Corporate Learning Long Tail and Attention Crisis

John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler’s recent article - Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 talks about the implications of the Long Tail on Education. The article is definitely worth a read, and it got me to finally write about what I see as a crisis in corporate learning.

Background
If you are not familiar with the concept of the Long Tail, head over to take a look at the Long Tail article on Wikipedia. It's a pretty good introduction to the main concepts around a very important concept. You can also look at Anderson's The Long Tail. The core idea is that for retailers like Amazon, they sell very large volumes of titles that cannot even be carried in a bricks-and-mortar store.


Typical Long Tail

Carried further, when distribution, storage and production get lower, it becomes viable to sell relatively less popular products.

Thus, markets in Long Tail situations shift towards larger volumes of increasingly broader products with smaller volumes at the top.

This is happening in many situations: major publishers (CNN, Yahoo, Cnet) competing with niches publishers, competing with blogs; TV production facing a widely distributed audience across 500 cable channels and YouTube. There's quite a bit more on this in Long Tail SEO - 60+ Articles.

Since everyone still has the same amount of time to spend consuming all of these products or information, they are naturally going to spread their time over broader and broader range. This gives rise to the Attention Economy where the scarce resource is not distribution channels or information, the scarce resource is attention. Each person only has a certain amount of time. Where we choose to spend that time is important. And even if we are successful in getting someone’s attention, we often get Shorter Attention Spans and only getting partial attention - Stop Reading - Skim Dive Skim.

If you think about the Long Tail graph, it works just as well when we substitute Attention instead of Sales.

Impact

How does this impact the world of learning organizations and corporate learning functions (training organizations)? Consider the following:

• Corporate learning functions today act like a publisher / distributor.

• The average knowledge worker has access to an increasingly large set of information resources and corporate learning is an ever smaller part of this set.

• Cost is most often not a factor in a knowledge workers decision about the use of information. Time (attention) is much more important. Factored in is expectation of quality (how much time I need to spend filtering the content to determine if it’s of value). As a quick example, we choose our preferred search engine in large part because we feel it will be the best investment of time to find the best quality information.

• Information sources will continue to grow exponentially, so Corporate Learning as a traditional publisher will be able to focus on an ever smaller portion of the knowledge worker’s needs.

• John Hagel – in a post Paying Attention tells us:

If we do not receive attention, we risk becoming progressively marginalized. Receiving attention becomes far more important than it ever was and will require far more effort than in the past. Corporate learning is in the midst of an attention crisis.

• Corporate learning functions are seeking to find ways to lower production costs so they can attack broader markets – go farther into the long tail. They look to eLearning approaches to lower distribution costs. They look to rapid authoring tools to lower production costs.
  
  
• For corporate learning functions to really impact the long tail, they will be forced to look at eLearning 2.0.

• John Hagel – in the same post Paying Attention tells us:

What we know at any point in time has diminishing value.

• Corporate learning is also facing the fact that anything they create and publish becomes out of date that much faster so effective production costs are increasing.

Challenges

The list of issues above represent what can truly be considered a crisis for corporate learning organizations. It's a crisis born of the Long Tail and the Attention Economy. A whole range of challenges result. I believe our first challenge is to really recognize our current world and the Disruptive Changes in Learning and realistically that we are facing an Innovators' Dilemma in Learning/eLearning.

Corporate learning functions will either continue to focus on the front of the tail and an ever smaller portion of the total information needs of knowledge workers or will look to expand into the long tail. To play in the long tail, corporate learning functions will need to:

• Find approaches that have dramatically lower production costs, near zero

• Look for opportunities to get out of the publisher, distributor role such as becoming an aggregator

• Focus on knowledge worker learning skills

• Help knowledge workers rethink what information they consume, how and why.

• Focus on maximizing the “return of attention” for knowledge workers rather than common measures today such as cost per learner hour.

Focus on Personal Work and Learning Environments (PWLE) - More Discussion and Personal Work and Learning Environments.

These challenges represent some pretty dramatic questions for us:

• How do we get into the attention economy business?
• How do we dramatically lower production and delivery costs?
• How do we support self-service learning and user generated content?
• How do we foster knowledge worker skills?
• What are the new metrics?
• What does this mean for our current learning systems?
• How do we aggregate content?
• What are the legal and compliance issues?
• What are the new roles that must be created to go after this?
• Where do our skills fit? What new skills do we need?

This is going to be interesting!

SCORM Test

There have been lots of good comments and discussion on the post Test SCORM Courses with an LMS : eLearning Technology. Well worth looking at some of them.

The basic issue covered in the post was how to test SCORM courses prior to loading on a given LMS (e.g., Docent, SumTotal, Saba, Learn.com, etc.).

We talked about the SCORM test suite, SCORM test wrappers, and various test tools such as Trident, Reload player (http://www.reload.ac.uk/scormplayer.html), SCORM Test Track, remote debugging using tools like WebEx, HTTP traffic tracking with tools like Firebug, and some other things. Quite a great bit of discussion and useful information. If you are interested in testing your scorm courses, probably worth a read.

