The point of preference

I often miss webinars.

That might be because it was delivered at 3:00am local time, or during a manic working day, or after hours when frankly I’m not in the mood.

So I’m grateful when the event is recorded and I can play it back later. But, more often than not, I don’t do that either.

There’s just something about a 1-hour recording that turns me off. Unless the topic is irresistible, it’s too easy to move on to more pressing matters.

I’d rather read a summary of the key points – and according to the likes received by my recent tweet and the results of a poll I ran on LinkedIn, I’m not alone. In this era of time poverty and relentless distractions, it’s no surprise.

Yet there are good reasons to watch the footage. As Anna Sabramowicz points out, “Taking notes makes me remember the key points more, plus there’s so much nuance in the language people use, a summary might just diminish that. Context matters of course!” Indeed it does.

Of course there are no wrong answers here. Your preference is your prerogative, after all. And it is this point of preference that I maintain is missed in the discourse about learning styles.

As any L&D professional worth their salt will know, there is no weight of evidence to support the widely disseminated notion that some people learn more effectively visually, while others learn more effectively verbally. Case in point, whether I read a text or watch a video about a certain topic, I’d be confident to nail a quiz about it, so the mode of delivery doesn’t really matter.

However, empirical research in the educational domain is usually based on what L&D pro’s with a dark sense of humour would call a “captive audience”. Whether it’s a high school exam, a university assessment, or perhaps a mandatory online module, the participants are compelled to participate.

But as the 70:20:10 model attests, this does not represent the real world most of the time – especially in the corporate sector. In this largely informal learning environment, the mode of delivery does matter because the decision to participate rests with the individual.

In other words, regardless of some people’s preference to read text over watching a video, they’ll learn just fine by watching the video. It’s just that they’ll probably choose not to. So in the absence of the text, they’ll end up not learning anything.

The upshot is that if you’re a webinar producer, you could be failing to meet the needs of the majority of your target audience. Use the results of my research (as unscientific as it is) as an incentive to write up summaries for those who want them. As Donald Clark points out, “AI can do it all in seconds… and will.” So there’ll be no excuse.

And if you’re smart about it, the information you share in the summary will compel us to play the video.

Rubber bands and chewing gum

Are you a hacker?

I don’t mean the type of person who leaks the diplomatic cables of the United States government (but curiously, not of the Russian or Ecuadorian governments).

Nor do I mean the heroes who disrupt the education of children.

No – by “hacker” I mean the type of person who gets the job done, come hell or high water. Someone who refuses to accept barriers, but rather expects them; and if they can’t smash them, they climb over them, dig under them, or drill through them.

According to Oxford professor Paulo Savaget, people who adopt a hacker mentality at work enjoy the process of finding work-arounds. Which, I’m sorry to concede, does not represent everyone in the Learning & Development profession.

Over the course of my career, I’ve witnessed a lot of talk among my peers about what should and shouldn’t be done to improve learning outcomes and hence business performance… but not a lot of action.

And I’ve heard all the excuses to justify it: “I haven’t been trained in that”; “We don’t have the technology”; “We don’t have the right culture”. Which again I’m sorry to concede, I’ve been quick to judge as symptoms of ineptitude, laziness or apathy.

Then an article by Eikris Biala caught my eye: What’s more important than learning theory? Intrigued by the headline, I read her piece and the following quote resonated:

“It slowly dawned on me that, while learning theory is important, so too is challenging the limiting beliefs of our learning community.”

She cited the example of coaches changing the behaviour of online course developers, and to me that underscores the inclusivity of the phrase “learning community” – it includes we L&D professionals alongside our target audience.

And so it dawned on me that it’s not necessarily ineptitude, laziness or apathy that stops many of us from making it happen. It could be the lack of belief we have in our own abilities.

When you’re aware of your limiting beliefs, you recognise them as a barrier to your innovation and productivity. Eikris goes on to provide advice on how to overcome this self-imposition, which I would supplement with: Give it a go.

Convert your idea into action, even if it’s tiny and imperfect.

Use rubber bands and chewing gum if that’s all you have. This expression is usually used in its derogative sense – whereby something that should be solid and reliable is rather patchy and prone to break – but I mean it in its most proactive sense, whereby offering something is better than wallowing with nothing.

Professor Savaget calls it the power of a “good enough” solution. You diminish your fear of failure because it’s not meant to be the final deliverable. Instead, it’s a proof of concept that releases the pressure of hitting a home run on your first attempt by earning success in stages.

To paraphrase an expression of my own that I articulated a long time ago and has fuelled me ever since:

Don’t tell me why it won’t work. Tell me how it can.

The $100 Hypothetical

As my home state emerges from lockdown, I reflect over the many months of confusion during the pandemic.

My fellow citizens were confounded by brain benders such as whether to wear a mask inside a ride-share vehicle; what qualifies as an “essential” item; and when one may travel beyond 5km from home.

No confusion over the Dine & Discover voucher scheme, however, whereby residents apply for $100 worth of credit to fund eligible recreation activities. As a populace, we nailed that one.

It is – by definition – an exemplar of the $100 Hypothetical.

The $100 Hypothetical is best explained by way of contrast.

