I just downloaded this eBook that came to my mail box promoted by x.com, Breaking Into The Industry: Become A Subject Matter Expert By Turning Your Passion Into A Profession, by site founder, X.

Let me take a look at the content...

Ok, this is not a review of the book but my own musings inspired by the topics covered. This is not intended as a critique. Maybe I'll do that later, after I've read it.

The book seems to tackle the Covid-boosted move by many sitting-on-their-duff former in-house experts to develop online courses and get rich. There is a proliferation of companies online right now that promote this ambition (I won't name them as this isn't an endorsement). X is not one of these, as he only mentions the possibility in passing along with other ways to promote your expertise.

The link he provides on this mention, however, goes to another blog post on his site, the sub-head of which promises, "This article explains how you, as a Subject Matter Expert, can create an instructional sound course within a day. From choosing the right tool to publishing a course based on learning objectives, just like Instructional Designers." The post, by Y and Z, describes what LOs are, does a quick chart of Bloom's taxonomy, points to some online authoring systems, and suggests curating and incorporating other people's work as a way of lowering development time (I haven't heard that one before). Oh, and adding some interactive questions is a good idea too.

How one is supposed to get this great course finished in one day is still a bit hazy. "Just like instructional designers"--HA! I don't recall ever completing a course in a day, but maybe that's just me.

By the way, guys, it's "instructionally" sound.

I changed my mind, this is a critique--it doesn't take long to read after all.

I've never heard of "SME" described as a career, before. The sentence, "A quintessential function of the SME is to identify information learners need to know versus extraneous data" looks to me like the purview of an ID rather than a SME, as does the advice to develop and check the validity of learning objectives for your course. I searched the book for any further delineation of responsibilities between an ID and SME and couldn't find one, except for X's definition of a SME, in that it does not include ID competencies.

I have only heard the term SME used within a company, not as a job description but as a designation with respect to a specific project. It's true that all sorts of people become "thought leaders" and "experts" just by talking and writing a lot and being visible. But "IT Expert" or "Evaluation Expert" isn't their job title, so I'm not sure what jobs these SMEs are looking for. Consultants trade on their expertise, sure, but it's usually informed by a long resume.

And I take back my earlier description of the target audience, as X asks, "What are you good at? Are there any niche skills you already have that give you a head start?" This is not restricted to people with deep expertise, necessarily, then. It sounds more and more like those online course promoters.

The gist of the book comes in Chapters 7 and 8, IMO, both of which concentrate on guest blogging, which is a service X provides. It's not surprising that an eBook should turn to self-promotion, but... is there a but? Not really, it's the main purpose people write blogs and eBooks in the first place, so more power to him.

This is no slag on X, then, as I admire the website he has developed and is now glued to promoting, as are all website hosts. It is kind of a slag on the whole blogging-eBook writing sales culture we're all being asked to buy into, however.

My question: Is all this "sharing", like the misnamed ride-sharing companies, doing us, collectively, any good? 

Half way through the above critique, I considered not posting it because it is not all sunshine and roses. The expectation of a "review" these days is that you will say nice things or say nothing at all. We're all just trying to help each other, after all, right? (Wink wink, nudge nudge.)

And saying nice things does that, right?

Or does it?

Mitch (aka the ID Curmudgeon)

• Smee : I've just had an apostrophe!
• Captain Hook : I think you mean an epiphany.
• Smee : [gestures his fingers to his head] Lightning has just struck my brain.
• Captain Hook : Well, that must hurt.

Early on in my training career, I embarked on the development of some product knowledge eLearning courses for front line staff in a bank. When they were ready for review, I recall my manager remarking on how smooth the process was. She said it was usually a laborious process getting feedback and corrections from SMEs, not to mention sign-off. I told her I had two principles to guide me: one, make it easy for them to review, and two, schedule a face to face or telephone meeting for the feedback, and remind them. 

