21st December 2022

Neon Elephant Award Announcement

Dr. Will Thalheimer, Principal at TiER1 Performance, Founder of Work-Learning Research, announces the winner of the 2022 Neon Elephant Award, given this year to Donald Clark, for writing the book, Learning Experience Design: How to Create Effective Learning that Works, and for his collation of the Greatest Minds on Learning (both in the podcast series with John Helmer and in Donald’s tireless work researching and curating critical ideas and thinkers in his Plan B blog).

Click here to learn more about the Neon Elephant Award…

 

2022 Award Winner – Donald Clark

Donald Clark is a successful entrepreneur, professor, researcher, author, blogger, and speaker. He is an internationally-renowned thinker in the field of learning-technology, having worked in EdTech for over 30 years; having been a leader in many successful learning-technology businesses (both as an executive and board member); and having written extensively on a wide range of topics related to learning and development—in books, articles, and his legendary blog. Relatively early in his career, Donald earned success as one of the original founders of Epic Group plc, a leading online learning company in the UK, an enterprise subsequently floated on the Stock Market in 1996 and sold in 2005. Since then, as Donald has described it, he has felt “free from the tyranny of employment,” using this privilege to the advantage of the learning field. Donald has becoming an advocate for research-based practices and intelligent uses of learning technologies. He has also founded, run, and supported learning-technology enterprises, which has further helped spread good learning practices.

Donald Clark’s most recent book—Learning Experience Design: How to Create Effective Learning that Works—stands above and apart from most writing on Learning Experience Design. It is fully and thoroughly inspired by the scientific research on learning and on real-world experience in using and developing learning technologies. Chapter after chapter it shares an inspiring introduction, a robust review of best practices, and a concise set of practical recommendations. Anyone practicing learning experience design should buy this book today—study it and apply it’s recommendations. Your learners and organizations will thank you. You will build wildly more effective learning!

Donald Clark’s compilations of our field’s best thinkers and ideas is legendary—or should be! Over many decades, he has tirelessly curated an almost endless treasure-trove of golden nuggets on many of the most important ideas in the learning field. This past year, he has brought these to a larger audience through his excellent collaboration with John Helmer, known most famously for his Learning Hack podcast. Donald Clark’s and John Helmer’s Great Minds on Learning webcast and podcast collaboration is fantastic. Donald’s written reviews provide us with an overview of the deep history of the learning field. Here is a blog post that lists many of Donald’s reviews of the great thinkers in our field.

Notable contributions from Donald Clark:


With Gratitude

In his decades of work, Donald Clark has been a tireless advocate for improvements and innovation in the field of learning-and-development and learning technology. He often refers to his work as “provocative,” and deserves admiration for (1) urging the learning field to embrace scientifically-informed practices, (2) urging us to be more forward looking in our embrace of learning technologies (particularly AI), and (3) being one of our field’s preeminent historians—reminding us of the rich and valuable work of researchers, writers, and practitioners from the past centuries to today. It is an honor to recognize Donald as this year’s winner of the Neon Elephant Award.

Click here to learn more about the Neon Elephant Award…

 

 

21st December 2021

Neon Elephant Award Announcement

Dr. Will Thalheimer, Principal at TiER1 Performance, Founder of Work-Learning Research, announces the winner of the 2021 Neon Elephant Award, given to two people this year, Clark Quinn and Patti Shank. Clark Quinn for writing the book, Learning Science for Instructional Designers. Patti Shank for writing the book Write Better Multiple-Choice Questions to Assess Learning—and for their many years translating learning research into practical recommendations.

Click here to learn more about the Neon Elephant Award…

2021 Award Winners – Clark Quinn and Patti Shank

Clark Quinn, PhD is an internationally-recognized consultant and thought-leader in learning science, learning technology and organizational learning. Clark holds a doctorate in Cognitive Psychology from the University of California at San Diego. Since 2001, Clark has been consulting, researching, writing, and speaking through his consulting practice, Quinnovation (website). Clark has been at the forefront of some of the most important trends in workplace learning, including his early advocacy for mobile learning, his work with the Internet Time Group advocating for a greater emphasis on workplace learning, and his many efforts to bring research-based wisdom to elearning design. With the publication of his new book, Clark again shows leadership—now in the cause of giving instructional designers a clear and highly-readable guide to the learning sciences.

