Flip The Script Nation

As an Instructional Designer, you are in an envious position. You have the ability to share information with your learners that make them more efficient, more productive, and more valued, as part of their team. You help them make a change for themselves. Sometimes it's a change they didn't even know they needed.

You impact people's careers, and therefore their lives. The meaning you share can cause them to change careers, increase their salaries, and add real meaning to their lives. But, it is all dependent on the stories you tell and how you tell them.

Your reward for doing this is real connections with people, teaching them something new (in a fresh way) and sharing a little of your passion with them.

Death-by-PowerPoint is the normal. It's what people expect from you. Be different! Stand out! Show people that you thought about their needs, did your homework, are familiar with your material, and demonstrate value to them.

When you do this for people, you are providing real meaning to them. This meaning creates a real change and growth for people.

Passion, humor, and authenticity are key to being playful. It's not about telling jokes, specifically. It's about being yourself and just making people laugh at situations or mistakes you encounter.

Somewhere along the line, we all got told that a real business presentation or talk needs to be boring and have no personality. The more complex, detailed, and information-heavy you can make it...the smarter you look. Guess what...that's FAKE NEWS!

Look at this image. In an instant, the humor of it tells you exactly how to behave to avoid catching the Corona Virus. It could have been boring bullet points, but it wasn't. And now, you will remember it. BAH BAH BAH!

I have been working with some new instructional designers and their biggest challenge seems to be that there is so much information that they don't even know how to start.

Specialization is not their problem. The ability to synthesize unrelated pieces of information and tie them together to create the necessary relationships is the actual problem. As a guide or coach, my role with them is to create the path and show them how the information in one area relates to another part of the role. This allows them to ability to see the bigger picture, and eventually be a stronger ID.

As professionals, we need to help people "see" better. It's not about the individual chunks of information. It's about helping people recognize patterns, nuances, and simplicity that lies behind the complex. We need to help people apply their mind, logic, analysis, synthesis, and intuition. This is how people learn to see the big picture - make them think about your content.

You can't do this with bullet points on a slide or with sound bites in a presentation. This happens through discussion and engagement.

People don't learn from facts, data, and information. This doesn't make your content unique.

Remember, as a kid, you had that special day in school, where you got to be the storyteller. You got to bring in your cool thing you found over the weekend, on a trip to the park? That day was "show and tell," day. This is what storytelling really is. As an adult, you are sharing your creativity, your ideas, opinions, and experiences.

The most effective communicators tell stories. The best facilitators also get their participants to share stories and experiences. Wrap your information in these stories. People remember emotions, situations, and related information.

Design of your content starts at the beginning of the process. This includes thinking about the visuals for your message...before you even sit down at the computer.

Slow your mind down. Consider your topic, message, objectives, and audience. Then, sketch out your ideas.

One of the most important skills you can have today is the ability to give a presentation that communicates an idea and causes people to engage and interact.

Reading a PowerPoint presentation to people is not learning.

Reading a ton of data from a PowerPoint slide is not communicating.

Quick story...
I sat in a meeting last week with 150 other people in it. The two presenters had thick accents (so they were difficult to understand, from the start) and all they did was read a PowerPoint presentation to this group of people. There were lots of flow charts and data tables. They also spoke with lots of acronyms that they assumed everyone on the Teams meeting was familiar with. I spoke to several people after this meeting and most of those people were also lost.

LESSON: If you plan to read a PowerPoint to people, cancel the meeting, record that as a webinar recording, and send it to people. Then, hold a session where you all talk about what was in the recording.

Let's dig into a little theory today.

What activities or experiences should you offer to your students?

There is a model called Bloom's Taxonomy you can use to develop experiences for your students and trust that you are creating the right thing for them.

Lower order thinking skills have very little long term effect. Things such as copying, searching, and highlighting activities fall into this level.

As you move up the scale and become more complex, your students are more engaged in the learning activity you are providing.

For example, as you move up the taxonomy ladder, you start to get into applying the things you learn. This involves taking information you have learned and using it to solve a problem. Even more complex is the act of analyzing information you are presented with and matching it to other pieces of information to come up with something new.

Being able to grade someone else's work, moderate a discussion, post about a topic (like this!), or test a theory is a higher order activity that brings a lot of punch to your course material.

