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Planning and Designing a Powerful Learning Event
Obviously, you want your learning events to be a success. To accomplish this goal, there are a number of things to remember as you plan and design them. By properly preparing and striving to ensure that your content and delivery results in meeting the needs and expectations of your learners and their sponsors, you will increase the likelihood of their satisfaction and meeting stated objectives. You will also help ensure that you deliver a quality, professional learning event.
Get Copyright Permission
There are many resources available on the Internet and in print that can contribute positively to your learning outcomes. No matter what your topic, there is likely a wealth of information available to you to reinforce concepts and add value to what you provide to your learners. Like me, the authors of most of these resources are typically happy to share their knowledge. In many instances, they will allow you to reproduce small segments of their publications or entire articles.
One important factor in deciding whether to reproduce or use material created by others, such as, music, articles, videos, or software, is to ensure that you have written permission to do so. Most copyright owners will allow you to use their material as long as you give them a citation or acknowledgement as long as you are not reproducing and selling it. Why would they not do so? You are in effect promoting and endorsing their product, which may ultimately result in more sales or business for them. Always get permission from the copyright holder before displaying or passing out copies of any material created by another person or organization. Failure to do so can lead to legal liability for you and your organization.
You can often get permission to use articles, book excerpts, or training materials directly from the author of those materials. If the author has assigned rights to others, such as a publisher, you will have to contact the magazine or publication, or copyright editor for the publishing house to get permission. For electronic rights on products such as music, movies, electronic training materials, or software you may have to check with the production company to determine who owns the rights.
You can normally find information on copyright in the front of magazines and publications, inside the front of a book, or on the case insert for music, videos, DVDs, and software. For music, you may be able to obtain permission from Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) or American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP). It may take a bit of research to locate a copyright owner. However, if the materials are important enough to add value to your session, and you want to use them, you will be wise to get permission before incorporating them into your session.
Make Everything Meaningful
You have already read that training time is precious. The challenge is to get learners to appreciate that what you are delivering to them meets their needs, matches their personal learning goals and is relevant. As adults and professionals in a given field, they likely already have a base knowledge of the content that you plan to share with them. For that reason, you must take the information learned from your needs analysis and create links or short-cuts between what they know and what you have planned. For example, if you are facilitating a workshop for a group of experienced supervisors, they likely have already been exposed to the basics of coaching, counseling, communicating, motivating, and providing performance feedback to employees. If these are topic areas covered in your session, you will need to think of ways to show learners how to more systematically and logically use the knowledge and skills they possess to improve their on-the-job performance. An easy way to help this occur is to provide the format or structure for using knowledge or skills, perhaps in the form of a model. You could then give learners a chance to work in small groups to determine ways of applying it in their work environments. Through this technique, they actually take what you give and customize it to their individual needs while receiving feedback from their peers on how it might be improved. In this fashion, when they walk out of the room, they have real-world knowledge, skills and strategies that can be applied immediately. This always adds value to any learning experience and enhances return on investment. It can also enhance your session evaluation results.
Focus on Specifics
In order to be meaningful, provide targeted information rather than taking an approach of throwing out a lot of information and ideas in hopes that some will help learners or be effective. Most attendees will not have the time nor desire to sit through a session in which you provide unneeded or irrelevant information. For example, if you were teaching a class on effective creative writing skills and were talking about how to look up information in a dictionary, it would be unnecessary to cover every term in the book. Instead, you should teach them how to find a specific item in the text. Similarly, if you were showing learners how to use Microsoft Word® software to create a document and save it, it would be unnecessary to show them how to attach a saved document to an outgoing email message. Even though the latter is one of the possibilities with compatible software, learners do not need to know that technique in your session. By including the unnecessary skill, you would likely only confuse and distract learners from your primary goal of learning to create a document.
Use the old K.I.S.S. principle (Keep It Short and Sweet) when creating and delivering your workshop material. Focus only on what learners need to know in order to achieve stated learning objectives.
Help Learners Make Connections
Adult learners appreciate information that they can add to their memory and which relates to something they already know. This cuts down on their learning curve and increases the learning experience. The “ah ha” moments or realizations and visual applications come more quickly when learners can relate to something they already have stored in memory.
To help maximize learning, provide information in small digestible chunks (chunking) or small bits of material with which learners are somewhat familiar. This reduces the likelihood that you will overwhelm them with volumes of new information. In taking such an approach, you increase the likelihood that they will quickly understand and assimilate what you offer. Anything else can cause overload and shut learning down.
Robert (Bob) W. Lucas is a Managing Partner in Global Performance Strategies LLC, a human resource training and consulting firm in Lake Mary, Florida. He has over three decades of experience training adults, is a past president of the Central Florida Chapter of ASTD and has written and contributed to twenty-nine books and hundreds of articles on workplace topics. Bob is listed in Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in America, and Who’s Who in the South and Southeast.
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