Clark is the author of numerous books. The following are representative:

 

Patti Shank, PhD

Patti Shank, PhD, is an internationally-recognized learning analyst, writer, and translational researcher in the learning, performance, and talent space. Dr. Shank holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership and Innovation, Instructional Technology from the University of Colorado, Denver and a Masters degree in Education and Human Development from George Washington University. Since 1996, Patti has been consulting, researching, and writing through her consulting practice, Learning Peaks LLC (pattishank.com). As the best research-to-practice professionals tend to do, Patti has extensive experience as a practitioner, including roles such as training specialist, training supervisor, and manager of training and education. Patti has also played a critical role collaborating with the workplace learning’s most prominent trade associations—working, sometimes quixotically, to encourage the adoption of research-based wisdom for learning.

Patti is the author of numerous books, focusing not only on evidence-based practices, but also on online learning, elearning, and learning assessment. The following are her most recent books:


With Gratitude

In their decades of work, both Patti Shank and Clark Quinn have lived careers of heroic effort, perseverance, and passion. Their love for the learning-and-development field is deep and true. They don’t settle for half the truth, they don’t settle for half measures. But rather, they show their mettle even when they get pushback, even when times are tough, even when easier paths might call. It is an honor to recognize Patti and Clark as this year’s winners of the Neon Elephant Award.

 

Click here to learn more about the Neon Elephant Award…

From Will Thalheimer

A PERSONAL ANNOUNCEMENT

After 22 years as a solo consultant at Work-Learning Research, I’m making a dazzling, flying leap to a whole new mountain. I am thrilled to announce that I have joined TiER1 Performance as a Principal!

Some of you who have followed my work over the years may have questions. “Why, Will Thalheimer, are you making this leap? Why TiER1? What about all the articles, documents, posts, videos, and models you’ve created—will they still be available? If my organization needs you to provide guidance, consulting, workshops, or speaking, can we still get your assistance? What about your public availability? Will you still pay $5,000 for the Learning Styles Challenge? Will you still be a leader at LDA? Will you still wear blue shoes to your keynotes?”

These are all great questions! Thanks for asking!

If you prefer to skip to my video announcement, you can see that below or access it on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/Gh7ryPf2EDM.

Who is TiER1 Performance?

TiER1 is an amazing and benevolent powerhouse of an organization! It’s a full-service performance-improvement company that helps organizations activate their business strategies through their people. TiER1 is employee-owned and a Certified B-Corporation, meaning it looks out for customers, employees, communities, and the environment. TiER1’s mission is to improve organizations through the performance of people—to help people do their best work, and to build a better world.

I am in awe of TiER1’s results in helping a vast array of companies and organizations, including Abbott, Boston Beer Company, Delta, Lilly, FedEx, GE, Google, NASA, National Science Foundation, Proctor & Gamble, Salesforce, and Takeda.

I am in awe of TiER1’s people! The range of expertise is amazing: eLearning, change management, organizational development, cognitive science, creative, communications, technology, industrial-organizational psychology, project management, performance experience design—and most importantly, a getting-stuff-done mindset.

I am in awe of how my TiER1 colleagues work with clients and work with each other. I am in awe of TiER1’s values! I am in awe of TiER1’s leadership, which comes from everyone in the organization, by the way, and also from the top! I’m sure I’m in the glow of the honeymoon, but I couldn’t be happier to be a member of the TiER1 team!

To sign up for the TiER1 Performance Performance-Matters Newsletter grab this link: https://tier1performance.com/performance-matters-newsletter-signup/

What About Your Work-Learning Research Assets?

The Work-Learning Research materials and website will not go away! Everything will still be free to the public. I will still maintain the website in my spare time, and you’ll still be able to stay in touch with me via my various websites and mailing lists.

What About Your Books?