The highest, most engaging activities involve having your students create something totally new based on what they are learning. These are also more difficult, hence the higher order. In the digital world, this would be making a video on a topic, writing an article series, or creating an ongoing podcast series.

Feel free to download and save this attached images and use them when you create activities for your own courses. I have provided a few because this taxonomy has been revised over the years and the more ideas you have to work with, the better the experiences you can offer to your students.

How do you know when to give people certain types of content?

When they:
- Want/need to learn something new (Formal Training)
- Want to learn more (Formal Training)
- Are trying to apply something they learned (Support)
- Are trying to solve a challenge (Support)
- Experience change (Support)

This is called the "5 Moments of Need." Depending on where your students are on this list determines the types of content they need.

Are you providing the right content at the right time for the right situation? For support, think of YouTube videos, cheat sheets, infographics, and podcasts. For formal training, that's your course products.

As a Course Designer, you ARE the shortcut. People are coming to you because they have either already gone the long way or are looking to shorten the time to their result.

If you are giving people multiple ways to solve a problem or are creating a long course, you have missed the mark.

Tell me the thing your course is supposed to do, do that thing, and let people get on with life. You don't need to know all the parts and pieces that make a car work to be able to drive a car. It's the same thing.

Think about tutorials on YouTube. You have two different tutorials for the same thing. One is 5 minutes long and another is 30 minutes long. Which one are you clicking?

This relates to training guides, workbooks, and various course add-on's also. Nobody wants your 300-page guide on all the thousands of ways to do something. They want the best practice in a cheat sheet. That's why they come to you over other people. They want the best result in the shortest amount of time.

Let me learn the thing quickly, be successful, and then let me look for more information for a deeper dive.

There is brilliance in brevity and being concise. Your students will be happier on the short path.

In the corporate world, this is showing itself as micro-learning.

You know that instant gratification feeling you get from getting a text message or immediately knowing an answer from search results from a Google? That's a dopamine loop.

Dopamine is is a chemical in your brain that triggers when you have pleasant experiences. It causes you to seek them out and you can get addicted to the experiences. We get shots of dopamine when we play games, socialize with others, or find unique experiences.

The reason people search for things online is their brains searching for dopamine. They want the feeling they get when they get the "reward." It is very much like Pavlov's dog.

Once you get in the loop, it is very difficult to get out of it. That's why people binge watch shows or go down YouTube rabbit holes. They are addicted to the experience of something new and interesting.

By the way, a short tweet or text is more dopamine inducing than long form text because it comes in short bursts.
As a Course Designer, you can leverage this. Try pairing audio cues with new content the student should pay attention to. You can string people along with bits of information at unexpected intervals (the more unpredictable it is, the more addicting it will be).

Guess what! You can't multi-task. It's a lie we tell ourselves

Research has proven that people can only focus on one task at a time because your brain can only really conduct on activity at a time.

You can talk. You can read. You can type. Try to do them all at once and you will see that it is near impossible.

But, we are really good at switching from one thing to another pretty easily. We THINK this is multi-tasking, but it isn't.

The only real exception to this rule is muscle memory. You can walk and talk at the same time without issue...usually. Opposite of this is driving and talking on the phone. It's hard to focus on a conversation and drive at the same time.

As a Course Designer, don't ask people to do multiple things at one time. They can't and it will usually fail. Expect errors from your students.

People are easily distracted. But, they can also filter everything out and focus on something.

Your students' ability to be distracted is directly related to how engrossed or involved they are in your content. If you put a lot of extra stuff on your slides - visual bling - that has no purpose but decoration, it's distracting them from your main content.

The key to remember is that this is an unconscious thing and happens very fast. You are best served not getting in the way.

What's a mental model?

It represents a person's thought process around how something works. Typically they are built around incomplete facts and intuitive perceptions. They influence how people take in new experiences or apply new information to existing knowledge.

People create mental models very quickly. In software or with a device they can do it before they even work with the thing. For example, how many times have you touched a screen expecting it to be touch screen. That's your mental model of how you interact with a mobile device being transferred to this new experience.

Another example is around eLearning. Ask a few people what eLearning looks like or what it's like to learn from it. You will see various mental models immediately at play. Now, ask those same people about online learning. You may get a different response.

