Remote Learner€¦ · Web viewAuthor: End User Last modified by: Debbie K. Shultz Created Date:...

Health Informatics1

Training Foundations‒Session 2October 19, 2012

1 The following transcript has been edited for readability.

Training Foundations‒Session 2 October 19, 2012

Slide 1

Training Foundations

(Nicole Bunselmeyer): Hi, welcome to session two of Training Foundations with Margaret Murphy and Nicole Bunselmeyer.

Slide 2

Session #2

Last session, we discussed conceptionally the training design process, but this session we are going to take a little deeper dive and look at the action steps needed to design an engaging and effective training course.

of 39

How to get started

How to get started? That is the question. Just as on any trip that we start out in, we need to know where we begin with and where we are going to end with. Last week, we talked about that road map and that is the ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) process.

This week, we are going to, or I should say this session, we are going to talk about the activities and the action steps along the way that will get us to our destination, which is an effective and engaging training course. So, now let us take a look at some practical steps in the design process.

Slide 4

Practical steps in the design process (1 of 6)

The first, Analyze purpose and audience and resources—we need to know about the learners, we need to know about what the problem is and what the learners need to be able to know or do at the end of the training. We also need to understand the attitudes that they come to the training with because that will also influence the success of the course. If it is compliance training,

the attitudes tend to be a little less excited about the course. So, take that into consideration as you design the course.

Also, you want to pay attention to special challenges, constraints or considerations, such as if half of the learners are non-native English speakers. That is an important consideration in order to build into the design of the course.

Slide 5


Writing clear objectives—the objectives act as our guideposts along the way in the course, and having clear objectives from the outset line us up for designing and developing and delivering an engaging and effective training course. So, make sure that those objectives are well written and make sense, and we will talk a little bit more here shortly about writing engaging and effective objectives.

Communicate “what is in it for me” to the learners. We are all adult learners, and we all come to a training course with certain expectations. We want to make sure that if we invest some time in that course that we get out of it what we hope to. So, communicate right up front what the learners will be able to know or do afterwards, and respect the needs of those adult learners, and build that course around those goals and objectives that you promised up front.


We want to be able to develop activities that actively engage the learners and as Margaret said in the last sessions, the learners need to be engaged cognitively. Rather than just lecturing to the participants, include activities that help the learners make meaningful connections to the content, as well as, include variety of activities. Just do not do lecture and discussion the whole time. Look for ways that help bring that content out and engage the learners in ways that keep them excited and motivated throughout the course.

Slide 7


Organize materials effectively. When you think about the course content, spend some time thinking about how you want to lay it out and how you want to organize it; sequence from easy to difficult, highly structured to less structured. Pay some attention to what the content is and the audience and how familiar they are with the topic upfront, and that will help guide you how you need to organize that content.

Additionally, we know that adults like to have digestible chunks of content. It is hard to sit through a 30-minute lecture and retain everything out of it, but breaking it up into little topics and then describing why it is relevant or using activities and breaking up that lecture into digestible chunks will be much more successful from a learner’s standpoint in being able to apply that content down the road.

Also do not overwhelm the learners with too much information. As we talked about in the last session that the role of objectives is helpful to making sure that the scope of the course stays on track, and we do not throw in extraneous information just because it sounds good or it is interesting. We need to focus on what the learners need to know and not what is nice to know.

Slide 8


Develop the skill and knowledge checks for each learning objective. The objectives are guideposts for the course. We need a way to be able to determine at the end of the course whether or not we successfully conveyed all of those objectives throughout the course content. So, identifying skill or knowledge checks that tie directly back to objectives is one way to be able to ensure that that training course was effective.

Here is a list of some sample ways to do skill and knowledge checks, and these go beyond the traditional true/false, multiple choice, as you can see. We have things like case studies, or projects, or writing assignments. So, there are lots of ways to be able to assess that knowledge, assess whether or not the learner was able to make those connections.


