E-Learning Provocateur

MARCH 18, 2024

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I beheld much to admire in a recent podcast in which Hayley Curcio, Head of MECCAversity, shared the iconic retailer’s approach not only to training its workforce but also to educating its customers. The host Marnina Diprose set the scene aptly: As an expert “we assume that people will just get what we’re saying, without the context of us being in the industry or being educated for multiple years.” To which Hayley added: “It

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E-Learning Provocateur

MARCH 12, 2024

“Those who say it can not be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it.” Who said that? Was it George Bernard Shaw? Elbert Hubbard? Or is it one of those mysterious “old Chinese proverbs”…? Regardless, in my experience it applies to the scaling of training across organisations, and I was honoured to discuss it with Michelle Ockers on her podcast.

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E-Learning Provocateur

FEBRUARY 5, 2024

I for one welcome the Australian Government’s proposal to establish a National Skills Passport. Tabled last year via the Working Future whitepaper, the idea is “to help people more easily demonstrate their skills to employers and reduce barriers to lifelong learning.” Bravo. But of course the devil is in the detail, and so far there hasn’t been very much of that (perhaps by design).

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E-Learning Provocateur

JANUARY 1, 2024

G’day & Kia Ora to the new year! As my greeting suggests, this year’s instalment of conference alerts is an Antipodean affair. Due to popular demand – well, two people – I’ve added events from the land of the long white cloud into the mix. If you’re aware of any other L&D conferences in Australia or New Zealand this year, please do let me know… Conference List The details of the following events may change, so best check the latest information on

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E-Learning Provocateur

DECEMBER 4, 2023

It’s about that time again when I look back on my blogging year and choose a theme that connects the breadth of topics that I managed to cover. This time I’ve borrowed “Think different” from Apple’s advertising campaign at the turn of the millennium. While the adverbial in this phrase omits the “‑ly” suffix in the American fashion, I chose it because it encapsulates the spirit of blogging – which is to add something fresh, independent, and ab

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Write Blog Compliance Training Apple Learning Styles 158

E-Learning Provocateur

NOVEMBER 13, 2023

In this research study , strategy consultants who used GPT-4 as a tool to assist them with “inside the frontier” tasks (within the capability of AI) performed significantly better than their counterparts did in terms of quality and productivity. Hence for such tasks, the authors called AI a quality and productivity booster. However, those who used GPT-4 for “outside the frontier” tasks (beyond the capability of AI without extensive human guidance) performed significantly

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E-Learning Provocateur

SEPTEMBER 4, 2023

Way back in the pre-pandemic era, I proposed a solution to fix our senseless compliance training – or to be more accurate, its management – yet it remains broken. The central premise of my argument was that it’s inefficient to repeat the same mandatory training when you change jobs within the same regulatory framework, so a centralised system to recognise your prior learning could save your new employer and the broader economy some serious coin.

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E-Learning Provocateur

JULY 31, 2023

I confess that whenever I see someone has cited their job title as “Learning Experience Designer” my first reaction is skepticism. As the joke goes, a data scientist is a statistician who lives in San Francisco. So too at times, it seems a learning experience designer is an instructional designer who lives in Sydney. Aggrandising one’s title is hardly new, so I’ve been pondering why this title bothers me so much.

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E-Learning Provocateur

JUNE 5, 2023

Ice breaker questions – some of us love them, the rest of us loathe them. They typically bear no relevance to the topic at hand, and if it’s even mildly personal, I’m too busy scrambling for something interesting to say instead of listening to what my colleagues are saying. But I can see why trainers use them: they metaphorically break the ice.

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E-Learning Provocateur

APRIL 4, 2023

My favourite episode of Blackadder is the one in which Baldrick burns the manuscript of Dr Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. As Edmund scrambles to re-write the tome, Baldrick contributes a definition of “dog”: Not a cat. While his definition is comically inadequate, it’s also unassailably accurate. Indeed a dog is not a cat; so if you understand what a cat is, the contrast will help you understand what a dog is.

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Knowledge Base Roles Knowledge Quiz 255

E-Learning Provocateur

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

The title of this blog post is borrowed from Deloitte’s summary of the priorities of C-suite executives (which in turn is borrowed from the Daniels ). Why they chose the phrase to represent their findings is clear: “When asked to choose their focus areas among the 10 core business priorities broadly categorized across growth, purpose, people, process, and technology, more than 60 percent of the executives surveyed chose seven or more priorities, and 25 percent chose all 10.” Th

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E-Learning Provocateur

JANUARY 10, 2023

Has our conference attendance rate returned to pre-pandemic levels? I’m not sure. I attended several last year, and while there seemed to be plenty of attendees at each one, most combined L&D with HR to bump up the numbers. Which is fine, given they’re allied professions, so long as the content pitched to the latter doesn’t squeeze out the value sought by the former.