Your learners will come to your content with past experiences and pre-defined mental models. As a Course Designer, it is your job to leverage this information, possibly show the student how that model is incorrect, or even where it is actually correct.

This is why it is so important to know your audience. You need to be aware of the different mental models at play.

How many items do you think you can remember at once?

The "magical" answer is four things.

This also requires that you aren't distracted or being interfered with while trying to remember them.

As a Course Designer, you can use a trick called "chunking." Break your information into groups and they will be easier to memorize. That's why there are dashes in phone numbers. Rather than 10 numbers, it's only 3 groups of numbers.

Long-term memory works the same way. People can retrieve information in categories. The category can contain more than 3-4 things. For example, how many Disney villains can you name? How many of the characters from Star Wars can you name? These are categories of information, not individual bits.

Also, expect that your students will use tools like notes to help them remember things, because its too difficult to focus on all your content and remember it. Create tools that help them with this process.

Short-Term Memory, also known as working memory, is very limited. Not only is it limited in time, but also in quantity.

Try to remember your friend's phone number at the same time someone else is playing music with lyrics or giving you names. It's extremely difficult, if not impossible. To keep that information, you must focus on it.

As an Instructional Designer, this means you should not expect people will read data and have to replicate that data somewhere else without providing a method for them to move it to long-term memory. It also means that you should not introduce new information while you want them to focus on the data you are providing.

Reading and Comprehending are two completely different things.

If your text is complex to read, it is very possible that people will read your content, but not actually understand a thing they read. This is important for tech or other complex content, like medical or legal content.

Titles and Headlines are Important. They help people skim and absorb. They also break content into digestible bits.

Did you know that 9% of men and .5% of women are color blind?

It actually means there is a color deficiency that makes it hard to differentiate colors.

Typically, it means people can't tell the difference between reds, yellows, and greens. Sometimes its blues and yellows.

When you pick a color scheme, you need to make sure that your colors contrast enough so even people that are color blind can see what you are trying to show.

www.vischeck.com allows you to check your colors on their site.

Relevant decision making = student engagement

It's not about creating a game or making them click stuff to expose content.

It's about the student having an emotional stake in the outcome of the experience. It's about asking the student to answer questions about how the content applies to them and how they will construct something new for themselves from the information you provide.

Did you know that what your brain sees and what your eyes see are not always the same?

Your brain creates the necessary shortcuts to be able to translate what your eyes are seeing. It tries to make sense of things and sometimes it makes errors.

Look at an optical illusion. That is a perfect example of your brain making an error.

You can influence what people see...or think they see...by using groupings or color coding.

As a designer, what you need to know is that what you think people will see in your presentation or course may not be what they actually see. Using visual design tips, you can influence this in different ways.

These two images are famous social media optical illusions.

Hello friends!

Got a question for you.

If the word for 2020 was "innovation"...

And the word for 2021 was "opportunity"...

What opportunities do you see for yourself, your online courses, and your students? How will things change or innovate for you?

[🎉 ANNOUNCEMENT 🎉] We've recently launched the 11-Day Ultimate Course Makeover Challenge.

I want to help you increase the % of students who complete your course, reduce your refund rate, get more engagement and testimonials from your students. If that's like what you need, then this is for you.

Check it out here: https://www.flipthescriptnation.com/ucmo-challenge-signup

11-Day Ultimate Course Makeover Challenge The Ultimate Course Makeover Challenge will finally allow you to have that Premium Flagship course that your students will complete, give you testimonials for and will allow you to charge more money!

As an Instructional Designer or someone in the L&D field (or possibly someone interested in the field) you may want to know that the Learning 2020 conference us online this year. And FREE!

For the past several years this is an event I have volunteered at. There is a lot of good stuff here. If you have any interest in this field, I encourage you to give it a look...its online and FREE!

Www.learning2020.com

Learning 2020 Conference – The Learning Leaders Conference Learning 2020 is the foremost conference exploring the critical issues facing today’s learning leaders. While we are unable to gather in person due to the pandemic, we are looking forward to gathering online where we will engage in discussions and experiences examining the strategies, skills, and ...

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Are you creating a course to sell? What’s your topic?

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