Assessing the training, the overall training– So, the skill and knowledge checks are just one part of this assessment. That is just assessing the learning. The behavior and the results are the other part that we are really interested in. Did this training change behavior on the job? Did this training make changes in the organization and the department? So, as you design and develop your training, think about how you are going to assess it on that higher level and look for ways to incorporate that higher level assessment after the training is done.

Slide 10

Characteristics of useful learning objectives

So, what are objectives and what are useful learning objectives? We have thrown that word out in the past two sessions, but let us just take a moment to explore what is in an objective. An objective is a statement about what the participant should be able to do after the training.

There is a science to writing objectives, and you will hear lots of different ways, kind of models if you will, for

writing objectives, but here we are going to keep it very simple and get to what is the essential part of an objective. It needs to be observable or demonstrable. We need to describe what the participant will be able to do after this training course. So, we need to think about the verbs that we use, and we need to describe end results not the learning process.

Slide 11

Course Objectives: Examples

So, for example, here are what we would describe as well-written course objectives, and as you look at all of these, look for that actionable verb, that observable verb, things like discuss, state, describe.

Course Objectives: Examples (cont’d)

Describe, demonstrate gestures, list at least four—as you can see that these are things that we can observe or we can witness, if you will, and that is the essence of a good objective.

Slide 13

Action verbs to avoid

I always like to show this slide because I think it is important to see what are not good action verbs to use, things like “have an awareness of.” How do you observe awareness and/or “familiar with,” the learner will be “familiar with”? There is really no way to gauge or assess what level of familiarity a learner has with that. Or one of my absolute favorites is “understands.” We all have our own version of what understanding is. So, these lists of verbs are ones to steer clear for if you are trying to write objectives that are observable and measureable.

Why objectives are important

So, why are objectives important? They clearly identify the desired knowledge, skill and behavior; they determine the scope; and they also, set and communicate expectations of the course to all the stakeholders. It lets them know what the training can or cannot do, and it also communicates expectations to the participants on what the expectation is for them after the course, and it provides a way to gauge effectiveness of the training.

So, at this point, I am going to turn it over to Margaret who is going to talk a little bit about Bloom’s taxonomy and its role in writing objectives.

Margaret.

Refer to Bloom’s taxonomy

(Margaret): Thanks, Nicole.

So, in the 1950s, a man named Benjamin Bloom came up with a way to categorize, stratify different levels of learning. At the bottom, we have the most basic knowledge, remembering or recalling knowledge facts. At that level, you see verbs such as define, identify, list. The next level up is understanding, comprehension of concepts. You might see verbs such as distinguish, compare, contrast. Next level up is application of concepts. There you might see, well, apply (that is an obvious choice), demonstrate, use. Analyze would be the next level up, and you would see verbs such as explain or arrange. At the top of the chart is create and, at that point, of course, create would be among the verbs used, develop, and so on. So we encourage you to refer to a handout that we have included that has a list of commonly used verbs along with which level in Bloom’s they are.

Another use of Bloom’s is when you are developing discussion questions. Take a look at what level you would like the discussion to be. Do you want it at a basic level? Do you want them the learners just to be able to recall certain facts or concepts? Or, do you want them at a higher level?

Activity

So, let us look at some objectives and you decide whether these are useful, well-written objectives or not useful. So, the first one: list six high-impact mistakes managers make while conducting employee performance evaluations. Okay or not? Okay, this one is fine. It is observable. You can see if someone is able to make a list. They are concrete, six high-impact mistakes. Okay, that one is just fine.

Number two: review key statistics concepts. All right, what do you think? This one has a couple problems. First of all, review, that is not really a useful outcome, not a good verb to use. Also, “key statistics concepts”—it is too broad. It needs to be more specific.

All right, manage others effectively. What do you think? Again, similar problems – it is too broad. How would you know? And it is not observable or measureable. How would you know if they can manage others effectively? It needs to be more specific.

Number four: create a Value Stream Map for a clinical process in the health care setting. Yeah, that one is great. Create. Can they do it or not? It is observable. Number five: internalize Acme’s corporate culture. So, how are you going to know if a participant has internalized the corporate culture? A choir of angels suddenly breaks into song? No way to tell. Number six: state the advantages and disadvantages of software adoption. Yeah, this one is fine, observable, specific.

