This article is an edited extract from the upcoming June issue of Inside Learning Technologies and Skills magazine.

Last month, Nicholas Baum explained some of the principles of something called ‘me-learning’. He outlined the mechanics of how an e-learning course can become a space in which learners can visualise new behaviours in action: ‘Here’s where I am; here’s where I could be; this is what I need to do to get there’. Personalised input and personalised output via emotionally charged content is another way to put it.

The approach has been proven to work in courses such as that developed by Transport for London on mental resilience, where qualitative and quantitative evaluations drew a direct line from meaningful emotional engagement to massive return on investment. So how does it work? Where does the why really come from? What ‘buy-in buttons’ should those who design learning (and learning platforms) be pushing?

A revolution which has been gathering pace in the field of behavioural economics is highly relevant here. It’s changing the way that we are shaping the online world more generally, and e-learning needs to sit up and listen.

Traditional economics has treated the human as homo economicus, who is ‘Sovereign in tastes, steely-eyed and point-on in perception of risk’. The problem with this model is that ‘homo economicus is a rare breed.’ I would go further and say that the self-interested, calculating human doesn’t really exist at all.  In fact, our brain chemistry motivates us to make decisions that aren’t necessarily rational or even self-interested.

Our memories are structured around emotional peaks and troughs, not averages or a steady accumulation of benefits. The ‘endowment effect’ means, for example, that we’ll place a much higher price on a teacup that is ours, than on an identical cup which isn’t – and we even hold on to shares long after the point where it made sense to sell them. A sense of belonging is the trump card.

This complicates our thinking about motivations for learning, and explains why the addictive learning environment can’t be as easily manufactured as we perhaps thought. It might make perfect sense to you why a learner would naturally engage with a learning intervention because it has social and game-based characteristics – that’s what creates a sense of reward, right?

But your course or platform is an imposter: it doesn’t carry with it the same emotional highs or the sense of belonging as the experience you based it on. It is a feature, emptied of emotional benefits.

To make e-learning better at changing behaviours, it’s time to start seriously asking where the e-learning course or platform that you have planned fits into the emotional narrative of your learners’ lives. What mood state are you going to capture and utilise? Most importantly, how are you going to make a learner feel like it belongs to her? In this sense, perhaps it’s time to start including emotional outcomes, as well as learning outcomes, in your next project specification.

Find out more by attending Saffron’s seminar on emotional investment in learning at the upcoming Learning Technologies Summer Forum. You can register here for free.

Have you ever wondered why the US produces so many radical innovators like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Google duo Larry Page and Sergey Brin and why Germany produces expert business builders like the Samwer brothers? Or why people in the UK and the US tend to go to university or college to study general subjects like English, Economics, Engineering or the coveted MBA whereas people in Germany tend to study industry specific subjects like Technology, Education and Nursing at Germany’s professional universities? Have you considered how employment law might influence your employees’ incentives to develop skills that are relevant to your business? And what effect might this have on the type of products and services that these countries deliver as well as their capacity to innovate?

Masters of mimicry

The Samwer brothers (Oliver, Marc, Alexander) have become billionaires as a result of cloning Internet up-and-comers like Ebay, Facebook and Pinterest into the German, Russian Brazilian or Italian languages and then selling them back to the English speaking originals for a profit. The Samwers, who have threatened blitzkrieg on the industry and asked employees to sign business plans in their own blood, say that they are not innovators, rather, they are builders of companies. They see concepts that are working in the US or Asia and replicate the approach for new markets with high barriers of entry.

Serial entrepreneur Stefan Gleanzer speculated that Berlin’s Mitte district (where the brothers base themselves) had become the global centre for cloning digital businesses. And whether or not you admire the model (and plenty don’t), you can’t deny its success. In 1999 the Samwer brothers founded Alando, a German version of the online auction house Ebay. Only 100 days later, they sold the company to Ebay for about £35 million.

That’s not to say that German ideas aren’t innovative. After all, Germany’s the country that gave the world Bauhaus, Albert Einstein, nuclear fission and now, the digital music site SoundCloud (and, of course, Kraftwerk). And Berlin’s anti-copycat movement is appealing to would-be German entrepreneurs to live up to this German spirit of innovation.

Styles of innovation

Researchers looking at industry innovation across countries say that this innovative/not-innovative distinction is beside the point. They draw a distinction between radical innovation, which entails substantial shifts in product lines, the development of entirely new goods or major changes to the production process, and incremental innovation marked by continuous but small-scale improvements to existing product lines and production processes. They also suggest that labour markets, vocational training systems and systems of social protection affect both employee learning and innovation outcomes – and that the US and Germany are polar opposites in all these respects.

