Where's the partisan tonight?

It has now been more than a year of me noticing a very worrisome trend on my social media timeline - the trend of sever partisan attitudes. Here is a simple algorithm that will easily predict how a partisan person will react for the 4 situations that occur.

For the Party / Person you support

1. If they do something good, post it all over social media.

2. If they do something bad,

    a. Keep quiet. Don't speak a word!

    b. Find a justification of the deed or something to disassociate the deed from the party / person and publicize

    c. Find something bad done by a party / person you don't like and post about that all over social media

For the Party / Person you don't support

3. If the party / person you don't support, does something good

    (What nonsense? A party that I don't support can't do any good)

    a. Find even the smallest of things that are or can be problems in this good thing, magnify them and project that as the evil hidden in the good all over social media.

    b. Find something remotely similar that has been done by the party / person you support, and amplify that saying we did it first - they are only copying

    c. Keep quiet. Don't say anything.

4. If the party / person you don't support, does something bad, this is it - the moment you have been waiting for - go the whole hog, spare no effort to bad-mouth all over social media!

Just because you don't like someone, doesn't mean that the person is capable of no good and just because you like someone, doesn't mean that the person is capable of no bad!

And your posting stuff may or may not change the readers' opinion about the party / person in question, it may change the readers' opinion about you!

Making your IDs say I Do!

In continuation with my previous post, where I had discussed the IDentity Crysis, in this post, I am trying to address the issue of Instructional Designers not staying long enough!

From my experience and discussions with several people in the industry, IDs leave for a variety of reasons, some of which are common across any professions - more pay, personal reasons etc. I would like to focus on the very ID-specific issues that arise:

• Accidental IDs: I entered the field of ID / e-learning in 1994, at which time, it was a newly-born industry, not many had heard of and most of us who joined, did not plan on becoming IDs.In fact, I have rubbed shoulders with a lawyer, a molecular biologist, a hotel management professional, a exercise physiologist, a Harappan researcher - you name it, we had people from all types of professions enter the field of ID. So, it is natural that many of them were here to try this out and obviously, not every one of these will stick on and grow.
• Creative IDs: Then there were the class of people who were highly creative and needed to be engaged in very creative and challenging work all the time. But, that is not always the case  - most of the time, IDs needed to be doing "non-creative" grunge work - copying material from some source files, capturing steps of a software etc. And even if they do get actual creative work, there is the dreaded standards to deal with! And so, this tribe after enduring this for some time, leave to join another organization, hoping that creative work will come their way or change their field completely!
• Managerial IDs: This class of people want to grow either in terms of number of people reporting or in terms of money or both! And in the Indian context, that typically means growing out of the pure ID role and moving in the direction of ID reviews, Managing ID resources or project management. And therefore, we either lose a good ID or we never had a good ID to begin with.

Each of these types need to be addressed and can be addressed...

• The accidental IDs need to be clearly communicated with upfront and one has to take a decision on whether one can afford to have them trained, work for a bit only to leave. There is always the option of understanding what they want to do and see if that can be achieved through an alternate path via the ID route. Conversion is difficult, so you may be better off with a temporary / contractual arrangement, or not taking them on at all!
• Creative IDs are slightly easier to address - again the key is expectation management. Having a good visibility into the type of projects and a fair distribution of creative and non-creative work is one way to go! The other way is to reconcile to the fact that work may always be boring and looks for other ways of unleashing creativity - an official blog, paint the office, conduct team training  / internal workshops etc. Of course, part-timing is another great way to address this - do serious / boring work at office and then do creative stuff on your own time! BTW: Injecting creativity is possible in almost all situations, so more often than not, this issue can be addressed if you yourself or your ID leader has enough experience.
• The managerial IDs can be dealt with in many different ways. The main one is to ensure that experienced IDs are well paid and in order for that it is important to show them the need for IDs to be involved in sales and solution design. Most IDs will be okay mentoring and reviewing other IDs. It is the business and reporting aspect that may make them all jittery! Again, part-timing is a wonderful option here too!

I guess in the next couple of months, I will be able to report back on whether and how I have been able to implement my own suggestions!