I’m still working on the second edition of my Performance-Focused Learner Survey book (It’s 99.34% written). Probable publication date will be mid 2021. I’m also still working on my new book, The CEOs Guide to Training, eLearning & Work: Reshaping Learning into a Competitive Advantage. Probable publication date early 2022, but I’m going to try to get this out earlier if I can. You will learn about the release of these books if you’re on one of my mailing lists. See below.

What About Your Public Activities?

I will still make myself available—when scheduling allows—to share research-inspired practical wisdom through keynotes, conference presentations, webinars, podcasts, articles, blog posts, and more. Matt Richter and I will continue our Truth In Learning Podcast. I will continue to lead my Presentation Science Boot Camp online workshop and my Performance-Focused Learner Survey online workshop—now through TiER1 Performance. I will still be active in LDA (the Learning Development Accelerator), leading with Matt Richter and the Executive Advisory Board, and facilitating Learning Insights Weekly, a weekly collaborative learning experience for LDA members. I will also be leading work-performance-focused learning events for TiER1’s Performance Institute—an incredible new learning space coming in March. Sign up below to be notified.

Are You Still Available for Consulting, Speaking, Workshops?

YES! I’m still the same charming consultant you’ve always known and loved, but now I can work in partnership with an amazing team—a full-service performance-improvement company. Where before, I could only do small to midsize projects, now I can work with my TiER1 teammates to take on huge and strategic projects, helping your organization transform its practices, pivot its business strategy, reimagine its L&D function, build a learning-measurement system, organize major change initiatives, build out a whole curriculum of online learning, and much, much more. Also, stay tuned for something I will be helping to give birth to—the TiER1 Performance Institute.

What About Those Blue Shoes?

The blue shoes will still be my go-to option, but more important even than a comfortable signature style, let us all hope that someday soon we will all be together in the same room—able to once again admire each other’s shoes!
Best of all, BLUE is TiER1’s dominant branding color!

How Can I Get in Touch with You?

First, I recommend you sign up for the TiER1 Performance Matters newsletter. Here’s the link: https://tier1performance.com/performance-matters-newsletter-signup/

Second, if you want to set up a meeting with me to talk about your organization’s needs, here’s my calendar link.

Finally, if you’d like to send me an email, you can do that by putting the pieces together: w . thalheimer @ tier1 performance .com

Sorry for making you do some work on that email, but I would prefer less spam! SMILE

My Announcement Video

In today’s video world, some of you may prefer my six-minute video announcement.

 

 

21st December 2020

Neon Elephant Award Announcement

Dr. Will Thalheimer, President of Work-Learning Research, Inc., announces the winner of the 2020 Neon Elephant Award, given to Mirjam Neelen and Paul Kirschner for writing the book, Evidence-Informed Learning Design: Use Evidence to Create Training Which Improves Performanceand for their many years publishing their blog 3-Star Learning Experiences.

Click here to learn more about the Neon Elephant Award…

2020 Award Winners – Mirjam Neelen and Paul Kirschner

Mirjam Neelen is one of the world’s most accomplished research-to-practice practitioners in the workplace learning field. On the practical side, Mirjam has played many roles. As of this writing, she is the Head of Global Learning Design and Learning Sciences at Novartis. She has been a Learning Experience Design Lead at Accenture and at the Learnovate Centre in Dublin, an Instructional Designer at Google, and Instructional Design Lead at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Mirjam utilizes evidence-informed wisdom in her work and also partners with Paul A. Kirschner in the 3-Star Learning Experience blog to bring research and evidence-informed insights to the workplace learning field. Mirjam is a member of the Executive Advisory Board of The Learning Development Accelerator.

Paul A. Kirschner is Professor Emeritus at the Open University of the Netherlands and owner of kirschner-ED, an educational consulting practice. Paul is an internationally recognized expert in learning and educational research, with many classic studies to his name. He has served as President of the International Society for the Learning Sciences, is an AERA (American Education Research Association) Research Fellow (the first European to receive this honor). He has published several very successful books: Ten Steps to Complex Learning, Urban Myths about Learning and Education. More Urban Myths about Learning and Education, and this year he published How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice with Carl Hendrick — as well as the book he and Mirjam are honored for here. Kirschner previously won the Neon Elephant Award in 2016 for the book Urban Myths about Learning and Education written with Pedro De Bruyckere and Casper D. Hulshof. Also, Paul’s co-author on the Ten-Steps book, Jeroen van Merriënboer, won the Neon-Elephant award in 2011.