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E-Learning Provocateur

DECEMBER 6, 2022

Another year has flown by, and once again I’m pleasantly surprised by the number of articles I managed to post in-between the trials and tribulations of life. In December I like to review each one with a view to identifying a common theme. This time around, I’ve noticed that I – perhaps more directly than usual – presented my ideas in the form of proposals.

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Agile Specialist Evalution Assessment 209

E-Learning Provocateur

NOVEMBER 29, 2022

I respect Malcolm Gladwell as a thinker, but I’m disappointed by his Grand Unified Theory for fixing higher education that he espouses in an episode of the Revisionist History podcast titled The Tortoise and the Hare. I won’t spoil the surprise for those who haven’t yet heard it, but suffice to say it’s born out of his experience in taking the hallowed Law School Admission Test (LSAT).

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E-Learning Provocateur

NOVEMBER 14, 2022

The term “Agile” means different things to different people. To some it’s the powerhouse of efficiency and productivity; whereas to others it’s a vague label at best, or an empty buzzword at worst. And I can see why the conflict arises: because two forms of agile exist – one with a small “a”, the other with a big “A” Small “a” agile.

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E-Learning Provocateur

MAY 31, 2022

We’ve all been there. The organisation invests an obscene amount of money in a course library, and after much fanfare and an initial spike of excitement, activity steadily dwindles until the platform resembles a ghost town vacated by all but the most enthusiastic of fans. Similar problems with learner engagement beset other forms of digital training too; whether it’s the famously low completions rates of MOOCs, or the constant chasing up of laggards who are yet to complete their comp

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E-Learning Provocateur

MAY 2, 2022

Despite its honesty, the humble phrase “I don’t know” is widely feared. From the fake-it-til-you-make-it mindset of consultants to the face-saving responses of executives , we puny humans are psychologically conditioned to have all the answers – or at least be seen to. Of course, demanding all the answers is the premise of summative assessment, especially when it’s in the form of the much maligned multiple-choice quiz.

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E-Learning Provocateur

APRIL 4, 2022

I’ve never understood the rationale of the 80% pass mark. Which 20% of our work are we prepared to do wrongly? It might explain the universally poor state of CX that companies are evidently willing to wear, but it’s arguably more serious when we consider the acronym-laden topics that are typically rolled out via e-learning, such as OHS and CTF.

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E-Learning Provocateur

MARCH 7, 2022

Well that was unexpected. When I hit the Publish button on Not our job , I braced myself for a barrage of misunderstanding and its evil twin, misrepresentation. But it didn’t happen. On the contrary, my peers who contacted me about it were downright agreeable. (A former colleague did politely pose a comment as a disagreement, but I happened to agree with everything she stated.).

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E-Learning Provocateur

JANUARY 31, 2022

Despite the prevailing rhetoric for the Learning & Development function to be “data driven”, data for the purposes of evaluating what we do is notoriously hard to come by. Typically we collect feedback from happy sheets (which I prefer to call unhappy sheets ) and confirm learning outcomes via some form of assessment. In my experience, however, behavioural change is reported much less often, while anything to do with business metrics even less so.

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Job Metrics Learning Objects Evalution 358

E-Learning Provocateur

JANUARY 4, 2022

Little did I know in March last year that the Learning & Development Leadership Summit would be the only in-person event that I would attend until the L&D Symposium in November! The summit was held in downtown Sydney – immersed in the hustle and bustle of the city, and convenient to boot. In contrast, the symposium was held in the gorgeous Hunter Valley – far enough away from the bright lights to be a hassle to get to, but free of the daily distractions of “work” – allowing u

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E-Learning Provocateur

NOVEMBER 1, 2021

As my home state emerges from lockdown, I reflect over the many months of confusion during the pandemic. My fellow citizens were confounded by brain benders such as whether to wear a mask inside a ride-share vehicle; what qualifies as an “essential” item; and when one may travel beyond 5km from home. No confusion over the Dine & Discover voucher scheme, however, whereby residents apply for $100 worth of credit to fund eligible recreation activities.

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E-Learning Provocateur

OCTOBER 3, 2021

There’s a maxim among pub pool players that the consumption of beer will improve your game, until you reach a tipping point whereby the alcohol flooding your bloodstream diminishes your mastery of the cue. Funnily enough, it’s not just an urban myth. While The Watsonia Bugle cheekily reports an empirically generated (but alas, fictional) bell curve , the effect of ethanol-induced relaxation and confidence on the players of time-rich sports has some actual science underpinning it.

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E-Learning Provocateur

AUGUST 31, 2021

Australia’s performance in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games was impressive, even for a nation that considers barely scraping into the top 10 a national cause for concern. What was surprising this time around was the proportion of gold medals to total medals – a whopping 37% – which of course makes all the difference in the final tally. Don’t get me wrong, I consider any medal a tremendous victory (exemplified by the Boomers’ historic bronze) but there’s no doubt the one most

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E-Learning Provocateur

AUGUST 8, 2021

There was an aspect I omitted from my previous post, Space invaders , in which I covered the spacing effect as a means of maximising long-term retention. Zsolt Olah picked it: interleaving and – ironically! – I judged it a bridge too far to include in the same post and so decided to split it out across a second one. You’ll see why… Interleaving.