So, let us look at some rewrites, rewrites of number two. Compute the mean of a set of numbers. A-Okay. Describe the procedure for finding the mean of a set of numbers. Great, very specific.

Number three: discuss three actions a manager can take to increase employee satisfaction. Yes, very observable.

Number five: articulate four elements of Acme’s mission statement. That is observable versus internalize the culture.

Slide 17

Objectives with a twist

Just wanted to throw this in—Objectives with a twist. Objectives are typically written in a very dry manner. Author and eLearning guru Michael Allen has come up with a way. He writes his objectives in a more creative fashion. So, look at the one on the left, standard objective. Look at what he does with it. In about two hours, you will learn to spot the problems in typical training programs that make them boring and forgettable. You will learn how to fix them. Are you ready?

Okay, so just putting that out there as an option.

Agenda (cont’d)

All right, for the remainder of the time, what we are going to do is launch into a description of varied instructional approaches and activities that you can use. The go-to instructional approach in most training sessions is PowerPoint-assisted lectures. We are hoping that you will come away with, number one, some ways to spark up your lectures and make them trigger more active learning in your participants. So, that is one goal.

The second goal is to give you some options. When you are thinking about putting together your PowerPoint deck, we hope you will pause and say, “Hang on. Is there another way to go at this other than lecture, another way for the learners to uptake this content?”

Key instructional components

So, a quick review of the key components of instruction: get their attention; clarify your goal; how are you going to convey the content; facilitate learning that can be back and forth questions with the audience, that can be walking around and chiming in with small group discussions (it can take any number of forms); providing opportunities for practice and application, that is key; giving feedback; assessing performance; and then, hopefully, you will be building in opportunities for the learners to enhance their retention and transfer and apply the skills back when they are on the job.

Approach #1

Let us look at several different approaches that you can take in the structure and delivery of your content. So, the first approach, which is fairly conventional, is to lecture for an hour and then give a practice activity. I do not recommend that approach. If you are going to go with lecture plus practice activities, I suggest breaking it into ten-minute chunks of lecture followed by activity. There was an interesting study done. Someone looked at college students in all different classes and came to the conclusion that at any given moment in a college lecture, even with different presenters with different styles, only about 20% of the students were actually listening to the lecture at any given moment. So, kind of gives you pause in terms of lengthy lectures.

Approach #2: Discovery

So, here is another approach, more of what we have termed the discovery approach. Give participants a problem to solve. Equip them with the resources to solve it, and you can also provide answers to questions as an expert. You can give them readings. If you are fortunate enough to have more than one trainer in the room, you can set up different stations around the room with experts who can answer questions on different topics. You can also create job aids that they use to solve problems. This is an approach that works better with people who are at, maybe, an intermediate level, not novices in a particular domain area.

Slide 22

Approach #3: Flipped Classroom

Another approach I wanted to mention is what is called the flipped classroom and this is an approach whereby the instructor provides the participants with the content before the classroom-based session. This could take any number of shapes. It could be recorded lectures, readings, games, discussions, and then the

classroom time is used for participants to work on problem-solving activities and to get their questions answered.

Slide 23

Lecture Training Session

None of us sets out to do this to our audiences in a training session. However, this is what happens if you lecture at people for an hour with just bullet pointed slides. What we would like to do is spend the rest of the time in today’s session going over instructional approaches that can enliven your training sessions and engage participants.

Slide 24

Active Training Session

So, that they feel more like this.

Common instructional methods

So, here is a list of some common instructional methods, and I will be going over each of these. And Nicole and I will be going over each of these in more detail to give you some tips and tricks.

Slide 26

1. Lectures

Let us look at lectures first since that is the predominant instructional approach in training. Lectures are not inherently bad. In fact, they can be a very good way of conveying basic concepts, facts, procedural information, processes, and there are ways to make lectures more engaging.