Relevant Websites

Mirjam’s and Paul’s book, Evidence-Informed Learning Design was published only ten months ago, but has already swept the world as a book critical to learning architects and learning executives in their efforts to build the most effective learning designs. In my book review earlier this year I wrote, “Mirjam Neelen and Paul Kirschner have written a truly beautiful book—one that everyone in the workplace learning field should read, study, and keep close at hand. It’s a book of transformational value because it teaches us how to think about our jobs as practitioners in utilizing research-informed ideas to build maximally effective learning architectures.”

Mirjam Neelen and Paul Kirschner are the kind of research translators we should honor and emulate in the workplace learning field. They are unafraid in seeking the truth, passionate in sharing research- and evidence-informed wisdom, dogged in compiling research from scientific journals, and thoughtful in making research ideas accessible to practitioners in our field. It is an honor to recognize Mirjam and Paul as this year’s winners of the Neon Elephant Award.

 

Click here to learn more about the Neon Elephant Award…

Today is May 15, 2020.

This week, I asked my publisher to take all 254 remaining copies of Performance-Focused Smile Sheets and throw them in the recycling bin!

Yes! The book was one of the most important books written in the learning-and-development field over the last decade.

But I threw it out!

Why?

Because I’m writing a new, completely revised edition based on my experience developing learner surveys for organizations around the world. My learner-survey approach has been used at The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Bank, at Bloomberg, at Roche (Genentech), at Oxfam. It has revolutionized the moribund smile sheet!

But time doesn’t stand still, and I’ve gained a ton of insights building learner surveys over the past five years, hearing from clients and others, pilot testing learner surveys, and creating smile sheets for my own workshops.

The new book will have an all new set of recommended questions. It will have information on open-ended questions. It will describe how learner surveys fit into the new LTEM framework (the learning-evaluation model that is replacing the Kirkpatrick-Katzell Four-Level Model around the world). The new book will also share the thinking behind the new learning-evaluation approach, LEADS (Learning Evaluation As Decision Support), which I’m developing.

When will the new book be out? Within three months!

The book may still be available in some pipelines, but I’m working to get it off the shelves. My advice is don’t buy it!

Wait for the second edition, which I’ve re-titled, Performance-Focused Learner Surveys.

Stay tuned!

And sign up for my newsletter at https://www.worklearning.com/sign-up/ to be the first to know when the book is available.

Thanks for your patience,

= Will Thalheimer

The L&D Conference—a quixotic attempt to reinvent conferencing. Aligning conference activities with how we humans actually learn. It’s an online conference, taking place over six weeks. It enables attendees to learn in the flow of their work. So they can use what they’re learning, share with their teammates back in the office, try things out, get advice, stay motivated and inspired to apply their new learning. The conference is the brainchild of Matt Richter and I, and we are now joined by marketing guru Ashley Sinclair. We are so excited to share this with you!

Unfortunately, when people think of online conferences, they think mediocre webinars strung together over one or two or a few days. THIS AIN’T THAT! We would NEVER design a conference that ignored the fundamentals of human learning!

We think you’ll like:

  • our global conference
  • our world-class speakers
  • our research-inspired sessions
  • our rollicking debates
  • our panels
  • our discount house
  • our sponsorship opportunities

BUT IF YOU NEED MORE CONVINCING—or you think YOUR BOSS might need convincing, we can help.

Download this gorgeous document. It makes the business case for joining us in the first L&D Conference.

And actually, the document does more than that. It persuades, in glorious detail, why this will be the best, most effective, and boldest L&D conference ever.

 

Click this Sentence to See the Detailed Document

 

Click this Sentence to See the Less Detailed Webpage

 

The LEARNNOVATORS team (specifically Santhosh Kumar) asked if I would join them in their Crystal Balling with Learnnovators interview series, and I accepted! They have some really great people on the series, I recommend that you check it out!