In the context of corporate learning & development, consider the employee who complains of being overwhelmed by the number of search results returned by the online course library, yet happily uses Google which returns billions of results.

Who never posts messages to the corporate ESN, but avidly posts to Facebook; who never records a knowledge sharing video, yet uploads selfies to TikTok or Instagram with abandon; who refuses to use a software program until they’ve been formally trained in it, but jumps headfirst into a new app, phone or video game without ever crinkling the user manual.

The $100 Hypothetical holds that the same employee would readily find a relevant course in the online library …if they received $100 for doing so.

Similarly, they’d post plenty of messages to the corporate ESN, record loads of knowledge sharing videos, and find out how to do various tasks with the software …if each time they received a couple of pineapples.

The alternative

The $100 Hypothetical makes the point that whenever people don’t do something, it’s often not because they can’t, but because they won’t.

Which begs the question: Why not?

Well I’m not aware of anyone attending a course prior to using the likes of Google, Facebook, TikTok or Insta, so a lack of training evidently isn’t always a barrier to action. There must be other reasons; perhaps shyness, fear, laziness, apathy, pride, or myriad other human foibles.

Yet while it’s tempting to decry the poor attitudes of our colleagues, it’s important to recognise the common denominator: value.

They use Google because it connects them to the information they need. They post to Facebook because it enriches their relationship with friends and family. They upload selfies to TikTok or Insta because it’s fun or it boosts their ego. They figure out apps, phones and video games on the fly because they want to experience them immediately.

But they don’t perceive the value in pursuing similar activities at work.

If the theory of the $100 Hypothetical maintains the introduction of a financial reward would tip the balance in favour of action, the practice must be to supply an alternative source of value in the absence of direct cash.

In other words, what would motivate them to do it if they didn’t receive $100 for doing so?

Collateral damage

The L&D community may be divided into two camps: (1) Those for whom the mere mention of learning styles makes their blood boil; and (2) Those who are inexplicably unaware of the hullabaloo and are thus oblivious to the aforementioned boiling of blood.

The antagonism stems from the popularity of learning styles in the educational discourse – not to mention vocational curricula – despite a lack of empirical evidence supporting their effectiveness when incorporated into instructional design. The argument is that in the absence of such evidence, don’t waste time and money trying to match your teaching style to everyone’s learning styles; instead, divert that energy towards other, evidence-based pedagogy.

This is sound advice.

Nonetheless, I urge my peers not to throw the baby out with the bath water. By this I mean regardless of the existence or impact of learning styles, a phenomenon that enjoys universal recognition is that of learner preferences. And I fear it may be an unintended casualty of the war on learning styles.

For example, a deduction from the literature might be that a teacher need not tailor his or her delivery to meet the needs of the audience. Since learning styles are bunk, I can do what I like because it won’t make a difference anyway. Such a view is conveniently teacher centric, and it flies in the face of the thought leadership on learner centeredness that we have advanced so far. Sure, the deduction may be unreasonable, but extremists rarely listen to reason.

However, a more insidious factor is the dominance of the literature on formal learning. Studies of the impact of learning styles are typically based on teaching in a classroom setting, often in the K12 sector. Furthermore, the statistics are based on scores achieved via formal assessment. Yet we know in the workplace the vast majority of learning is informal.

Let me illustrate my concern here with a personal example. When I need to find out how to perform a particular task in a particular software program, I strongly prefer text-based instructions over video. I’m annoyed by having to play a clip, wait for it to load, and then wait for the presenter to get to the bit that is relevant to me. Instead, I prefer to scan the step-by-step instructions at my own speed and get on with it.

Now, if only video was available and I weren’t such a diligent employee, I might postpone the task or forget about it all together. Yet if you were to put me in a classroom, force me to watch the video, then test my ability to perform the task – sure, I’ll ace it. But that’s not the point.

The point is that the learner’s preference hasn’t been taken into account in the instructional design, and that can affect his performance in the real world.

If you don’t agree with me, perhaps because you happen to like video, suppose a manual was the only form of instruction available. Would you read it? Perhaps you would because you are a diligent employee.

Isn’t everyone?

In case your blood is beginning to boil, let me emphasise: (1) Learning styles appear to have no significant effect on learning outcomes; and (2) The nature of the content probably dictates its most effective mode of delivery.

If we assume that learning styles are highly correlated with learner preferences – indeed, for some they are synonymous – then we might be tempted to conclude that learner preferences have no significant effect on learning outcomes. I consider this a false conclusion.

Indeed in a controlled environment, learner preferences don’t really matter. The participants are forced to do it whether they like it or not, or they somehow feel obliged to comply.

Outside of the controlled environment, however, learner preferences do matter. We sometimes see this in formal settings (which is why universities enforce a minimum percentage of lecture attendance), but it appears most starkly in informal settings where the learner is empowered to do it or not. If they don’t like doing it, odds are they won’t.

So we need to be mindful of the interaction between pedagogical effectiveness and learner preference. An experience that your learners love but is ineffective is ultimately worthless. But so too is an experience that is effective but your learners loathe.

As a profession we need to aim for experiences that are both effective and liked by our audience – or at the very least, don’t turn them away.

I can’t use Facebook

This one goes out to all the L&D folks who are wary of the “I haven’t been trained” excuse.