The German case

In Germany, a system of works councils composed of elected employee representatives with much more clout than the UK’s trade unions, provide employees with security against arbitrary layoffs or changes to their working conditions. These long labor contracts encourage employees to invest in company-specific skills – because they’re not worried that they’ll soon be fired, rendering their company specific skills redundant. As a result, countries like this depend on education and training systems capable of providing workers with such skills. Germany’s strong dual system of vocational training provides high levels of industry-specific skills.

The US case

Top management in US companies tends to have complete control over the firm including substantial freedom to hire and fire which means that they can quickly reconfigure their knowledge bases in order to develop new product lines or cut failing ones.

The education and training systems in countries with laxer employment laws are generally complementary to these fluid labour markets. From the perspective of workers facing short job tenures, career success depends on developing transferable skills that can be used in many different companies; and most educational programs from secondary through to university levels, even in business and engineering, stress ‘certification’ in general skills rather than more specialised ones.

Companies in these countries do a lot of in-house training, although mostly in the marketable skills that employees have incentives to learn like presentation skills, people management and health and safety.

The argument then goes that German firms tend to lack the capacities for radical innovation that American firms enjoy by virtue of their much less fluid labour markets.

Is this true? Not indisputably and people are still unclear as to how much other countries fit into this US/Germany mould. Either way, the point here isn’t that one system is better than the other (or that Jobs is better than the Samwers), merely that one system will generate a labour force with a different set of a skills and firms with a different product output from the other.

And how can Learning and Development departments respond to the constraints of the system in which they operate? Well, in the UK, where labour markets are equally fluid, L&D departments may wish to go with the flow by investing in the type of general skills training (such as health and safety, project management and MS Office) in which their employees are willing to invest (and which companies can risk losing when their employees move on to competitors). Alternatively, companies that find themselves with an immediate skill shortage problem may wish to skip the in-house training phase by taking advantage of the skills in the overseas market – but this will only save time, not money, because overseas employees are more expensive to hire.

Over the last few years there can be no argument that e-learning has come on an awful long way. What started off in many cases as animated PowerPoints has evolved to courses that include animations, branching scenarios, video and in some cases incorporates gaming mechanics and social drivers to increase user engagement.

Something that has really caught my eye recently is the increasing popularity of websites such as Khan Academy and Ted-Ed. Most people will already be familiar with ted.com and some of its videos from leaders in their field sharing ideas – my personal favourite is the speech given by Steve Jobs at a Stanford graduation. Not only is Steve inspiring, yet realistic in his human experience but, it is very straightforward with three quick stories that engage you and then a key message or learning point after each.

These new online resources are now taking their content a step further by providing a platform to deliver immersive classroom experiences using videoed lessons which can be further enhanced by a range of features including interactions and commentary. For those who have not looked already, I would strongly encourage you to check out both sites as they make some truly fantastic resources available to their users.

The popularity of this type of medium leaves me in no doubt that it is here to stay. So where does this leave e-learning? While it will still be relevant for many of the same teaching areas that it has been before, we should be looking to take this to the next level by investigating what inspires people in the classroom, on TED or in their daily lives and focus the best practices from these areas into improving our instructional design. By incorporating and developing ideas from these other formats we can make sure that the e-learning we develop continues improving as it has been over the last few years – which is what we are always trying to do at Saffron!

So where does Flipped Learning come in? This is how Wikipedia currently defines the term:

“The traditional pattern of secondary education has been to have classroom lectures, in which the teacher explains a topic, followed by homework, in which the student does exercises.

“In flip teaching, the student first studies the topic by himself, typically using video lessons created by the instructor or shared by another educator, such as those provided by the Khan Academy. In the classroom, the pupil then tries to apply the knowledge by solving problems and doing practical work.”

This concept has been around in the academic world for sometime. However, new developments such as being able to track outcomes in these lessons, test effectively and increase engagement is making this style of learning an increasingly viable option for a wider range of applications.

The main benefit of this style of learning is gaining the value added by a really fantastic teacher delivering the course material to the learner; we can all remember how at school a large amount of our success in subjects was down to how engaging the teacher was, and this is no different as you get older. I don’t find the TED video of Steve Job’s graduation speech inspiring because it’s on TED, but because it’s Steve Jobs! For me that’s what is really great about flipped learning – it’s the ability to share amazing teachers with an audience outside their classroom.

I think that this all bodes well for the future of e-learning. The flipped model helps open up training projects which in the past have strongly favoured a classroom approach, such as leadership training. This means that more people can learn as a group without being limited by their location or access to a classroom, while e-learning can help the learner to develop their skills further once they have experienced the flipped content.