The most impressive thing was that they must have studied my whole career history and read my publication list and watched my videos because they came up with a whole set of very pertinent and important questions. I was BLOWN AWAY—completely IMPRESSED! And, given their dedication, I spent a ton of time preparing and answering their questions.

It’s a two part series and here are the links:

Here are some of the quotes they pulled out and/or I’d like to highlight:

Learning is one of the most wondrous, complex, and important areas of human functioning.

The explosion of different learning technologies beyond authoring tools and LMSs is likely to create a wave of innovations in learning.

Data can be good, but also very very bad.

Learning Analytics is poised to cause problems as well. People are measuring all the wrong things. They are measuring what is easy to measure in learning, but not what is important.

We will be bamboozled by vendors who say they are using AI, but are not, or who are using just 1% AI and claiming that their product is AI-based.

Our senior managers don’t understand learning, they think it is easy, so they don’t support L&D like they should.

Because our L&D leaders live in a world where they are not understood, they do stupid stuff like pretending to align learning with business terminology and business-school vibes—forgetting to align first with learning.

We lie to our senior leaders when we show them our learning data—our smile sheets and our attendance data. We then manage toward these superstitious targets, causing a gross loss of effectiveness.

Learning is hard and learning that is focused on work is even harder because our learners have other priorities—so we shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much.

We know from the science of human cognition that when people encounter visual stimuli, their eyes move rapidly from one object to another and back again trying to comprehend what they see. I call this the “eye-path phenomenon.” So, because of this inherent human tendency, we as presenters—as learning designers too!—have to design our presentation slides to align with these eye-path movements.

Organizations now—and even more so in the near future—will use many tools in a Learning-Technology Stack. These will include (1) platforms that offer asynchronous cloud-based learning environments that enable and encourage better learning designs, (2) tools that enable realistic practice in decision-making, (3) tools that reinforce and remind learners, (4) spaced-learning tools, (5) habit-support tools, (6) insight-learning tools (those that enable creative ideation and innovation), et cetera

Learnnovators asked me what I hoped for the learning and development field. Here’s what I said:

Nobody is good at predicting the future, so I will share the vision I hope for. I hope we in learning and development continue to be passionate about helping other people learn and perform at their best. I hope we recognize that we have a responsibility not just to our organizations, but beyond business results to our learners, their coworkers/families/friends, to the community, society, and the environs. I hope we become brilliantly professionalized, having rigorous standards, a well-researched body of knowledge, higher salaries, and career paths beyond L&D. I hope we measure better, using our results to improve what we do. I hope we, more-and-more, take a small-S scientific approach to our practices, doing more A-B testing, compiling a database of meaningful results, building virtuous cycles of continuous improvement. I hope we develop better tools to make building better learning—and better performance—easier and more effective. And I hope we continue to feel good about our contributions to learning. Learning is at the heart of our humanity!

Given the challenges TEACHERS and PROFESSORS are facing with the Coronavirus Pandemic I’ve decided to make the Presentation Science Online Workshop available to Teachers and Professors for FREE (now through April 30th).

The workshop provides a strong science-of-learning foundation that will help educators make informed decisions as they move their courses online, create video recordings, or use any free time to update their classroom learning designs.

PLEASE share this with educators you know.

https://academy.worklearning.com/library/presentation-science/90041/about/

 

About the Presentation Science Workshop

Presentation Science is an online self-paced workshop designed specifically to help people who are trainers, teachers, professors, speakers, CEOs, Executive Directors, managers, military leaders, salespeople, team leads–anybody who uses presentation software–to help their audiences learn.

Inspired by learning science, this workshop will help speakers and educators to (1) keep their audiences’ attention, (2) support comprehension, (3) motivate audience members to take action, and (4) support them in remembering what’s been taught.

The workshop is also an excellent TRAIN-THE-TRAINER experience and organizations wanting to engage in a private cohort can make arrangements with Will Thalheimer (workshop creator and host) to do that. You can see the specific pricing options here: https://www.presentationscience.net/pricing.

And for more information about the workshop, see PresentationScience.Net.

 

 

12th December 2019

Neon Elephant Award Announcement

Dr. Will Thalheimer, President of Work-Learning Research, Inc., announces the winner of the 2019 Neon Elephant Award, given to David Epstein for writing the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and for his many years as a journalist and science-inspired truth teller.

