Thinking of Going to Graduate School?

I often get asked by people in our field (the learning-and-performance field) about how to select a graduate school and how to approach graduate school once in. Maybe because I spent so much time in graduate school (10 years), I think I can offer some ideas:

  1. Start reading the research now to find out whose research you admire, etc.
  2. The ideal is to find a professor you want to work with, although this is very difficult.
  3. Find a program that is well-respected and offers several professors who are top notch. Go to a school with an active colloquy or open research-discussion sessions.
  4. If you can, go to one of the best schools. It will help you later as you network your way to career postings you want.
  5. Expect a long and difficult haul. Expect wonderful rewards if you put in the effort.
  6. Avoid professors who are evil. Seriously, there are some who are just dysfunctional. Ask for student references and talk to real students who have gone through the program. Ask for the good the bad the ugly.
  7. Find a program with a very strong research methodology approach. If you graduate without knowing how to evaluate research, you won’t do anybody any good. I’ve seen too many smart people who just shy away from the whole research enterprise because they’ve never been prepared for it.
  8. Get a reading list of the articles and books used in the required courses. Ask around to see if these are written by the top thinkers in the field. Do not confuse "top thinkers" with "most-popular thinkers."
  9. My own bias is to focus on the fundamentals of learning at the same time focusing on what is practical, but this is hard to find.
  10. Be prepared to have a very thick skin. Be open to ideas. Relish them, but stick to your guns if you know deep down that you’ve got an intriguing idea.
  11. Ask the professors what journals they publish in. Determine if these are top tier or lesser tier journals. Aim for the top tier.
  12. Beware of the programs labeled as "adult learning, curriculum studies" and the like. These often are weak in the foundations of human learning (but not always). If you go to a school focused on instructional technology, make sure you find one with good background in learning.
  13. If you want to build learning interventions when you get out of school, don’t just focus on academics, build stuff while in graduate school that you can show to prospective employers later.
  14. Note that the best development shops are very skeptical of graduates of instructional-design programs because many come out of those programs with rigidly inflexible mental models of how to build learning. This unbearable hardness of being is often combined with an arrogance that leaves these graduates with little ability to learn. Bottom line: Find a school, and adopt an attitude, that is inquisitive, open, skeptical, and hungry for knowledge. Find a way to test your ideas and learning interventions using valid methods so you can get the feedback loops you need to continually improve what you’re doing and thinking.
  15. Begin to take control of your learning now, before you get into school. In the doctoral program, it’s 95% you.
  16. Realize that when you start reading in the field, it will feel like you are a complete idiot. This is normal as you learn the language of the thinkers and researchers. On the other hand, as you learn more and more, don’t forget how the real world talks.
  17. Most of the time, but not always, PhD degrees are more research-oriented than EdD degrees, which is a good thing.

Note that I write these recommendations because I believe we need many more people in our field who can bridge the gap between research and practice. If you’re completely not cut out to do research, that’s fine. Be practical. But get yourself enough research background so you can evaluate research claims when you see them. Beware of a fear of research. Fear usually comes from a lack of exposure. Expose yourself.

Politics in Workplace Learning

Politics yuck, politics tricks, politics risk, politics fix, politics rules, politics is. Truth is, politics is the hand-to-hand application of anecdotal and scientific wisdom on human learning and cognition.

Obamamccain

Here in the United States, we are in the middle of an exciting and critical Presidential election campaign. I love observing politics because I find it intriguing from a learning-and-cognition standpoint. Here are some things we (as learning professionals) can learn from the political wizards.

  1. Repetition is worth repeating.
  2. Space your repetitions over time.
  3. Have powerful messengers repeat the key messages.
  4. Authentic messengers are listened to longer and with more engagement.
  5. Messengers who lose credibility (or integrity) are doomed.
  6. Prioritize your messages. Brand your messages into a potent theme.
  7. Vary the delivery of your messages, but stay consistent in the underlying message and theme.
  8. Learning messages that are aligned with on-the-ground realities are the most powerful. It is only the very rarest of incumbents who can overcome a bad economy. It is only the rarest of learning messages that can overcome irrelevance or everyday business distractions.
  9. When your efforts or credibility are attacked, fight back hard and fast. When candidates are attacked, they attack back, disputing the assertions. If your training efforts are impugned or criticized anywhere in your company, go on the offensive. Dispute the claims immediately and publicly. Let people know public criticism of your efforts will be met with vigorous rebuttals. Pull the criticizer aside privately and ask them not to continue their claims. Explain your realities. Educate them about the learning enterprise. Send out communications to key stakeholders disputing the claims, if not directly then indirectly by highlighting successes. After stopping the bleeding, listen to the complaints to see if there is truth in them. Fix the problems as soon as you can. Go back to the complainers and tell them how you fixed the problems. Ask the complainers for their support and ideas going forward. Remind them of your need for resources, support, etc. Help them solve their business problems. If you do get public complaints, see those as a warning sign that you are screwing up big time. Reach out and get better feedback on how you’re doing and how you’re doing politically. Build better feedback into your learning measurements and designs. Remember, if you’re a leader of the learning enterprise in your company, you have a responsibility to ensure that the learning-and-performance efforts will work. If your training efforts have a bad reputation, the learning will never get the support it needs to move from learning to application and you’ll never get the resources you need to get real results.

Bottom line: Embrace politics; it’s only human.

Article on Engaging eLearning

Here’s a nice article, sponsored by Adobe, and written by Allison Rossett and Antonia Chan (2008, June) that provides some very nice descriptions and examples about engaging eLearning design. Check it out.

Have Any Training & Development Departments Asked to be Political?

