What do you take away from the Game of Life?

April 17, 2019

Easter holidays. A great time when we break out the board games in the Cole household. A particular favourite is The Game of Life (published by Hasbro). As a learning designer who often creates mini games for business purposes, I’m always interested in the subtext of a game – the behaviours and tactics that get […]

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Three things I learned from making it into the UK top 200

March 19, 2019

The rapidly changing business environment means that increasingly people need T-shaped skills profiles (deep expertise in one or more domains and a broad awareness of several areas). As change accelerates, people will need to reinvent the vertical part of their T more often. The conventional wisdom (Gladwell et al.) is that it takes 10,000 hours […]

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Subject matter experts – time for a re-brand?

November 15, 2018

The last 20 years has seen the evolution of terminology from Computer-Based Learning to e-learning to digital learning (and beyond). One term that has been static is SME (subject matter expert). Given how much the world and technology has changed in that time, is it time for a re-think? One Big Four firm has already […]

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Three ways GDPR changes life for L&D managers

April 6, 2018

GDPR is one of e-learning’s hot topics in 2018. Here’s a blog that I co-wrote with Brightwave’s Head of QA, Simon Hollobon, on how it will affect L&D managers when they have a breathing space from getting learning to their colleagues about GDPR.

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Learning objectives are like metadata – useful but best left unseen

November 1, 2017

An update on a post about learning objectives which attracted a healthy amount of support and debate: refinements to that position and what it means in practice for learning designers. One of the richest compilations of high quality thinking is Will Thalheimer’s. If you can’t spare 30 minutes to watch the video, here are my key take […]

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Three essential charts about learners for L&D business partners to show their stakeholders

October 4, 2017

As noted before, many factors have made it harder for L&D professionals to know their learners really well. This means that L&D initiatives are more exposed to guesswork and questionable opinions of other business stakeholders about what good learning looks like e.g. “the way I learned this was” , “the way that my kids are learning is all […]

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Why the time is right for self-managed learning

May 31, 2017

In 1990 Peter Senge published “The Fifth Discipline” , giving a compelling vision of how companies could transform into learning organisations. The ideas chime with many L&D professionals, but adoption by business has been patchy. As both Towards Maturity and Bersin have recently launched reports on self-managed learning, it reminded me of a project I […]

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I don’t want “to understand” in my learning objectives

November 21, 2016

Learning objectives are core tools of the trade in learning design. If you can state “By the end of this course/e-learning/other, a learner will be able to X”, you have a focus for your design and a means for reviewers to check that the learning journey will get to its intended destination. I’ve noticed in […]

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Five more ingredients for compliance e-learning excellence

October 17, 2016

Once again I had the privilege to judge the e-learning awards (now called the Learning Technology Awards). When I last judged the compliance category two years ago I wrote Five ingredients for compliance e-learning excellence. It was great to see that many of the entries reflected these five ingredients and the general improvement in learner […]

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Let’s focus on the learning (with a little help from Cynefin)

June 15, 2016

I enjoyed a day out at the Learning Technologies Summer Forum yesterday. Like many conferences, there was no shortage of vendors trying to broadcast how their offering is the panacea to organisations’ performance problems. This noise about the channels of learning (“modality”) tends to distract from a far more significant consideration: What is the nature of […]

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