Click here to learn more about the Neon Elephant Award…

 

2019 Award Winner – David Epstein

David Epstein, is an award-winning writer and journalist, having won awards for his writing from such esteemed bodies as the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the National Center on Disability and Journalism—and has been included in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. David has been a science writer for ProPublica and a senior writer at Sports Illustrated where he helped break the story on baseball legend Alex Rodriguez’s steroid use. David speaks internationally on performance science and the uses (and misuses) of data and his TED talk on human athletic performance has been viewed over eight million times.

Mr. Epstein is the author of two books:

David is honored this year for his new book on human learning and development, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. The book lays out a very strong case for why most people will become better performers if they focus broadly on their development rather than focusing tenaciously and exclusively on one domain. If we want to raise our children to be great soccer players (aka “football” in most places), we’d be better off having them play multiple sports rather than just soccer. If we want to develop the most innovative cancer researchers, we shouldn’t just train them in cancer-related biology and medicine, we should give them a wealth of information and experiences from a wide range of fields.

Range is a phenomenal piece of art and science. Epstein is truly brilliant in compiling and comprehending the science he reviews, while at the same time telling stories and organizing the book in ways that engage and make complex concepts understandable. In writing the book, David is debunking the common wisdom that performance is improved most rapidly and effectively by focusing practice and learning toward a narrow foci. Where others have only hinted at the power of a broad developmental pathway, Epstein’s Range builds up a towering landmark of evidence that will remain visible on the horizon of the learning field for decades if not millennium.

We in the workplace learning-and-development field should immerse ourselves in Range—not just in thinking about how to design learning and architect learning contexts, but also in thinking about how to evaluate prospects for recruitment and hiring. It’s likely that we currently undervalue people with broad backgrounds and artificially overvalue people with extreme and narrow talents.

Here is a nice article where Epstein wrestles with a question that elucidates an issue we have in our field—what happens when many people in a field are not following research-based guidelines. The article is set in the medical profession, but there are definite parallels to what we face everyday in the learning field.

Epstein is the kind of person we should honor and emulate in the workplace learning field. He is unafraid in seeking the truth, relentless and seemingly inexhaustible in his research efforts, and clear and engaging as a conveyor of information. It is an honor to recognize him as this year’s winner of the Neon Elephant Award.

 

Click here to learn more about the Neon Elephant Award…

Last month I released a new online, self-paced workshop called Presentation Science: How to Help Your Audience to Engage, Learn, Remember, and Act. The workshop is comparable to a two-day workshop and comprises about 12.5 hours of work, including videos, scenario questions, reflection questions, discussions, and a final assessment.

 

People are beginning to “graduate” from the workshop. Here’s what the first two graduates had to say:

Powerful content here! I love this course. It’s the best online course I’ve taken–ever! I only see one problem with the course. You’ve set the price too low based on the actual value of the course! It’s worth much more than what you are charging, considering the quality. I’d set the price at $1,000 minimum personally! In my opinion, it is worth $10,000 in the first 6 months once a person has successfully applied this to build new trainings!

— Gale Stafford, executive coach and learning architect at County of San Mateo

Will Thalheimer’s Presentation Science Workshop provides a TON of strategies, tactics, and tools backed up by learning science that will help you transform your bullet-riddled, mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations into meaningful, memorable, motivating, and (yes!) magnificent learning events.

— Holly H., senior instructional designer at global energy technology company

 

 

As you can imagine, I’m thrilled with this response. At the same time, I feel a responsibility to continue making the workshop better and better. At a later date–when I’ve gathered more data–I will write about how I think the new online-learning technologies are now poised to enable great learning designs. I’ll also talk about how to utilize these tools to follow research-inspired recommendations. For now, I’m just going to brag a bit! SMILE

And encourage you to consider taking this course for yourself, or recommending it to your organization, your subject-matter experts, trainers, teachers, professors, managers, salespeople, executives—anybody who has to give a presentation that has to be maximally effective.

 

The Presentation Science Workshop:
Learn More by Clicking Here!