Smell the Roses

I recently had the opportunity to watch (live) an interview with Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay from 1998 - 2008; the time when eBay grew from 30 employees to 15,000 employees and took their operations internationally. She was an impressive speaker and offered many insightful comments and bits of wisdom based on her experiences. What stuck with me was her response to a question about the best advice she could give to an executive vice president soon ready to take over the helm of her mother's 40-year-old, very successful organization. Very eloquently she said:

1. Smell the roses and enjoy the journey.
2. Focus on 20% of the work that will get you 80% of the results.
3. Continue to deliver results to your customers.
4. Be nimble and quick.

Simple, straightforward advice with a powerful message about handling change, being responsive, spending time on the right activities, and most importantly enjoying life along the way. It reminded me that what is important about reaching your destination is the journey you took to get there. Remember to stop and smell the roses along the way.

Written by Michelle Kelly

Writing Online Course Assessment Questions

My last post concerned learners’ needs for feedback after answering online course assessment questions. As I thought more about this, I was reminded that it’s easier to write good feedback when working with good questions.

Below are three online resources you may find helpful:

• Tom Kuhlmann, author of the Rapid E-Learning blog, discusses five common mistakes in creating quiz questions.
• The Computer Assisted Assessment Center of Loughborough University provides guidelines and tips for creating assessment questions.
• In Adobe’s Acrobat Connect Pro guide are several tips for designing effective quizzes and assessments.

Online Learning Assessments and Feedback

When working with clients who are new to online learning, we are frequently asked why we need to provide feedback for online assessment questions. They often feel that it’s enough to tell learners that their answers are correct or incorrect. From our experience with online learning and learner needs, we know that they need and want more.

Learners often have the following questions after answering an assessment question:

• Did I get the right answer?
• If not, why not?
• What’s wrong with my answer?
• What did I misunderstand?
• How can I correct my misunderstanding?

Feedback provides the opportunity to answer these questions and provide clarification. To provide effective feedback, we use the following guidelines:

• Provide feedback on the same screen that contains the question and place the feedback near the question.
• When learners choose the correct answer:
• Tell them they are correct and explain the main reason why.
• If more than one answer is correct, say so in the feedback and explain why more than one answer is correct.
• When learners choose an incorrect answer:
• Tell them they are incorrect and explain why.
• For multiple choice answers, explain why the other answers are incorrect.
• Provide learners with a hint to the correct answer and let them try again. If they only have one try at the question, feedback should explain the correct answer and explain why.
• Provide a link to the section of the course where the topic is covered so they can review the content.

Remember that in an online course, learners don’t usually have the opportunity to raise their hands and ask for clarification from the facilitator; feedback can provide the clarification learners need.

Engaging Your Workforce During Challenging Economic Times

As a professor at Regis for the last five years, my classroom dynamics and discussions have changed dramatically over the last year. Recently, we were discussing training and development and the importance of leveraging it during the downturn. Employees need to know that they are an intricate, valuable asset in the organization in order to keep them engaged and performing to meet overall organizational goals. However, I surveyed the class and found that 60% have had lay-offs or are in a hiring freeze. So, as one student asked, how do we develop our employees with such constrained budgets? We began to answer this key question and together determined these top six recommendations:

1. Keep your training programs alive or bring in an outside firm, such as EPI, to conduct training and keep employees engaged.
2. Host lunch-and-learns and utilize talent throughout the organization to share knowledge, skills and abilities. Expertise resides in our own organizations. It is likely someone on staff could share how to manage finances, how to do yoga, nutrition, or even how to lead a team meeting, etc.
3. Implement formal mentoring programs. They are low cost and provide opportunities for knowledge sharing across the organization. These formal programs also help develop relationships across the organization and can break down silos. The goal is that these formal relationships will become informal.
4. Develop your employees on the job. For instance, select a new person to lead the team meeting, have an employee attend a meeting for you in your place, cross-train your team to build new skill sets, or select a person each week to give a presentation on something new they’ve learned.
5. Provide rewards and recognition. Congratulate your employees who do a good job, write a personal note for good performance, publicly recognize an employee for good performance, take a fun break and let employees visit, and ask for their input about how to do something a different way with less staff (make it a contest).
6. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Try to share as much information as possible with your team. If you have valuable information regarding what the company is going through, share it. They will trust you more and be more engaged and likely to perform.

Putting It Into Words

Many people struggle to put their thoughts into words, and yet the written word is an essential part of daily life (how many e-mails have you written today?). Whether it's writing a training manual or sending a quick e-mail, we don't always have the luxury of being present to explain our thoughts or draw a visual. The ability to accurately and vividly convey our meaning with written words is very important, particularly when you are trying to use those words to teach someone else.

If transferring your thoughts into writing is something that requires extra effort or time for you, consider trying the writing exercises below. By applying the task of explaining or describing to circumstances outside your usual work environment, these exercises may help you forget about all the rules and hindrances of writing and get to the art of really conveying your thoughts. You'll also benefit from immediate feedback from your reader, which isn't something that's always available. And of course, a little practice never hurts.

First, Do This
This exercise helps you practice accuracy by writing step-by-step instructions for a puzzle that your readers have never done before.

1. Select a tangram puzzle.
2. Review the solution to that puzzle.
3. Write step-by-step directions for placing the pieces into the solution shape.
4. Give the tangram puzzle pieces and your written directions to a coworker or friend (your "reader").
5. Without revealing the solution image, ask your reader to use your directions to complete the puzzle.
6. Watch your reader's progress and note where he/she goes wrong. Any step where your reader struggles is an opportunity for you to have been more accurate or clear. If your reader can complete the puzzle, you've been successful in laying out logical steps and guessing and addressing your reader's questions. If your reader can't complete the task, you need to reconsider the puzzle from your reader's perspective and try again.

Oh Lemon, My Lemon
Extremely accurate and clear writing can also be...boring. If you're writing something other than step-by-step instructions, you also want your words to have life and character, which is what this exercise can help you practice. This exercise also requires accuracy, but success relies more on vivid description than methodical detail.

1. Buy a lemon. (If you're doing this exercise by yourself, you'll need two extra lemons so your reader will have a selection. If you're doing this exercise with a group of people, have one lemon per writer.)
2. Take five minutes to study your lemon.
3. Take another 10 minutes to write a description of your lemon.
4. Place your lemon in a row among the other lemons.
5. After all the lemons are placed together, give the description of your lemon to your reader. (If you are in a group, collect all the descriptions, shuffle them up, and re-distribute to the group.)
6. Ask your reader to read your description, and based on that description, to select your lemon from among the other lemons. If your reader can identify your lemon, that means your description was vivid enough that the reader was able to see the lemon through your eyes, and could picture that lemon from your writing. If your reader can't select your lemon, point out your lemon and ask your reader where the description went wrong.

Too easy? Try giving yourself a word limit for the description of your lemon. Shoot for a paragraph, then try to reduce your words by half. Vivid and concise is the ultimate writing goal.

Posted by Jenny Beer