Creating engaging lectures

Novelty and change appeal to us cognitively and tend to hold people’s attention. So, one way you can do this, in lectures, is through your presentation style, varying your vocal intonation. That is why a monotone voice is so deadly dull in a presentation because there is no change. So, there is nothing to hold us cognitively. You can use gestures, facial expressions. All of those help to enliven your lectures. Another tactic which I strongly encourage you to use is to pepper your lectures with questions that go out to the audience. Put something up and ask them why or ask them leading questions about content. Do not have it all coming from you. Using multimedia is another way to engage your learners and stories; human beings love stories.

I am going to turn it over to Nicole who is going to talk to you a little bit further about both of those topics.

Multimedia

(Nicole): Great, thank you, Margaret.

Multimedia. Well, when we say multimedia, it is important to recognize that multimedia has always been a part of instructor-led content. Think back to the days of film strips and VHS videos. But what is interesting about multimedia now is that there are so many ways to now incorporate instructor- or participant-generated multimedia, and what I mean by that is a simple video done with a cellphone or a video camera capturing some little concept that you want to bring in and use as a discussion point in the class, or using really rich graphics just as in this example to help demonstrate concepts that otherwise would be filled with percentages and bullet points, such as in this example we are looking at what is in our mail. It is data that would look great on a slide and an Excel spreadsheet, you know, all these numbers, but here it becomes much more powerful and really conveys something to the participants in a class that numbers alone will not do.

So, when you think about multimedia in the class, go beyond those old notions of third-party generated media and begin to think about ways that you can pull in video, graphics, any sort of audio recordings, ways how multimedia can help spice up the class, and do not be afraid to embrace it. Because on one level, that very authentic self-created piece often has more value and can be much more compelling to a learner than some very professionally developed piece.

Multimedia (cont’d)

For example, I just wanted to show this screenshot. This is a screenshot of a video that we created to describe workflow and we did a little bit of post-production. You can see the boxes here are simple PowerPoint boxes identifying steps in a workflow and we shot a little bit of video to make visual the actual steps in a clinical workflow, and we brought them both together to use them to support a live training class.

It is little things like that that can be done to help make especially concepts that are hard to get your head around a lot more approachable, and so we encourage you to step out of your comfort box when it comes to multimedia and not be afraid to bring in rich visuals to help communicate certain aspects of your course.

Stories

So, stories, kind of tying into that idea of multimedia, stories are a real interesting aspect that can be brought into a course to really help create connections between people and content. For example, think about trying to improve quality to reduce medical error. Imagine if you went out and found a YouTube video that had recorded stories of patients who had been victims of medical error, and you used that to open up a topic in class about the importance of reducing medical error in healthcare. And the interesting thing about stories is they do not have to be our own. Just as in this example we can share other people’s stories. So, you do not need to be thinking, “Oh, I need to be the storyteller here.” You can repurpose other. Going back to the concept of multimedia, most cellphones right now are equipped with some sort of video camera on there, and the resolution is not bad. Imagine just interviewing someone real briefly, getting a few sound bites from some sort of expert or someone who helped convey a topic that is in line with what you are presenting, and being able to throw that quick clip up on a PowerPoint slide, click on it in class, and hear right from an expert. It is those little connections that help learners make connections to content.

2. Reflection exercise

(Margaret): We also wanted to share with you something that we have termed reflection exercises. These can be you can ask individuals to simply write down their answers or you can ask people to work in pairs. It is really kind of a matter of variety in your class. Do you already have a lot of pair activities? Do you already have a lot of individual activities and time? Any time that people break up into groups or work in pairs, it takes a little more time.

So, let us look at A and B. These are two reflection exercises that I would put at the beginning of a course. It is also a sneaky way of pointing out the benefits of the class to the participants. Item number C, that would be one other thing to note about reflection exercises. You can either have people report out or not. Something like example C would be an example where you would not have people report out because it is personal information.

D, we did this at the very beginning of session 1. We asked you to identify what you liked and disliked about a training session you attended. Instead of just going through a bullet-pointed list of adult learning characteristics and preferences, we looped you into the process. We used, or we would have if you were here in person, we used responses to questions as a way into the topic.