But recently someone (anonymous) left comments challenging a few of my base assumptions and I'd be curious to get thoughts. They asked:

"Why is testing courseware different? Why assume that the client or someone else is supposed to provide systems for testing for courseware vendors but not say accounting systems?"

"Perhaps you can rent or lease the software? Most major LMS vendors have their own test labs, support, and professional services."

"All of them sell their LMSs."

"There are third-party companies which you can hire to test courseware against LMSs."

"Have you ever tried contacting SumTotal about what options they have available for third-party courseware testing? What did they say? How many other LMS vendors have you spoken to?"

All of these challenge the base assumption that I made which is - the LMS vendor really is not looking to work with people who are creating small amounts of courses that need to be tested on their LMS. That's my general sense having working with a variety of different LMS vendors, but maybe that's not true?

Also, I wonder how much it would take to get the LMS setup for scorm testing? Cost? Hours?

Any comments from the LMS vendors ?

Any experience out there in working with LMS vendors to do scorm tests?

Or is it pretty much that you are using scorm testing tools and then getting on the actual installation to test and debug issues?

Safety Training Design

Some interesting discussions are going on in the Big Question for February The Learning Circuits Blog: Instructional Design - If - When - How Much. I thought I'd take a cut at an answer based on something we've been involved with recent - the design of safety training. This includes topics like driver safety, defensive driving, following rules, workplace safety, OSHA, operating machinery, wrist safety, food preparation, kitchen safety, first aid, fire, etc. There are striking similarities to most of the topics:

• Most of the core information is already known by the learner. They probably already know the 3 second following safety rule.
• There is likely content that is known, but ignored. Even though they know they should drive their truck 3 seconds behind the car in front, they don't because it feels like you are losing a lot of time when someone cuts in front of you and you have to slow down to allow 3 seconds again. (Note: it actually doesn't cost much time, but it does feel like it ... especially here in Los Angeles.).
• Performers need consistent reinforcement of these messages.
  

The reality is that much of the training on these kinds of topics is rather boring and mundane because it assumes that its purpose is to teach the person the information in the first place.

This is where design comes in ... We have to look at the larger picture and figure out what is going to make sense.

The answer we commonly come out with is a blended solution that involves various touch points including activities for managers, posters and a series of small (15 minutes or less) eLearning pieces that focus on reminding, reinforcing and on likely bad habits. Content around bad habits addresses things like - how much does it really cost you to let the person cut in front? On most trips it is almost nothing. It's almost all perception. Yes, there are lots of studies. And, in fact, stressing about it is bad for you. Be cool, follow the 3 second rule.

Corney, yes. But possibly very effective at attacking the problem. By the way, they already know the 3-second rule.

So, what does this case of Safety Training Design have to do with Instructional Design - If - When - How Much?

The recent post by Gary Hegenbart - Why Bother with Instructional Design? Gary tells us:

For eLearning I think careful planning is required, especially for self-paced courses. For classroom training, and maybe even live online training, almost no ID is needed. Huh? An instructional designer saying you don’t need instructional design? Yep, you need course developers not instructional designers.

In the past year I’ve spent a lot of time working on instructor-led training for both in-person classes and live online classes. What I’ve found is that no matter how much work I do two things are true:

• The instructor will always do things their way.
• Students don’t care about instructional design.

Wow, I don't really buy these arguments. I don't disagree that the instructor will take liberties with the instructional design. And Gary later makes the point that you need a good instructor - agreed. However, they should be given a decent road map. And "students don't care" - hogwash. If the safety training design was for manager delivered training, would you want to tell the managers to teach the three second rule or would you want them to concentrate on the real point - why people ignore the rule even though they know it. Would you want them to try to do it all in one shot, or over time. Design is needed here. And you often see really poor design around exactly this kind of topic.

So, Gary's argument around this topic don't hold water for me. I definitely need some level of instructional design or my training is going to be focused on the wrong things.

What's interesting about the design of safety training is that it feels like a topic where you would need very little ID. After all, you can quickly find a list of the topics that go under something like driver safety. You'd find out that you need to teach the 3 second following rule. And you quickly jump onto a really boring (since the learner already knows the information) course.

To me, this is where Common Sense and Intuition is Not Enough around when, if and how much instructional design is needed. Common sense and intuition is why there's so much really horrible safety training eLearning in the world today.

Making the Most of Attending a Conference - Ideas Needed

In comments in the post Death of Magazines - Broader Deeper Coverage, Virginia Yonkers commented:

I have to wonder what you expect to get out of a conference. I have never gone to a conference with the expectation of learning anything (although it would be a nice aside) but rather to network, discuss issues, and market (myself, my institution, my discipline, my theories/philosophies).

and later

I just had two papers accepted at the AERA conference in NYC this year and am dreading it. Last year's experience was horrible when it came to the conference itself, because I felt no sense of connection with such a massive organization.