I am really excited to see how websites such as the Khan Academy develop in the future. At the time of writing their websites boast over 166 million lessons delivered – so clearly the format is here to stay. Fans of e-learning should not see this as a threat, but we need to ensure our solutions stay ahead of the curve and continue improving to hold their own next to these new tools. Instead of worrying about flipped learning or the range of other tools becoming available to L&D we should see it as a chance to improve our own offering!

I think Steve sums up the case for learning from others perfectly:

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

What does innovation in e-learning really mean anymore? Is it merely a buzzword, just like all restaurant cuisine is ‘authentic and made from fresh produce’ all e-learning is ‘engaging, interactive and innovative’?

A few weeks ago I went to the opening of the Heatherwick Studio design and architecture exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The exhibits pay tribute to Thomas Heatherwick’s ‘extraordinary form-making’ and include the surprisingly elegant Rolling Bridge, which draws back in a caterpillar motion to provide access. You can also find out how the team designed the new London buses, reintroducing the much-loved ‘hop-on hop-off’ service harking back to the 1950s.

My most memorable piece was one that you could try for yourself: Spun, designed in response to the intriguing brief ‘Could a completely rotationally symmetrical form make a comfortable chair?’ and you can see me here having a go (after a few gin cocktails).

The chair’s seat, back and arms are all the same profile and it looks a bit like a bobbin. It’s not hydraulic, space travel ready and made from titanium so light it’s used in the production of the queen’s cakes. It is, however, lovely looking, comfortable to sit in and very fun to spin around on – it works, meets its brief and surprises the user… it’s innovative.

So what can we take away from this? There’s a message here about the ways in which we strive to deliver innovative e-learning. Yes, augmented reality apps open up exciting new avenues but what can we do to make smaller budget projects and those with technical constraints innovative? I don’t think that innovative e-learning should be reliant on expensive new technologies – we can achieve innovation in e-learning by being creative in our approach to instructional design.

For example, where we don’t need to formally assess learners, why not scrap the ‘learning objectives’ screen and instead issue the learner with a ‘mission brief’, unlock all the units and allow the learner to explore the e-learning course, collecting clues and solving problems? This instructional design concept, married with a film noir inspired look and feel creates a compelling and immersive learning experience suitable for topics such as bribery and corruption and business ethics.

I’m not recommending we regress back to basics and restrict our e-learning to static screens and images of corporate norms in dodgy suits. All I’m saying is that learning technologies aren’t always the only or best way to innovate and reinvigorate our e-learning.

Try to think about fresh and creative ways in which you can meet your brief. Sometimes it’s just about doing something different with the wheel, rather than reinventing it.

The Heatherwick Studio exhibition is on at the Victoria and Albert museum until 30 September, go here for more information.

A couple of months back I made the decision to delete my LinkedIn profile, a decision greeted with incredulity from all quarters. The most memorable criticism came from my friend Tom when we were in the pub. “You idiot!” he gasped, before exclaiming “IT’S THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE!”

By “one”, Tom was referring to LinkedIn’s classification as a “social media” platform, lumped in with Facebook, Twitter,  Yammer, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster and the rest. What sets LinkedIn apart is that it’s considered to be the professional network; a platform you can use to build your career, not your social life. You’re encouraged to develop “connections”, not friends, and there are forums and messaging capabilities to develop cross-collaboration with your network.

Sometimes we seem to forget that at their heart, many social networks are primarily public directories; they hold, and give access to, information on their users. The vast amount of user information they hold have meant that social networks are seen as the oil fields of the 21^st century, offering unlimited reward for prospectors should they strike it rich.

But a user can also choose to reclaim that data should they wish to, and people are getting wiser to that fact. We’re seeing a growth in a movement championing the “right to be forgotten” in the third decade of the age of information.

What this means is that before signing up to a service or platform, more and more users are performing a simple cost benefit analysis. “What features does this service give me, and what am I expected to offer in return? How transparent is the service being on how they’ll go about using and storing my data? Is my information safe with them? Will my boss get to see my drunken photos?”

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published last Monday showed that 34% of Facebook users surveyed were spending less time on the website than six months ago, whereas only 20% were spending more. The suggestion is that users are displaying a reluctance to access a service whose growth model is built around the premise that they should in some way pay to host their personal content.

As advertising placements get more prominent, expect user engagement figures to start falling further. I’d argue that it’s only right that users should offer some kind of financial contribution to maintain access to functions and features of a platform that they use, but there will come a point of advertising saturation which will ultimately prompt users to turn away and curtail Facebook’s ability to turn a profit.