E and F would be examples of ways to end a class. E is a standard item in all of my training sessions. It accomplishes a couple of goals. One, it helps learners kind of troll back through the material mentally and figure out what were the three important takeaways.

The other thing is it is always illuminating to me what people will come away with as the most important things. They may not line up with what you think are the important things, and it comes down to sometimes just individual variations, but sometimes it is the instructional method that you use that makes something stick with one learner or

stick with a group of learners. The other thing it does is it kind of, in a way, points out the value of the class. So, it is a reinforcement that this training was valuable in some way. And F, it kind of invites participants to look at extending the training past that particular session.

Slide 32

2. Fact or myth

Here is another little trick to use. It can spice up your lectures when you have been doing blah, blah, blah for quite a while; pause and ask a question. Practice activities are a better use of classroom time than reviewing examples. Fact, myth, or C? Actually, this one is C—depends on whether the learners are novices or more advanced. Novices need more examples before they are ready for practice activities.

Fact or myth?

Here is another one. What do you think? Are learning outcomes improved with the use of instructional methods that appeal to all learning styles? Now right now I am guessing that most of you are choosing A. Actually, it is B. It is a myth. The whole notion of learning styles has pretty much been debunked over the last few years. Now, if we were in an actual classroom setting, a question like this creates a conversation between the instructor and the participants and will go on, and you will have their attention much more so than if you are marching through bullet points. We all have to do that to a certain extent, the marching through the bullet points, but wherever possible, find alternatives.

Slide 34

2. Did you know that…

Here is a variation on that. I design a lot of curriculum these days and courseware for health informatics training. This was a unit on the role of health IT in healthcare quality. So, we started off the course with a few did-you-know-that questions. So, this one, and the answer is 98,000, kind of an alarming statistic. Bring a friend to the hospital if you need to go, but this question, there are a couple of things.

It draws the learner into the topic in an active way. It also points out the importance of the training topic. If there are this many people dying from medical error, then clearly health IT is important if it can reduce that figure.

Slide 35

3. Worked example

Another strategy is something called worked examples. The idea is that first you give learners a full example. You do not ask anything of them but to look at the example, and then you increase their participation. You give them a partially completed solution and then ask them to complete the rest of it.

Slide 36

Worked example

Okay, here is an example from Ruth Colvin Clark. This is on relational databases. Okay, she arranges the screen. She has given them part of the information, and then she asks them questions.

Worked example

Okay, here is a simpler example. All right, I will let you read that over. So, the learner has to fill in one of those steps.

Slide 38

Worked example (cont’d)

Nicole is going to walk us through another more sophisticated worked example.

(Nicole): Thanks, Margaret. We applied the worked example technique to a workflow training that we did. It was a three-part training session where we started from understanding what is a workflow symbol and definitions, all the way up to the end where they needed to actually create an entire workflow diagram. So, what I would like to do is show you really briefly the first step, which was becoming familiar with flowchart symbols, and bear with me while I bring up this example.

[Demonstrates the workflow symbols and definitions exercise.]

This was created in Articulate Storyline, but it was designed to help make people familiar with flowchart symbols and their definitions. So, if we click Beginning Training, they had an opportunity to click through and learn what each symbol was. As you can see, you can click all the way through, and they can click Next, and do a Review Exercise where they have to drag the symbol into the right spot. So, we will just do a couple of these just to demonstrate such as Document. As you can see, it goes green. So, it reinforces that is the correct one.

We will drop this into Process. Ah, bounced up red, indicated to the learner that that was not the right one. We drop it to the correct one, and it is green. So, this simple little review, they submit. Once they have got them all correct, they can back and take a little quiz, just a very simple way to engage learners in the initial parts of a worked example. It goes beyond just saying, “Look at the page of all the symbols and memorize the definitions.”

So, we are going to go back to our slide deck here.

