RECOMMENDED CONTENT

Here is one of the principles that I use for faster, cheaper, and better training design:

Avoid creating content. Instead, create structured learning activities that incorporate existing content.

Here's my take on the history of content dissemination: In ancient times, when content was transmitted by word of mouth, priests and scholars hoarded and controlled it in order to withhold information, keep the general public in ignorance, and hold on to power. The first breakthrough occurred with the advent of the printing press. Content became more easily available to anyone who can afford the price of books. However, a significant amount of content was withheld from the public.

The impact of the Gutenberg print revolution is a relatively minor phenomenon compared with the impact of the more recent Internet revolution that started a couple of decades ago and is still accelerating. Content is freely and abundantly available, at least on this side of the digital divide. Authors, bloggers, podcasters, wiki users, commentators, and television networks are competing with each other to provide accurate, useful, and up-to-date content, free of charge. Traditional policies, procedures, and superstitious behaviors associated with print publishing are rapidly disappearing. This does not mean that the computer and the Internet are replacing printed content. Actually, on-demand publishing and online sales are increasing the number of print publication and speeding up their distribution.

Testing my Claim

If you want to test my claim of abundance of content, choose any training topic and conduct a web search at amazon.com. Follow this up by googling the word or phrase to discover the astounding amount of online content.

Here are the results that I got a yesterday when I checked out the topic of "leadership". Amazon.com yielded 17,413 books. Google yielded nearly a billion (910,000,000, to be specific) items. I also searched for the more specialized topic of "hazardous materials". Results: 1151 books available from amazon.com and 70 million documents are available online.

"Content is not available"

Given these results, training designers cannot rationalize the creation of new content by claiming that content is not available for their training topic. Even if we assume that only one percent of the books and only one-tenth of a percent of the online documents are usable, we still have enough content to keep us (and our learners) meaningfully busy. My suggestion is that we assemble various combinations of the existing content materials (fully respecting copyright regulations, of course) and design learning activities that require and reward interaction with the content.

When training designers complain that their topics are so specialized, protected, or new that no content material is currently available, I usually challenge them. There are always user manuals, technical specifications, or job aids floating around someplace. In the extreme case where no technical documentation is available and only a few people have the esoteric knowledge, we still have access to the content inside their crania. In this case, we can produce instant content by interviewing subject-matter experts and recording the results on video or audiotape.

The abundance of content becomes more clear when we take into account these three different types:

Instructional content is structured for training purposes. This type of content include training manuals, facilitator's guides, and self-instructional materials and workbooks.
Structured content is organized for reading purposes. This type includes popular and specialized books for the typical readers.
Unstructured content includes raw pieces of information created for purposes other than serving the reading public or the learning group. For example, a list of quotes about leadership or a set of customer complaints belong to this category.

“We cannot use the content in the current form”

In whatever form the content currently exists, we can design effective learning activities to incorporate them. Various activity templates are available for use with different types of content sources.

Textra games for use with printed materials
Application games for use with job aids
Double exposure activities for use with video or audio recording
Item processing activities for use with unstructured pieces of information
Structured sharing activities for utilizing learners' experiences, knowledge, and opinions
Interactive lectures for use with subject-matter experts
Bernie Dodge's WebQuest approach for use with online content

The complaint that learners cannot use the original content is based on the assumption that everyone except instructional designers is incompetent.

Learning by Interacting

Here's something that I have always noticed about the process of instructional design. The instructional designer reviews, analyzes, and organizes the content into some structured form. In the end, learners are bored with the dead content. In contrast, I use templates that require participants to use explore partially structured or unstructured content and reorganize them into a form that makes sense to them. The result of this dynamic process is an in-depth understanding, mastery, recall, and application of the content.

There is ample experimental support that letting people analyze and manipulate the content (as a part of peer tutoring and peer coaching) results in effective learning by the participants, including the tutors and the coaches. My friend Sarah Bowman sum this phenomenon up in a pithy saying: "In a training situation, whoever talks the most learns the most." The ancient Hindus :-) had apithier saying: Docendo discimus (teach to learn).