The IDentity Crysis

Yes, you read that right! It is about Identity of Instructional Designers (IDs) and it certainly makes me want to cry!!!

When companies decide they need IDs, one is never sure, what it is they want to get done from these IDs. So, before getting into the whole crisis thing, a little bit on Instructional Design. What is it? While there are a myriad different ways in which it is described, I am satisfied to go with the definition I found on Wikipedia:

Instructional Design is the practice of creating "instructional experiences which make the acquisition of knowledge and skill more efficient, effective, and appealing."

Please note the following:

• Creating instructional experiences
• Which makes acquisition more efficient, effective and appealing

Now let us see what many Instructional Designers end up doing:

• Convert existing material as is into e-learning: The existing material may be in the form of documents, presentations, or worse video and sometimes just audio! So, the job of an ID is restricted to:
• transcribing text from audio / video
• copy-pasting text from pdf / ppt
• chunking content into screens for pdf
• think up of graphical representation of the topic being taught
• Convert existing material into e-learning with interactivity: Yes, the previous category exists. You might argue that e-learning without any interaction is pointless, but the reality is that to save a few pennies and to get a tick-in-the-box implementation of e-learning, IDs are used for simple conversion. Coming back to this category, here the additional work that the ID does is:
• creates interactions (mostly MCQs) based on the content
• slightly better off - creates some tabbed interactions
• Convert manuals into e-learning: Although, this comes under the general realm of conversion, this requires even more rudimentary skills:
• take every step in the manual and put it up screen-by-screen
• if it is a software manual, then the screen captures are also done by the ID using one of the several capture utilities

I am sure you get the general idea... IDs don't just do conversion you say! Oh! I agree with you, the other thing that is a hit these days is getting IDs to simply create a bank of questions - a whole lot of them - bulk produce questions at break-neck productivity - 5 minutes per question or some such speed.

• Generally skim through the content and think up of as many MCQs as required
• In some cases, think up of some scenarios and then create multiple MCQs by simply changing the variables in the scenario

So, as you can see, hardly any emphasis on creating instructional experiences or anything which ensures efficient, effective and appealing acquisition! Oh, you might get someone to say - get me some jazzy, eye-catching graphics or create a game around this - but that is usually only eye-candy, with hardly any focus on learning!

There is a very small percentage of IDs who are lucky enough to get actual ID work, and I am sure many would agree that even that is not guaranteed all the time. So, many a times, even the most experienced IDs would be gritting their teeth working on some project that is purportedly an ID project.

Refusing non-ID work is the luxury afforded by the lucky few, who don't have bills to pay and mouth to feed. Otherwise, it is an uphill task, trying to convince a stakeholder to go through the full cycle of:

• Analysing what the audience needs
• What are the objectives that need to be fulfilled
• What is the best way of fulfilling these objectives

And only then getting pen to hit paper.

As Instructional Designers, what is it that we can do:

• We need to become evangelists - at least the more senior ones and we need to convince both clients and sales teams that doing the right thing is the profitable thing in the long run
• For this, we need to come out of our shells (a lot of IDs are introverts - sorry about the generalizations) and learn more about the business drivers and customer mindsets. We need to go for more sales meetings and delve deep into the solution designing aspect.

In continuing with what I had written in my last post - Keeping the main thing the main thing,

If we do not know what is the main thing, we will never be able to keep the main thing the main thing

And that is what being aware of the business compulsions and how these can be mitigated through proper use of ID will help creating the virtuous cycle:

• Quality of learning material will improve
• Learners will learn and perform better
• Stakeholders will appreciate the improvement
• Instructional Designers will get more credit
• Instructional Design will emerge as a good career option
• Instructional Designers will get better work to do

A good analogy would be professions like Interior Designing or Fashion Designing, where anyone and everyone including a mason or a tailor would profess to be a designer, but they are not. Similarly, if we do our job diligently and instead of converting content, if we convert stakeholders into believers in Instructional Design, the world will be a more learned place!

So, the next time you do a conversion project:

Don't Convert Content, Convert Stakeholders