Slide 39

Videos of Sample Workflows

The second step, and you saw the slide a little bit earlier, is where we actually took a workflow and we filmed the process and we demonstrated the flowchart symbols in line with actually the video of that workflow in action, and then we did the next step which is we showed a workflow as it is in its flawed state and then asked learners to identify how they would redesign it. And then once they build up their skills and familiarity with all of the elements in a workflow, as well as, redesigning the workflow, their final kind of test, if you will, was to actually map out a workflow in its entirety.

So, this gives you a real brief idea of how to do a worked example and, though we used video and Articulate Storyline, this can also be done in a classroom, particularly that first

step can be done with just simple matching exercises. So, you can step out and be creative when you start to do these types of activities.

Slide 40

4. Group discussions

(Margaret): Okay, a look at group discussions and just a little side note—research that has been done on collaborative learning, the conclusion that they have come to, the one solid conclusion is that participants rate more highly training sessions that include opportunities for collaborative learning, but the jury is still out on whether learning outcomes are improved, but people like it.

So, discussion questions, I would say go back Bloom’s taxonomy when you are designing discussion questions to see where you want them pegged. Include questions that do not have one clear answer. If I am doing a classroom session on training, I might start with “What is learning?” just to get discussion going and get people thinking about the topic, or another question, “Discuss the characteristics of an effective trainer,” or if it is management, characteristics of an effective manager. It is an interesting way to get people launched into a topic.

4. Group discussions (cont’d)

Your role in group discussions, while they are discussing, you need to be actively involved in checking in for a couple of reasons. One, you want to make sure that they actually understand the directions and what they are supposed to be talking about, and the other one is to check on group process to make sure that there is not one person dominating the discussion and followed by a debrief. One little note, be sure you let the groups know ahead of time that you will be asking them to report out so that they can assign somebody to that role and let them know clearly what they will be reporting out on.

Slide 42

5. Case studios/scenarios

Case studies are a wonderful learning mechanism for adults. Adults are much more problem oriented. They are not interested in content just for the sake of content. They want to solve problems. So, be creative. Create some little scenarios. They do not have to be masterpieces. Just make sure that they have a clearly defined problem to solve. Make sure it is relevant, work relevant, and that

you equip them with sufficient information and resources to actually be able to come up with a solution.

You should also pay attention to group composition to make sure that there are not any problems. If there are people at different hierarchical levels in an organization, is that going to be a problem if you mix them? Do you want some cross-functional pollination? In one of the health IT trainings we did, we had a mix of clinical staff, IT, and administrative staff in a case study, and the results were very interesting because the individuals involved came at the problem from different angles, and later people mentioned that as an interesting facet to the case study work.

Slide 43

Scenario-quiz hybrid

Here is an example. Cathy Moore is an individual who has an interesting blog, primarily about eLearning, but a lot of the ideas out there on eLearning are easily transferred to the classroom. She combined scenarios with quizzes. So, let us take a look and see what she did.

Bear with me for a second.

Okay. So, she presented a quiz. Let us take a look. Here is the quiz question. Which of the following is the most secure way to carry sensitive data? Okay, pretty straightforward; she turned it into a mini-scenario. It makes an item so much more interesting if there is an actual person involved, a little bit of a story. So, he has a long commute home, and here is the scenario showing specific feedback. It is on his laptop. Bob falls asleep during a commute, and a thief steals his laptop and sells the data. Okay and you can see it goes through various types of feedback, and it is much more powerful in terms of someone remembering and someone realizing, “Wow, it is pretty significant if I do not store data the right way.”

7. Role-playing

Role-playing. Role-playing can be fantastic for teaching soft skills. It is not everybody’s cup of tea. So, consider your audience. There are some people who would rather have a root canal than be part of a role play. The other aspect is that there are two other ways to do it. You can do a role play where there are two people who are really on stage. Make sure it is voluntary and that there would be people who are comfortable doing it. Another way to do it is to have everybody work in pairs in a role play and that is a lot more comfortable for most people. Here is an example of that. I was teaching technical customer service staff. And we were trying to improve their communication skills when talking to people about technical issues. So, I divided the room into groups of two, had each pair sit back to back. I gave one person in the pair a diagram and their job was to explain to the other person how to draw the diagram. So, it was a very effective way to give people a sense of audience. It worked well, and I did not have any pushback, even from people I thought might give pushback.