However, the learning took place when I came home and was able to read through the papers and journals I picked up while there. I also contacted some of the people whose papers I found interesting. Unfortunately, at this point in my career, I must attend these types of conferences. So I will suffer through a trip to NYC (I'm a small town girl) and give me 10 minutes of presentation.

Sadly, I've felt the same way about going to conferences. I'm going to present at the conference and I'll get together with folks for networking and discussion. I'll learn through those things, but it seems that creating a conference where I also get to have a great participation experience is not on the agenda of conference organizers or attendees. This is something I've lamented about frequently.

Lots of people chimed into the post Better Conferences and among the ideas were things like:

• Free wifi (top choice on the poll)
  
• Smaller sessions with more advanced topics and discussions (this worked great at the last DevLearn but unfortunately was at 7AM)
  
• Unconference within a conference
  
• Keynotes aimed at us
• Lots of demos
• Cheat sheets or other sharing to help you get more from the conference
  

But this was from the perspective of what the conference organizer should do to make it a better event. Clark Quinn told me back then that it really is up to the attendee (especially the "expert" attendee) to get more out of it.

I somewhat agree with him on this. And I've certainly tried to think through this (see Be an Insanely Great Professional Conference Attendee and Session Hopping a Practical Guide). I've also continually suggested that the key is Better Questions (see also Continuing Thoughts on Questions and What Questions Should We be Asking?).

However, Virginia's comments got me thinking. I thought about how great the conversations are at my CTO Forum where a group of peers come together. Why am I not getting value from conferences? Why is Virginia clearly dreading going to her conference? Shouldn't something that costs so much money and time offer me more value that something that's free (my CTO Forum). Something is wrong here. Maybe

As a practitioner with more experience, I'm not doing the right things to get more from my conference experience.

But what are these things? What do other people do to get more from a conference?

For more discussions on networking and LinkedIn see Networking Events in Los Angeles and Southern California, Secret for Networking at Events – Prenetworking, Pre-network with LinkedIn, Local Event Organizers Need to Adopt Social Media.

Death of Magazines - Broader Deeper Coverage

Rick Nigol posted and reminded me of a post by Donald Clark - Training magaZZZZZZZZZZines. Both are lamenting about the fact that picking up any publication tends to cover roughly the same ground over and over. I have a similar feeling about the limited value of these publications for me and it's something that I mention at most presentations I ever do on eLearning 2.0. In particular, I say that since I've begun to shift my scanning behavior to blogs (scanning is how you stay up-to-speed on a topic) - my rapid fire skimming of blogs via a Skim Dive Skim approach has meant that magazines have mostly become pretty irrelevant to me. I will bring copies of magazines on a plane to flip through, but rarely do I read articles in any great depth. They simply are not worth my Limited Attention.

In other words, my scanning behavior has radically changed because of blogs (see Time Spent on Blogging, Personal Learning Strategies).

I also lump into this most of the activities at conferences (see Better Conferences). In fact, my limited attention has made me into a Session Hopper. It's much like skimming, but at a conference.

But Rick and Donald got me thinking that the reality is that Magazines and Conferences continually must aim at introductory, novice, overview level content. That appeals to the broadest audience. And somehow, ASTD conferences attract 50-75% newbies to ever conference. If you look at it, there is a relationship here:

Introductory / Novice Sources:

• Conference Sessions
• Training
• Wikipedia
• Magazines

What's common about these is that they are higher level coverage from a more trusted source, but they only go to a certain depth. And, yes, after you've gone through these for a while, they tend to be fairly repetitive.

Expert Sources:

• Search
• Blogs
• Conversations with other experts
  

These sources tend to offer more depth along more narrow topics. Further, there is a tendency to involve other people in conversations to really explore the topic. The conversations can happen in all kinds of ways both online and offline.

The conference sessions I present on eLearning 2.0 and the articles I write on various topics (e.g., Learning and Networking With A Blog (T+D article)) have to be somewhat of an overview. You cannot assume that people come with a common understanding of a topic. And I would suggest that I normally focus on more advanced topics.

In Disruptive Changes in Learning, I point to how the long tail of learning is addressed through alternative sources...

• Mainstream media -> YouTube
• Mainstream press -> Blogs

And this has real impact when you see things like: InfoWorld Folds Print Magazine and you also see things like The Industry Standard coming back, but as an aggregator / prediction market.

It will be interesting to see what begins to happen to mainstream sources that chase large audiences. Can they survive with such broad coverage? Can they also add value for people looking for deeper content? I personally think there's an interesting aggregator role, but they may be made irrelevant by networked aggregation unless they get out in front today.

Certainly, for most experts, my guess is that they've lost much of their value and there are much better scanning sources.

Of course, this also relates to the same issues we face as developers of training. We currently focus on large audiences. We face much the same challenge as publishers and conference organizers. How do you pursue opportunity in the long tail?