Facebook may fail to make good gains because, fundamentally, there’s something slightly repressive about being forced to sit through adverts every time you want to see those photos from your university days. I’ve created that content – so why am I expected to pay over the odds to see it?

LinkedIn proved to be the wrong tool for me at this point in my career, and to put it bluntly, I felt that information I was offering outweighed the benefits that LinkedIn had to offer me. What I was looking for was an immediate exchange of information with likeminded people, or checking out links to other people’s work – rapid networking, if you like – and I already get that from Twitter.

However, I could see myself returning to LinkedIn again – provided that they innovate and introduce a new learning and development platform where you could learn skills from the website itself. Surely it makes sense for a professional networking service to align itself more closely with professional growth, teaching and certifying skills taught through its platform?

We can already see examples of this with Code Academy, a privately funded learning service that is free to access and teaches you the basics of HTML5 and JavaScript using bite size exercises based on real world uses. If LinkedIn concentrated on development content that could help users gain qualifications, then it would elevate it to another level. It wouldn’t just be a networking platform; it would be the most effective social learning platform we’ve ever seen.

e-Learning designers face many of the same challenges as designers of classroom training – they’re aspiring to a learning experience which is relevant, motivates, incentivises and inspires learners to change or improve certain behaviours or attitudes.

But let me now take you behind the scenes, into the world of us e-learning developers. One of the core challenges that we face lies in creating e-learning that is effective, engaging and accessible for all learners, including those who aren’t using a mouse and instead are using assistive technologies. A video may be the most interesting and effective way to illustrate a key message in the learning, but what will the training experience be like for a learner using a screen reader?

These are my top seven tips for developing effective e-learning in line with the WCA accessibility guidelines.

1. Include the equivalent text alternative for all graphics and images
   This is similar to alt text used in html sites. All learners need to understand the meaning and use of the image or graphics.
2. Use colour effectively
   Any content using colour should also be available in a format that doesn’t require colour perception. One way to do this is by avoiding using colours in instructions, such as ‘Click on the red, green and blue parts of the image to view the descriptions.’
3. Avoid using animated, flickering or flashing content
   If this isn’t an option, then include information at the beginning of these screens stating that the screen is animated and provide the way to turn off the flickering or animations.
4. Use a descriptive transcript for videos
   that visualises the current situation for the visually impaired learner.
5. Use a font which is a sufficient size and a readable style
   Avoid using colours in the fonts and try to use the high resolution graphics which will not scale when the learner zooms in on the image.
6. Arrange all the elements on screen logically
   Use a sequence in which they display the learning. If it’s not possible to physically arrange the elements on screen, try to code the accessible elements in the sequence of learning.
7. Provide the alternative equivalent text and brief description for the navigation icons
   This will help ensure that  that all learners are able to navigate efficiently through the learning.

The most important thing to remember though is ‘when’, rather than ‘what’. Plan for accessibility in the design of e-learning from the beginning of the process, rather than creating a course which isn’t accessible to all learners and then attempting to convert or improve it to meet accessibility requirements later on. Instructional designers, graphic designers and developers need to work closely together at the design stage of a project to develop effectively and accessible e-learning.

Final thoughts

I hope that these tips give you some pointers for designing your own accessible e-learning, but you should bear in mind Kevin Carey’s (Director of HumanITy) advice: ‘There is no single solution for accessibility’. One size will not fit all: especially when it comes to designing complex bespoke interactions. A little creative thinking can go a long way, so don’t be tempted to over-simplify if there is a way that you can still present your content accessibly.

If you have any other tips on ensuring e-learning is accessible then please post them below………………

The internet is alight with blogs and articles about economic nudging, David Cameron’s ‘Nudge Unit’ and yet another economist (Richard Thaler) who’s recruited himself into the White House with promises to improve the effectiveness of government.

For the last few hundred years, a simple assumption has dominated thinking about human nature: when faced with a set of choices, people make the one that’s most likely to serve their personal interests. But behavioural economists say that people often don’t make decisions like this. People often make decisions which are downright irrational, such as taking out subprime mortgages or chain smoking cigarettes faster than Mad Men’s Don Draper (it’s 2012 now, so you don’t have his excuse).

This is interesting from Saffron’s point of view because we’re often tasked with trying to change employees’ behaviour when there may be no direct incentive for them to do so. An employee might wonder why they should bother engaging in cost saving tactics like switching off their computer at the end of the day or boiling one less kettle for tea when it’s not their money that’s being spent in the first place. And the far away reason that they should do so to save the planet and protect future generations doesn’t cut it for everyone. Saffron’s Nick Simons often repeats that you can’t change behaviour unless you can provide people with incentives or disincentives for doing so. But if people aren’t simply driven by their rational self interest, then it could be that we can change behaviour even when we can’t provide a Pavlovian reward or punishment.