8. Observation/Fishbowl

Another technique is observation or what is called the Fishbowl, and this is where you get a pair or group of people in the middle and then you have observers on the outside. So, an example of this would be, let us say, that you are teaching meeting facilitation. You have a small group in the middle, and there is one person facilitating and the people on the outside observe what that person does well, what could be improved. The group has to be very comfortable. This is not something that you would do in a one-session training or in the first session of a multisession training. This can work well in groups that know each other and are comfortable with each other—great for soft skills.

9. Games

Games are another terrific way to enliven a training session, especially if you are tasked with teaching a very technical topic that a lot of people may not find to be inherently interesting, any number of games that you can create for a topic. One of the best sources I found is a man named Thiagi who has been in the training world for several decades, and he has all kinds of free links to games that you can access through his website, 300 to be exact. You can also Google. There are lots of resources for games out there. Some of them take more time to develop than others, but definitely worth a look.

Slide 47

10. Post-training to extend training impact

And finally, post-training activities to extend the impact of your training; you can create an online discussion forum, a blog, a wiki to assemble information. If someone is willing to take on the job, you can have coaching. This would be especially useful in something like training for new supervisors and having a mentor check in with them and provide coaching. Job aids—wonderful way to make sure that the learning sticks. When they forget some of the

concepts that you taught or processes and procedures, they can refer to a job aid to refresh their memories.

Slide 48

Using assessment questions to reinforce learning

And finally, I just wanted to mention the use of assessment questions to reinforce learning. The multiple-choice question is not exactly a cutting edge innovative instructional approach, but there are better and worse ways to construct them. So, here is an assessment question related to decreasing medical errors. Okay.

Slide 49

…as opposed to

As opposed to a question like this. Okay, this one, what was the difference between the two? Take one more look. There is this one, and here is this one. All right, the one we are on right now is purely regurgitative—and P.S. “Who cares?” It is not an important concept.

This one (the first example), on the other hand, is not just asking a learner to regurgitate. It is asking them to think about the

different ways to prevent medical error. So, they have to run through all of these possible answers. Okay, and notice we have feedback. If you end up delivering assessments online, try to include feedback that direct people back to where they could find information about the topic.

Slide 50

Closing

We have talked to you about a lot of different topics in our two hours of training. I must say it was an interesting exercise. Both of us have a training style that is highly interactive with the audience. So, it took some thought, how to present this when it is all of the communication is one way.

At any rate, we hope that you have come away with some tools that you can use in your own training. And Nicole and I chatted back and forth, and we thought, you know, if individuals came out with only six concepts, what would the most important ones be? And we came up with: Don’t overload your learners cognitively. Respect the needs of your adult learners, i.e., make sure that the content is relevant. When you are designing the course, do not think about, “What do I know about this topic.” Think about it from the learners’ perspective. Chunk your content into digestible pieces. Incorporate images and multimedia elements, and consider doing it yourself. It is not that hard. We used to great effect some expert interviews, and we simply sent people some little 80 dollar webcam and they held forth no PowerPoint slides. They had flubs. They misspoke on occasion. People loved it. They liked the fact that it was not overproduced. That it was personal and human. We challenge you to go beyond the “Sage on the Stage” and incorporate other activities, other approaches to conveying content and helping your participants master content.

Thank you very much and we look forward to seeing you in real time in one of the upcoming webinars where we will go over how to conduct training effectively via webinar as well as answer any questions you might have. Thanks.

(Nicole): Thanks.

Slide 51

Thank You!

[This slide not narrated.]

Slide 52

Resources


Sources/Resources


Remote Learner€¦ · Web viewAuthor: End User Last modified by: Debbie K. Shultz Created Date:...

Documents

Transcript of Remote Learner€¦ · Web viewAuthor: End User Last modified by: Debbie K. Shultz Created Date:...