If you are like me you’d have taken many courses this year already. You typically look at the title and the content and if these 2 pieces of data interests you, you make a choice to attend or not. You may look for additional input such as dates, speaker profile, venue, past participant testimonials etc. and that’s it.
I have often felt challenged with the idea of “how do i communicate the value of a course i design in a way that the stakeholder ‘will get it’ at least at an instructional level in a succinct way.” i.e. going one level deeper than what i contextualized above.
I was recently hit with a bunch of competing programs/courses. They all looked good and similar. The only way i could make an informed first level choice was costly, both time wise and money wise. I had to either call the provider or physically go to the provider’s office to get “oriented”. In today’s world that is a luxury few can afford.
What if instructional designers could adopt a global standard to measure instructional design and communicate course content in a quantifiable, fun and meaningful way, with input from the consumer or staying faithful to the business course objectives? Ah! why didn’t i think of that before!
Here’s one possible approach.
1. All courses, be it professional skills, leadership and sales or technical, intend to provide ideas for transforming the learner’s behavior.
I opt to use the Wikipedia definition of behaviour as: Behavior (American English) or behaviour (Commonwealth English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems, or artificial entities in conjunction with themselves or their environment, which includes the other systems or organisms around as well as the (inanimate) physical environment. It is the response of the system or organism to various stimuli or inputs, whether internal or external, conscious or subconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary. This takes care of technical courses and soft skills.
2. All courses are designed to provide input which i call Advocacy and scope for some interaction- Activity.
3. All courses provide for some breaks, which i call Rest, re-energize and breaks (RRBs)
Here’s what you get for a 4 hour (half a day) leadership/professional skills program.
Here’s how the communication would go: Learning and Talent partner (LTP) to stakeholder about a bespoke program:
LTP: Here’s what we’ve got for you. It’s a half day program as you had requested. We’ve tried to incorporate all the learnings you’ve wanted for your team.
S. What’s the course looking like.
LTP. We believe its pretty well balanced. MOL- RRB ratio is 80-20, Its got 23 BTIs- these are what we counted from the things you wanted your staff to get.
S. What’s MOL-RRB ratio!
LTP: MOL stands for Minutes of learning and RRB stands for Rest, re-energize and breaks. To break it down further, MOL includes the total of the ‘teaching’ part plus the activities part in the course. Its everything other than the time allocated for RRBs.
S. Will it be interactive?
LTP. Yes its got a good balance of advocacy and activity. We call it MAD MAcs ratio. In this case we’ve gone for a MADMAcs ratio of 3:1. This means for every 3 units of concepts being taught, we’ll have one round of activity to embed the concepts.
Q. Is 3:1 Madmax as you call it good enough, Is there an optimum ratio standard?
LTP. Yes there is and its subjective. It takes into consideration things like the overall duration, the complexity of concepts, the energy of the audience, the time of the day when the program is being delivered etc. Its this balance that differentiates one design from another!
Q. Is there a range for MADMax?
LTP. Yes there could be a wide range. Example, if its a course for middle management, we may want to have more experiential and case based learning. In this case the MADMAcs ratio could be flipped to more MAcs than MADs.
In summary:
Remember Madmax ratio. Stakeholders and Instructional designers would like to adopt a global standard to measure instructional design and communicate course content in a quantifiable, fun and meaningful way, with input from the consumer or staying faithful to the business objective. If done, stakeholders can combine the title and the content and look at these additional metrics on the side, to now be able to:
Adopt a language that more supports efficient dialog between learning and business
Participants could get a much better sense of and get even more motivated to, attend the course.
Participants could be mentally and may be physically as well 🙂 better prepared
Make a better choice if they have to choose between 2 competing courses.
Use it as a sanity check to see of the course is well balanced.
Further Research
With new ways of delivering learning, I hope the concepts here are useful in triggering learning organizations to research optimum ratios among RRBs, MADs and MAcs and BTIs for various types of courses to maximize the ROI for courses.
