When One Learns, We ALL Learn
Even in times of more certainty than now, getting development dollars for our teams is tough. How do you make sure your employees are getting what they need? Most of our employees do not have the same development needs so that may make it hard to choose who gets a class or conference if your budget is limited. This is a false choice. If your employee is participating in a learning opportunity and the end of it is their discussion with you about it...that is a learning fail for your team.
The newest member of our instructional design team took an online class on eLearning from Tim Slade's website, https://courses.timslade.com/. It is a good introduction to the course development process with templates and lots of personal insights. Our ID worked her way through the course in sections, inviting us to a "share" session bi-weekly to show us what she learned. She was careful about the intellectual property rights for the course by summarizing and not directly sharing the actual course ( not legal folks nor respectful of the provider so don't be tempted ). She did share the templates provided as she compared them to what we were using. This led us to a good discussion, a breakout team comparing our form, that team's recommendation to the whole team, and our voting to approve these changes to our form and process. (Thanks Tim!)
We also had discussions over the 3 sessions about file structure, user acceptance testing, our evaluation process, and now have follow-up work for the whole group to improve what we do. Our ID's time spent increasing her knowledge of good eLearning course development led her to ask our team some tough questions about how we do our work. I am confident that these discussions are going to lead to overall improvement for us. Her learning would have been good for her regardless but what a lost opportunity had she kept it to herself. I have let our team have learning fail sometimes and am going back to look for where we can rectify that. In the meantime, another member is showing us the cool layers and triggers in the course he designed so I need to scoot. Happy learning!