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E-Learning Provocateur

MAY 3, 2021

I find it strange when a blogger doesn’t approve my comment. I consider comments the life blood of my own blog, and whether they be positive or negative, classy or rude, they all add to the diversity of the conversation. If your fragile ego can’t handle that, don’t blog. I recently submitted a constructive comment to a particular blog post, twice, and it never eventuated.

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Assessment Diversity Training Education Evalution 238

E-Learning Provocateur

APRIL 5, 2021

English is a funny language. Coloured by countless other languages over centuries of war, politics, colonialism, migration and globalisation, many words have been lost, appropriated or invented, while others have changed their meaning. In Australian English for example, fair dinkum means “true” or “genuine” Linguaphiles speculate the phrase originated in 19th Century Lincolnshire, where “dinkum” referred to a fair amount of work, probably in relation to a stin

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Pedagogy Teach Reference Performance Support 338

E-Learning Provocateur

FEBRUARY 1, 2021

In a past life I worked with a fellow named Jim who was very good at what he did. As what I would term a “trainer”, he was well versed in face-to-face delivery and widely respected in the business as a subject matter expert. He had also racked up quite a tenure at the company, so he was considered something of a stalwart. In my own role, though, I could see what Jim couldn’t: the incoming wave of e-learning.

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E-Learning Provocateur

JANUARY 4, 2021

Let’s try that again. Just as we were gearing up for another year’s worth of cutting edge insights and showcases, the coronavirus had other ideas. While some of the digital learning conferences I had listed for 2020 went ahead as planned, others pivoted to virtual delivery, while the rest were ironically postponed or cancelled. Although in this country we remain confident in vaccination and elimination, the genie is out of the bottle and this year we’ll see an unprecedented num

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E-Learning Provocateur

DECEMBER 7, 2020

I dislike grammar jokes, pedants, and Oxford commas. That’s my jovial way to end a year that will be remembered as a tough one for a long time to come. I found blogging a welcome distraction, so much so that in addition to my annual list of e-learning conferences in Australia (which took a beating!) I churned out no fewer than ten thought pieces.

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E-Learning Provocateur

NOVEMBER 30, 2020

In Roses are red , I proposed definitions for oft-used yet ambiguous terms such as “competency” and “capability” Not only did I suggest a competency be considered a task, but also that its measurement be binary: competent or not yet competent.

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Kirkpatrick Beginner Pattern Assessment 356

E-Learning Provocateur

NOVEMBER 2, 2020

I once had a conversation with a man who scared me. It was over 20 years ago, and I remember him being quite a lovely fellow. He was simply proud of his son earning his PhD. What scared me was his conviction that in order to keep up in the imminent future, an undergraduate qualification would not be enough; one must earn a postgraduate qualification.

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E-Learning Provocateur

OCTOBER 5, 2020

I’ve blogged in favour of digital badges in the past, not because they’re colourful motivators – which arguably they are, at least for some people – but because they represent an achievement. While the robustness of the criteria for earning a badge may be challenged, as may be the assessment of meeting said criteria, the concept holds true: a badge must be earned by demonstrating that you have done something.

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Social Networks Blended Learning Social Network Quiz 244

E-Learning Provocateur

JULY 14, 2020

From $7 billion to nearly $14 billion. That’s how much the spend on leadership training by American corporations grew over the preceding 15 years, according to Kaiser and Curphy in their 2013 paper Leadership development: The failure of an industry and the opportunity for consulting psychologists. Over that same period we witnessed the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the implosion of Enron, and of course the Global Financial Crisis.

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Metrics Leadership Diversity Training Consulting 289

E-Learning Provocateur

JUNE 22, 2020

Years ago, I remember taking a tour of what was then one of those newfangled “innovation labs” A hive of Design Thinking , it was crawling with serious young people in jeans and t-shirts scribbling on walls and rearranging herds of post-it notes. In an otherwise old-fashioned financial services organisation, it was an impressive tilt towards modernisation and true customer centricity (beyond the warm and fuzzy TV commercials).

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Micro-Learning Predictions Assessment Innovation 246

E-Learning Provocateur

MAY 3, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new normal for L&D professionals as millions of people were sent home to work remotely. While many of us had been offering online courses and other alternatives to in-person training for years, suddenly nothing could be run in a traditional classroom setting; and so as a collective we’ve been forced to shift learning and development online.

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Blended Learning Remote Learning Jive Cognitive 363

E-Learning Provocateur

APRIL 6, 2020

Few things in the L&D profession attract as much disdain as the Level 1 evaluation survey. Known colloquially as the “happy sheet”, the humble questionnaire is typically considered too onerous, too long, too shallow, and it gives whiners a platform to complain about the sandwiches or the air conditioning. And yet a long time ago, someone told me something that has stuck with me ever since: you don’t want to not do it.

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Evalution Score Survey Summary 264