Have any of you been asked to be political as part of your role as a learning professional? Has your training and development apparatus been charged with manipulating employee voting behavior or political action?

This story from Slate, about Walmart’s attempts to marshal votes for Republicans, got me thinking about this.

Let us know if you know anything about training and development departments being utilized to influence elections.

What would you do if asked to develop a training initiative to modify your learners’ political thinking and action? Would you do it if the training would support your preferred candidate? Would it be ethical if the training was simply designed to encourage voter turnout (realizing of course that voter turnout/registration is usually targeted to push the election one way or another)? Would it be ethical to use the training and development department if the training was truly non-partisan, not favoring either candidate or party?

Training Awards are Poor Metric

The "Awards" that proliferate in our industry are largely a bunch of hooey. Bill Ellet, Editor of Training Media Review, in a more measured tone than mine, has some prescient thoughts on this.

Be Skeptical of Brain-Based Learning

I’ve been skeptical of claims of so-called brain-based learning for years. Someday perhaps we’ll be able to link analysis of brain function to behavior and learning, but we’re not there yet.

Here is a brilliant YouTube video by Daniel Willingham, professor at the University of Virginia, that does a great job explaining the problems with brain-based learning. His audience seems to be schools and universities, but his arguments hold for work-learning as well.

Measurement Best-Practices Review

This Friday online, I’m leading a discussion on measurement best-practices during my Brown Bag Learning event. It’s a 30-minute review of the a new job aid I’ve created to help you do better measurement. As usual, it’s research-based!!

Click to get the job aid.

Click to register (or learn more) about the webinosh.

All Media Forced to be Sold for Cheap

In a provocative article today in the New York Times (June 6, 2008), Paul Krugman makes the case that all media (books, music, articles, software, etc.) providers/creators will be forced to lower prices significantly or give away their products for free. The new business model will involve selling ancillary services or products.

This will not only produce a profound shift in how the world works, but it will affect the learning-and-performance industry as well. For example, no longer will I be able to earn practically nothing for producing some of the best research-to-practice stuff on the planet. Instead, I’ll be able to earn nothing at all for the research reports I produce. No worries, I’m all right with that. I’ve got my consulting and speaking to support me.

But really, all you training providers ought to peer deeply into the future. How will this affect you?

Here’s some wild ideas:

  1. Off-the-shelf e-learning courses will get really good and be sold really cheaply to wide audiences and all the small e-learning shops across the world will collapse into three to five big powerhouses, at least for generic topics like customer-service basics, leadership basics, Microsoft Excel, etc. (maybe just within countries at first because of the need to be culturally appropriate)
  2. Companies that sell vast collections of mediocre e-learning are doomed.
  3. Custom training vendors will have to focus on learning that is strategic to their clients success and/or tailored. We’ll all have to get better talking to the business people.
  4. Training will have low profit margins, but training with consulting will have sustainable profit margins.
  5. LMS’s (and the coming talent-development upgrades) will be given away cheap, but installation, training, and maintenance will be sold for reasonable margins. Moodle will win. Well, Moodle could get other open-source competition.
  6. Training departments (or talent-development departments) will be able to purchase some things more cheaply.
  7. All the e-learning development tools that proliferate today will disappear or be reduced to niche segmentation as two to five dominant players provide relatively inexpensive yet powerful authoring tools. Think Captivate at $259 in five years, $79 in ten years.
  8. Training vendors may actually be forced to prove their value as the market shrinks and competition heats up. Can you say control-group studies done by independent unbiased evaluators. (I’m probably biased in wishing for this).
  9. Training vendors may actually be forced to pay attention to the learning research to enable them to actually get better results so they will look good on valid evaluations. (I’m probably biased in wishing for this).

     

Okay, what do you think?

 

As for my research/consulting practice, don’t worry, I’m already there. I basically make 80% of my money doing consulting, speaking and keynotes, workshops, learning audits, and providing instructional-design help. My research is done for love, because it’s the right thing to do, and because it makes me—in my not-so-humble opinion, extraordinarily good at providing consulting, workshops, etc.

Brown Bag Learning

I’ve decided to offer free webinars from time to time on very short subjects. I did my first one last week, and it went pretty well, except for a bit of operator error on my part.

In these 30-minute sessions, I’m going to focus on some of the most important issues in learning design.

Each session includes:

  • Learning News

    (brief humorous take on the week’s news)
  • Stone Pebble Nugget
    (exploration of key issue in learning design)
  • Ask Dr. Thalheimer
    (Ask me anything — think free consulting)

 
 

Upcoming Online Sessions:
(Click below to sign up)

Friday June 6th
Feedback on Correct Answers

Friday June 20th
Minimizing Forgetting 

 
 


Previous Online Sessions:

Friday May 30, 2008
The Learning Landscape

Thiagi Instructional Design Guru on Video

I just spent an hour and forty minutes watching Thiagi on a YouTube video. That’s a lot of time, but it was worth it.

Thiagi (whose last name is too long to spell, and like Prince or Madonna it’s not really necessary) is not only one of our fields’ foremost personalities and presenters, but he is also a brilliantly creative instructional designer. I may not agree with each and every one of his assertions, but every time I hear him speak I am compelled to listen for wisdom that I myself don’t yet own. I am challenged to new ways of thinking. I am humbled by his encyclopedic knowledge of learning-design methods and his ability to pair learning needs with that encyclopedia.

If I was a learning executive with a tough learning-design problem, he would be one of the people I’d call to get useful original ideas on the issue.

As you watch the video, you might want to skip forward to 0:05:40 to get through the introductory comments about the program at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.