you have a way to measure something like button pushes, this is easy. But if you’re training people on soft skills, like politeness or customer service EQ, then it gets more complicated. You might have to have observation involved, or some kind of pre- and post-test simulation exercise to determine if the learner’s behavior and skills changed. Level 4: Did we make a difference? Now that your group of learners has enjoyed the training, remembered it, and you were able to see they actually used it, the next question is:  Did we make an impact? This is when you can look at metrics and data and say, "Wow, look at the increase in Button  X pushes! We’ve had a 95% increase in Button X usage." Assume Button X actually saves you $10 every time an employee pushes it. Well, do a little math and you just saved your company a lot of money! How do we determine this? This is usually relying on cold, hard data. You want numbers. You have to look at what you want to achieve. What is the end result? Are you trying to save time, steps, volume? Get the data to show that, and then add the money factor to it. If this training initiative shaved 2 hours off an employee’s weekly workload and you had 500 employees take the training, that’s 1000 hours. Say the average employee’s salary is $20/hour. You can just tell your boss that your training idea saved the company $20,000 a week! And who wouldn’t want to give you a promotion? Now that we have the basics down, let’s examine a case study to give you some more specifics. With an actual example! Case Study:  The call center. Call centers are a mecca of training initiatives. There is always opportunity for employees to do their job quicker, more easily, and with fewer support resources. So this is what happened when I was tasked with revising a new hire training for a call center that supported customers calling in with their tech issues. Current state: There was high employee turnover, customer satisfaction scores (also known as CSAT) were dropping, the calls took longer than they were supposed to, and the managers and trainers were constantly doing just in time training initiatives hoping for the best results. How can a call center support its customers and make a profit in this shape? Answer: They can’t. What was the solution? After going in and doing a job analysis, interviewing some groups of employees and identifying that the problem was they weren’t adequately prepared to do the job, I revised their new hire training so that it was more engaging, covered all of the top call drivers, and had the new employees doing the job in the safety of the training environment (via tools simulation and mock calls) before they got on the floor to take calls. Then it was time to measure.  Did it work? Remember that the problem of the current state had a few measurables that could be tied to training: 1) the CSAT was poor, and 2) the calls took too long. These were both data points that could be used in order to do an ROI analysis. So after a month on the floor, I compared the new batches of call center employees who had gone through the revamped training, with the previous few groups who went through the previous training. I used sample sizes that were around the same (around 100), and the same time period to try and do an apples to apples comparison. What I found was that for the new batch of employees, the CSAT scores had gone up by 10%, and their calls were 2 minutes shorter. And the only thing that had changed was the training. This was great news. Customers were happier because they got their issues resolved faster and more accurately, and the business was happier because those metrics are what they live and breathe by. Not only had we shown that there was a measurable difference in quality, but we could now look at how much we were saving per call. By assuming the employees made on average $15/hour, with a 100 employees, over time those 2 minutes per call were going to add up. All this money saved just by introducing a new training program catered to employee needs, and doing an effective training evaluation after it was implemented. Do you want to know more about conducting an evaluation of a training project? Trying to figure out which data to use or how to get started? Contact Enspire for a consultation today! The post Assess Training Success! appeared first on Enspire.

You can find a TED talk on just about any subject. Being in the learning biz, and many of us parents to boot, we were drawn to Adora Svitak‘s 2010 talk that deftly inverts the adult-as-teacher-child-as-student paradigm. As noted on the TED site, Adora "says the world needs "childish" thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and especially optimism. Kids’ big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grownups’ willingness to learn from children as much as to teach." Watch Adora’s 2010 speech below.   The post Learning from Our Kids appeared first on Enspire.

Houndstooth Executive Producer Mark Heaps will deliver the Creative Keynote at PePcon 2015, a leading conference in the print and e-publishing fields, this Wednesday, 3 June at 9:00 AM. Formerly at Google, Apple, and Duarte in creative lead roles, Mark is an Adobe Certified Expert and Community Professional with 20 years of experience. Mark’s keynote will help creative service providers hone their client-facing skills and guide engagements to a successful conclusion. Bringing his long Adobe experience to bear, Mark will also speak on Tuesday, 2 June from 4-5:00 PM on Shockingly Helpful Tips for Photoshop and Illustrator. Find more info on the complete PePcon schedule, here!   The post Houndstooth at PePcon appeared first on Enspire.

