Presenter Tips from the Conference

From personal experience I know that creating a good in-person presentation can be both time-consuming and draining. Here’s a couple tips I learned:

1. One presenter used an easy way to assess the audience in the beginning by having them rate themselves on familiarity with gamfication –who falls between 1-3, 4-7, 8-10 to easily assess audience - can be done by raising hands .

2. Another recommended starting a presentation with “I would like you to take this journey with me . . . “ and then describing the beginning of a project and its challenges as away to make your training more of a story that engages the audience.

Sententia Gamification: Gamification for Talent Development: Deconstructing the Psychology of Games to Entice, Engage, and Encourage Learners

Dr. Jonathan Peters, Chief Motivational Officer shared his contagious enthusiasm for bringing more gamification to learning. Key takeaways:

• Entice, engage and encourage (them to take learning from game space to work space).

• Hard, because our brains associate the learning with whatever environment it happens in.

• Gamification is motivational design. It deconstructs game atribures to drive game-like player behavior ina non-game context.

• “saying motivation design” instead helps with people who think their work is too serious for games

• Loyalty programs are a type of gamification – not necessarily fun, but using game mechanics to drive behavior

• When designing, we tend to create experiences we enjoy. But we need to know what our learners consider to be “fun”.

• Most studies done on college students, because they are cheap - however may not be representative

• With many games, they may have more fun, but outcomes aren’t any better. Maybe the mechanics don’t resonate with them (badges, points etc.)

• GAMES Design Method:

  • G oal

  • A dventure

  • M ethod

  • E ngagement

  • S ync-it

• They train people in gamification – apprentice, journeyman, master craftsman.

• One fun example was a game to train employees about something they considered boring. In it Terry turkey has no feathers, every question you answer gets him a feather. If you don’t get at least 22/25 feathers turkey explode. Most people did it twice just to see him explode.

• Different player types, according to Richard Bartle

• Killers – focus on winning, rank, and direct peer-to-peer competition, engaged by leaderboards and ranks (it’s not enough for them to win, they want to watch you die)

• Achievers – attaining status and achieving preset goals quickly and completely

• Socialites – focus on socializing and a drive to develop a network of friends and contacts – newsfeeds, friends list, chats

• Explorer – focus on exploring

• Dr Peters discussed the Reiss Motivational Profile, which is an empirically based taxonomy of human needs and desires culled from a huge data set, cultures from 4 continents. We all have because they move our genes forward. I would like to know more about this, and wonder whether cultural conditioning and gender expectations play a role in who and how people prioritize and display these traits:

  • Acceptance

  • Beauty

  • Curiosity

  • Eating

  • Family

  • Honor

  • Idealism

  • Independence

  • Order

  • Physical activity

  • Power,

  • Saving

  • Social contact

  • Status

  • Tranquility

  • Vengeance

Instructional Designers: Change Agents and Leaders

Key takeaways from Dr. Carla Lane’s presentation:

1. It can be invaluable to either work with a program evaluator, or become your own program evaluator. Keep evaluating every few months.

2. Sequence of change agent roles

1.     develop a need for change

2.     establish an information exchange relationship

3.     diagnose problems

4.     create an intent to change in the client (s)

5.     translate an intent into action

6.     stabilize adoption and prevent discontinuance

7.     achieve a terminal relationship

3. There is really so much an instructional designer needs to do nowadays. Field is finally coming into its own, becoming a real profession.

4. Both Training magazine and elearning magazine frequently offer all kinds of virtual seminars to aid professional development.

5. Highly recommends reading Diffusion of Innovation by Everett Rogers, particularly Chapter 9 on becoming a change agent.

6. The recent tax cut has caused many education and training budgets to be reduced drastically. These budgets are always the first thing to be cut.

7. Trying to convince the mass of a new idea is useless. Convince innovators and early adopters first. Usually about 25% of learners are innovators 25%, and 13.5%  early adopters.

8. People don’t resist change. They resist people trying to change them.

9. “The problem with being a professor these days is that you can’t make a living working at one university, you have to work for two or even three”. Dr. Lane works at Cappella University and teaches elsewhere.

10. In earlier times classes started slowly to ease the students into the routine. Now they are moving towards hitting the ground running, especially in establishing and communicating expectations early on.

11. Blackboard and moodle have some mobile options.

12.  At Cappella they don’t test anymore, but focus more on projects, assignments, and providing foundational reading.

13. “There are a lot of students who don’t like working together. You probably have a lot of employees who don’t like to work together”.

14. It is hard to get supervisor to invest in training, especially these days. A lot of people she asked to attend could not get supervisors to agree. They saw no value in a conference, or at least not worth even losing a day of work, much less the other expenses. She said they called it a “symposium” instead of a “conference” for this reason.

NASA Goddard Distance Learning Models

1. NASA has 500 interns each summer and one person to manage them. Responding to all their emails would be overwhelming, so they started a college intern portal with Blackboard’s Coursesites, which is free. Free was important, since their budget is low. Students can’t self-register, they enroll them.

The site works well for interns to find roommates, discuss housing options, share pictures, submit their paperwork deliverables, and see a calendar of their mandatory training and events. It also allows them to get feedback through surveys of interns and download reports and track an intern’s progress.

2. Goddard also provides distance learning for educators to get up to speed for STEM content needs. NASA staff learning is done in a separate department.

3. They use the ADDIE framework. The analysis phase involves both needs assessment and goal setting. They really work with school districts so that they come to NASA with their needs, instead of NASA trying to guess what they want and need. For example, New Jersey came to them with a need for more content about sustainability, so they created it.

4. Their design phase includes:

·      Learning objectives

·      Nasa mission and content

·      SME

·      Assessment instruments

·      Media selection

5. Their most common modes of training are 60- 90 minute webinars that are pretty passive learning, and “webshops”. Webshops are for professional development and last 6-7 hours. They are often held on the professional development day of school. An instructor goes over content available and demos hands on activities and ways to engage with students.

6. They used to do more in person training, but that is being replaced by online. They use a range of free tools, focusing on whatever technology their users are most comfortable with (or will work within existing firewalls and other constraints).

She primarily uses adobe connect for webinars and webshops, but also vidyo, Skype, zoom, Google hangouts, Facebook and Ustream.

7. Webinar software allows the option to comment on technical difficulties, and provide feedback on how useful the content was, which they try to use. They can also see looks at analytics from registration and who/how long people attend live seminars or watch recorded ones. However, it’s hard for them to really collect data on individuals “gotten their hands slapped by the lawyers several times”. Even for the interns, hard to track whether they are getting jobs etc.

8. They have some programs where they offer “badges” as “microcredentials” to show expertise on certain topics.