To make it easy, I wouldn't give them a whole course to review, but only those pages of storyboard that had technical points that needed to be correct. In the review meeting, I made sure I understood all of the corrections in depth, not just what was on the page, and I also invited them to air any concerns or modifications. That way I knew there would be no surprises down the road. 

I found that if I went into meetings with SMEs with the expectation that there would be modifications and corrections, rather than expecting a rubber stamp, I was never disappointed, and things could always be worked out. 

There's a corollary to the above: this situation only applies when you have the materials with which to build the course to start with. When you don't, it's a whole other kettle of fish.

I once turned down a job for this reason. The client wanted to develop six hours of training. They had already tossed one training consultancy because they found that their SMEs were having to spend too much time with them. I could see why--they had a specialized product that required some expertise in order to write training for it, but they were hiring IDs to do the writing by interviewing SMEs. There wasn't any reliable documentation to build from. 

I am sorry, but this not what instructional designers are trained to do. Yes, we write training, but we are not experts and we are not journalists either. The hours I have spent on the phone with SMEs on similar projects I will never get back--and neither will they. I made a recommendation that the client should hire writers who were also experts in their field--and they would not be hard to find--to work as writers under the direction of the IDs, and that the role of the SMEs should be only as reviewers. The firm I was working for didn't think the client had the flexibility to change their plan, so I had to decline. : (

SMEs are great when you use them wisely. Connie Malamed, at the eLearning Coach blog, describes SMEs and IDs as mutually compatible as long you recognize that they "live in different worlds." Her  podcast interview, Pro Tips For Working With Subject Matter ExpertsStrategies and techniques from Dawn Mahoney and Diane Elkins, brings up some interesting points, such as:

1. The ID is a kind of filter between the content and the student.
2. The best SME for a practical skill is not necessarily someone who can talk about it but someone who does it well. 
3. One SME does not a course make. We need to talk with people who come at the subject from a variety of perspectives (worker, manager, senior management} to get well-rounded content.
4. It might be worth the time to explain to the SME what an ID does, so that they understand your role as a partner and not just a secretary.

And lots more. You can go listen below. (I'm a print guy, so I'm glad there's also a transcript.)

Mitch, aka The SME Wrangler

Links:
Elearning Coach: http://theelearningcoach.com
Blog page/podcast/transcript: https://theelearningcoach.com/podcasts/65/

Over at the Learndash blog, blogger Laura Lynch pens a very useful guide to helping learners in an online course avoid procrastination, a predictor of learner churn.

"Learners who struggle with procrastination are more likely to burn out, leave the course incomplete, and not sign up for more."

While this is true, I can't help thinking procrastination in general gets a bad rap. Such a pervasive quality of human behavior must have something going for it, no? Especially, I think, for creative people, who are known for not doing much while coming up with things no one else can accomplish no matter how much time they have.

Enter the Creativity Research Journal, whose 2010 study by J.R. Cohen and J.R. Ferrari (no relation to J.R.R. Tolkein or J.R. from Dallas), Take Some Time to Think This Over: The Relation Between Rumination, Indecision, and Creativity, tackles just this question.

One of the things the authors investigate is what happens during a period of procrastination. They decide to measure three possible activities: reflective rumination, brooding, and   indecision, and correlate them all to creativity. Their findings show that:

a) Indecision is positively related to reflective rumination but not creativity.
b) Reflective rumination is positively related to creativity.  
c) Brooding doesn't significantly enter into it.

They tease out this conundrum (see a, b, above) using a linear regression analysis which shows that reflective rumination significantly predicts creativity only if high levels of indecision are also present. This finding corroborates earlier studies that found that individuals who ruminate and procrastinate excel in creative fields. Procrastination had also been referred to by Dijksterhuis and Meurs (2006) as a "necessary unconscious incubation period" in relation to creative work.   
What the 2010 study added is to introduce indecision "as an adaptive mechanism within the creative process.“  

I thought so! Sounds to me like, in the creative realm, the brain prefers to mull over problems without our conscious input, and procrastination is just our way of giving it a little space, man.