And it’s definitely Saffron’s experience that not everyone behaves wholly rationally. One client told us that their employees fail to use their new online expenses system because they didn’t like the change. Clearly some people would rather forgo reimbursement for expenses than have to change the way they do things.

The idea of nudging is based on research that shows that you might be able to persuade people to make different (read, more responsible) decisions by tweaking their environment so that they perceive their options in different ways. For example, studies show that placing fruit at eye level in school canteens can dramatically increase sales. One experiment involved sending vehicle tax avoiders warning letters in plainer English. I haven’t seen the letter but according to The Economist, it went something like this: ‘pay your tax or lose your car.’

But is this easier said than done? Going back to my example about change management: if people don’t want to change, despite incentives, then to what methods should a hard working instructional designer resort?

Saffron recommends three alternatives:

1. A good relationship between the graphic design and instructional design team is a must for any good e-learning course

Next time you see several PowerPoint screens worth of text think about how it might be represented visually. Rather than writing a couple of screens telling users about a new project management process, why not represent it as a process flow or animation?

2. Forget the theory, focus on behaviour

We all know how easy it is to be hoodwinked by subject matter experts into filling a course with heaps of the theory behind competition law or data protection when what a learner needs to know is what they need to do better or differently in their job. Educate your SMEs so that they know that they’ll never change behaviour if you don’t show people what sort of behaviour they’re expected to perform.

3. Less is more

60 minutes of scenario-based questioning probably won’t be as effective as a 10 or 15 minute course, even if it’s less interactive. If you’re only selecting material that’s absolutely relevant to your audience then you shouldn’t really have any more than 30 minutes’ worth of content anyway. If you do, then consider whether the scope of your course is too large.

Whether or not nudging gets people to stop eating fast food or pay their car tax remains to be seen. But I’m still wondering: could we apply the insights of nudging to e-learning? Many companies already automatically assign courses to their employees’ online learning profiles and send out self-generated emails to remind people to take them. But is there any more that e-learning professionals could take from the economic nudgers? It could certainly work out cheaper than promising to give staff Amazon vouchers or a meal out for two in return for completing training courses.

When we take a look at compliance training, we often try to “justify” the learning to the reluctant user by listing the all of the empirical stuff that provides the context for the business case. “Data protection is important for us at Compuglobal Hypermeganet because in <insert recent year> there were <insert massive figure> breaches of data for our industry resulting in <insert inordinately large amount of money> in fines.”
And yeah, it serves a purpose, to a point. Examples like this are an attempt at what we like to describe as a “war story” – using the worst case scenario to illustrate what a breach in compliance means.

But just trotting out the figures is a cop out for any self-respecting instructional designer; a massive disservice to what good e-learning should set out to do. Every single fact and figure should have to fight to prove its validity, rather than just being lumped in as a pseudo-supportive argument.

Here at Saffron we like to make a point about the “need-to-know” factor of data or statistics in our learning. Does everyone in your organisation really need to know how many cases were reported to the regulator in the past five years, or how many of those reported were prosecuted? It’s unlikely, because in most cases the training has been commissioned so that after you’ve completed it you can make the right decisions and avoid breaking the law. The focus of the training isn’t past performance, but future decisions.

Say you’re a small telecoms company that receives 250,000 calls from your 50000 customers per year. Last year, your staff logged 5000 suspicious calls, where the caller sounded like they were fraudulently trying to obtain personal account details. But it’s come to light in a recent court case that a private detective’s firm actually made over 10000 fraudulent calls, with a 50% success rate.

Some might just trot out this information as a bullet point list and leave the learner to it. But with just a little thought, we get our “need-to-know” number, where we can summarise the implications of the entire example and position it in a way that’s relevant to the learner by using just one figure.

From the stats, we can imply that 1 in every 25 calls made to the business is potentially fraudulent (total calls/fraudulent calls). This provides the context to the learner without going into overwhelming detail, and gets rid of the bits that aren’t really worthwhile.
The learner can then relate this number to their everyday working life – if they take 50 calls a day, they can see that it’s likely that at least 2 of them could be fraudulent. With this information, the issue becomes much, much more apparent and resonates with the individual.

These “need-to-know” numbers provide context, whilst also arming the learner with knowledge that they can use in their daily routines. They aren’t hard to stumble across – you can often reach them by delving a little deeper into the data. They make the learning digestible, relevant, and can often be brought to life with supporting graphics or scenarios. So think about it next time you’re writing and ask the obvious question – what do learners need to know?