Enspire is pleased to announce that the joint Enspire / MasterCard team have won a Silver Brandon Hall award in the 2014 Best Use of Mobile Learning category. MasterCard needed a compelling, mobile-enabled interactive program that transformed employees into advocates for the organization. This brand training, which serves as the first level of a three-part training initiative called EDGE (Employees Driving the Global Enterprise), delivers a wealth of information that empowers MasterCard employees to deliver the company’s value message, both face-to-face and on social media. MasterCard EDGE is designed for all MasterCard employees - people with a wide variety of experience in different sectors of the organization. Nearly three-fourths of MasterCard’s employees were born after 1965. To address the needs of this diverse group, MasterCard and Enspire devised a goal-based learning experience. Using a  morning train commute to work as a metaphor, learners accept a series of challenges, interact with characters, and gain insights into the MasterCard brand. Deployment on tablet devices allowed the experience to make use of new HTML5 API’s  for navigation through  the experience. At the same time, jettisoning a Flash or shrinkwrapped software approach facilitated a completely custom approach, with contemporary media and technical implementation. EDGE also won the Award of Excellence from Diversity Journal in August. (See page 36). Contact Enspire to learn more about EDGE, or any of our hundreds of other successful programs.     The post Enspire Wins Silver appeared first on Enspire.

AUSTIN TX  - 5 June 2015 - Training Industry has named Enspire, a leading developer of training content and media, to its Content Development Companies Watchlist for 2015. Training Industry has named Enspire to the list, or as a Top 20 Content Development company,  for 4 years in a row. In 2014 Enspire was also named as a Top 20 Gamification Company in recognition of its 15 years of simulation and game work for Fortune 500 clients. Selection to the 2015 Content Development Watch List was based on the following criteria: Industry visibility, innovation and impact Capability to develop and deliver multiple types of content Company size and growth potential Depth and breadth of subject matter expertise Quality of clients Geographic reach Each company who participates undergoes extensive research, including thorough analysis of its capabilities, experience, and expertise. "We are very proud to be included in Training Industry’s Content Development Company watchlist," said Enspire and Houndstooth CEO Mary Maltbie. "Our team has worked extremely hard to deliver great learning content through all of our capabilities - online, blended, in physical spaces such as workshops and museums, and through our commercial media." Enspire and its Houndstooth experience design and media arm have developed internal and consumer-facing training since 2001. The post Enspire named Top Content Company appeared first on Enspire.

If you could time travel back 8000 years to an Indo-European speaking village and ask somebody to tell you a joke,  you’d probably get this one: "If you don’t like the weather, stick around. It’ll change!"  Ha ha! Humans throughout time have told that joke because weather humor is 1) unfailingly hilarious, and 2) offers up the makings of inoffensive, vanilla conversation mumble-able in elevators, office parties, village market days, or periods of awkward silence.  Our fair city of Austin, Texas is no exception to the changing weather rule, but it offers relief for the climate-overwhelmed through a greatly simplified system. The folks who plan Austin music festivals know this, and craftily park their events on blocks of calendar time when the weather inflects from one of its two states to the other.  I diagrammed it out for easy reference:   This year’s warm autumn breezes not only tell me it’s time for the Austin City Limits music festival to spin up like a dust devil a couple of blocks away, but (talk about burying the lead) they’ve carried Enspire and Houndstooth south! After nearly 13 years in our beloved 1940′s three story walk-up a stone’s throw from the University of Texas campus and several nice phở establishments, we’ve decamped to digs a mile south and at least two generations newer. We’ll miss some things about the old space (phở joints, proximity to pub next door) more than others (see "three story walk-up"). A good deal of great work was done and wonderful times had a 1708 Guadalupe. But the best things about Enspire and Houndstooth are our clients, our projects, and our co-workers. All of those three can be found at our new address in the Crescent building: 127 E Riverside Drive Suite 101 Austin, TX 78704 Oh! We have a rooftop deck, too - see the picture at the very top of the story. Come by and we’ll offer you a beer. The post We’ve moved! appeared first on Enspire.

Get Enspire’s 2015 #Medical Case Studies! Medical soft skills, #nurse critical care training, and #Cancer navigator training, and more. Get them, here: http://ow.ly/O028v The post Medical Case Studies appeared first on Enspire.

Enspire hosted its annual Oktoberfest celebration on Friday, 17 October. Inaugurating a new tradition, this year’s Fest was held on Enspire’s expansive rooftop deck with an excellent (see earlier blog post) view of downtown Austin. Previous celebrations had been held at Scholtz Garten, an establishment near our old offices that has been in continuous operation at the same location since 1866 - an artifact of Central Texas’ extremely large German and Czech populations. Everybody knows Oktoberfest is about beer, but that gives short shrift to the mass quantities of wurst, kraut, chickens, fish, ham hocks and pretzels consumed under German Fest tents. In Germany eating and drinking are cut with dancing and acres of carnival rides that agitate the collective into an appropriate state of Gemütlichkeit. Enspire’s satellite Austin Oktoberfest achieved the same with plenty of beer, spirits, food, and tours of our new office for Enspire clients, alums, and friends and family members. The post Gruß vom Oktoberfest! appeared first on Enspire.