All of which may have nothing to do with academic procrastination.

But it may be a comfort to those instructional designers who occasionally need to ask for an extra day or two to come up with their brilliant interactive learning solutions.

Mitch

Refs:
Cohen, J. R., & Ferrari, J. R. (2010). Take some time to think this over: Therelation between rumination,
    indecision, and creativity.Creativity Re-search Journal, 22,68–73.doi:10.1080/10400410903579601
Dijksterhuis, A., & Meurs, T. (2006). Where creativity resides: Thegenerative power of unconscious
    thought.Consciousness andCognition,15, 135–146.

Dashe & Thomson's blog in June of this year, The Science of Learning, written by Shane Lueck, serves up some tantalizing tidbits regarding the application to learning of recent discoveries in neuroscience.

This week's cartoon is an expansion on number 5,  Feelings Drive Behavior. The thrust in the blog is that emotions influence behavior more than does rational thought (example given: you choose the cake). Therefore, we should acknowledge and attend to the learner's emotional state (e.g., nervousness speaking in front of a group) prior to doling out tasks or information, so that they are prepared to receive them.

Another aspect to the emotion vs. logic, Bones vs. Spock dichotomy that I would add, supported not only by research but by brain structure (e.g., the hypothalamus has neurons devoted to emotion and neurons devoted to logic) is that much of the time our so-called logic is nothing more than justification and rationalization of our desires. Feelings not only trump logic, as Lueck says, the two work in such a yin-yang symbiosis as to be mutually inseparable.

This is part of why unconscious bias is such a tricky business. People will consider their hiring practices fair and color-blind, for instance, but somehow the same faces keep on getting hired year after year. Each hiring decision is easy to support with logic, but the tendency to hire "someone who looks like me" is well documented. In other words, it's an instance of emotion first (aka instinct, gut feeling, hunch, comfort zone,"I have a good feeling about this guy"); logic second.

How does this apply to eLearning design? Well, let's take compliance training. In an office building, you aren't supposed to let someone you don' t know onto your floor, right? But many employees dislike playing cop, and do so anyway.

Most training argues the case for barring strangers using logic alone, and leaves it at that. But imagine if the course was designed to first acknowledge the awkwardness as normal, followed by an exercise to help them overcome that particular emotional block? Would more compliance be the result?

Who knows?--I've never seen it tried. But it would certainly be more common if we followed the science.

Mitch

In his eLearning Art blog, Bryan Jones asked a question of a bunch of eLearning gurus: "What is your #1 tip for designing a great eLearning slide?"

The answer that best reflects my own view was at the top of the list, courtesy of Allen Interactions' Michael  Allen:

"Slides? I don’t think of elearning in terms of slides (which are tools of presentations) but more in terms of events to engage and stimulate thinking. So design elearning as a conversation with the learner. eLearning should be a good listener, responding to learners as their skills falter and grow. Don’t throw slides at learners, one after the other. Yawn. They don’t stick."

Although those of us who work in this field are far beyond the page-turner stage, the concept of an eLearning screen as a slide still irks me, seeming like a conceptual holdover from PowerPoint terminology.

The word itself may just be a harmless anacrhonism. Articulate "slides" are time based and can be as dynamic and engaging as you want. But the conceptual framework of presenting information and then asking a question is a bit hard-wired into the format.

To really have a "conversation with the learner," as Allen suggests, we need to not only ask questions and give corrections, or even get the learner to perform within the context of scenarios. We need to invite their input, learn what they already know and target our content toward filling gaps and rewarding progress, as you would in a true conversation.

In other words, much of eLearing is still stuck in the mode of "give give give" rather than the more constructive and natural "give and take, give and take."

Is this a problem with authoring sytems or designers? I think the latter, though often the former push us into thinking in ways that make for easier programming.

Will a dose of AI make future authoring systems more like a coach than a tutor? I, for one, would like to see it. Maybe then we can replace the term "slide" with something that better reflects the learning conversation we would like to be having.

Mitch