4 Proven Strategies for Supporting Adult Learners: What Works and Why

Everyone. Thank you so much for joining today's webinar, four proven strategies for supporting adult learners, what works and why. I'm Bianca Woods. I'm a content manager here at ATD. So pleased to be joining you as today's webinar moderator. Now one of the things I'm here to do is keep a super close eye on the chat so that if any questions don't happen to get answered in the moment, not to worry.

I'm gonna hang on to them. And if you have time at the end of the session during the q and a, we'll we can revisit them then. So question doesn't get answered right away, don't worry. I got you. Now I wanted to start by thanking today's sponsor, Instructure.

Instructure reimagines the technologies that turn teaching and learning into opportunities, And our ecosystem of products connects the dots for educators and institutions by improving educational experiences across k through twelve, higher education, and the workforce. Now I'm also so pleased to be welcoming our speaker today, Melissa Lobel. She's the chief academic officer for Instructure, where she drives the company's global academic strategy. Now with extensive EdTech experience both as an educator and also in EdTech executive leadership positions, She advocates for educators worldwide to have the necessary resources as they face ever increasing educational barriers. Now I'm gonna pass it over to Melissa to get things going.

Thank you so much, Bianca. It's wonderful to be here with all of you, and I'm going to quickly share my screen so that we can, pop up my presentation. And there we go. So it's wonderful, like I said, to be here with everyone today. We have quite a quite a group of those of you that are synchronously connecting, and I am sure there'll be many asynchronous connections after this as well.

I, I am a forever teacher, and I will share a little bit more about my background as we get into the conversation. But I'm I'm a planner. So for you to think about your next amount of time with me and with us together, I have about thirty, thirty five minutes of insights to share. And then, again, we'll have plenty of time at the end for questions. And for those of you that have might have joined after seeing the note in the chat, you will also be provided with these slides as well as the recording after the fact.

So if you wanna go back and reference any of this, there are some places where there's some research referenced and other things. You'll be able to leverage the presentation after the fact. And with that, I'm gonna go ahead and jump right in. So as, Bianca shared, I am the chief academic officer at Instructure, and I have I have the pleasure of leading not only our academic strategy work, which really means how are we thinking about teaching and learning in a time of real tumultuous change or really teaching and learning at any time, which is which is what we are seeing, today become more and more important as we're thinking about the society around us. But I'm also, responsible for bringing insights from what, I see and, experience out in the continued education space and leverage those into things like today's conversation, best practices, or insights that I am seeing out in the field.

And in fact, just for context, because you'll you'll hear that some of my experiences will be directly from things that I have done and then also from things that I have learned from others along the way. I've spent a long time in, higher education and in workforce development. Early, early on in my career, spent some time, building executive and continuing education programs in a business school, progressed that through to work more in large institute larger institutions, and I've worked for a number of vendors. But I the the main theme, though, across all of these experiences, again, is that I've partnered with educators, learners, and really helped, unpack how can we best connect, engage, and drive learner success in the kinds of practices that we're using every day. I'm also an instructor in a a continuing education program.

So when we get into some of the tips towards the end, you're gonna hear some that I've actually personally leveraged, experimented with, some work, some haven't. But, but I'll share some of those insight as insights as well from the true, instructor perspective. K. With that context, let's jump in. And the reason we're all here is adult learners, especially adult learners today, have some very unique challenges that they're facing as we are trying to do our best, whether we are, in corporate learning, whether we are in higher education partnering with industry to deliver workforce aligned learning, whether we're a higher education or a k twelve teacher, instructor, or faculty member.

We're seeing a significant difference, not just generally general generation. That's just a tricky word. Anyway, not just within the generations we're seeing that challenge, but we're also seeing a bigger challenge and that learners are coming with unique responsibilities and unique challenges more than ever before. And this covers all generations that that we are working with and teaching. And in particular, it it, the the underpinning to these challenges is the complexity of the world around us today.

Complexity can be a good thing, but it can also be a challenge. So these challenges that we're seeing often, fall into four unique buckets. First, we see challenges around time and effort constraints. This is how do I manage everything in my life? I feel like, you know, we are continuing as as humans and as adult learners continuing to take on more and more responsibility to juggle more aspects of our life. And that becomes challenging because our engagement is different in the kinds of learning activities we participate in.

And it can often be hard to build some of the deeper, neurological, like, pathways if you start to think about brain science. It become more and more difficult when we our lives around us are more and more complex or chaotic. We also are seeing with adult learners continued and and I would even say heightened access barriers. So finding programs, activities, ways to learn that not only suit those time constraints that we talked about, but more than that, that will leverage, you know, what we have access to from a learning perspective. Everything from the technology to bandwidth to, our capacity to understand ourselves as a learner.

That there's access challenges here that are underpinning how we wanna design our learning. These, of course, lead into engagement retention struggles. So how do we keep learners even by using, you know, some of the the age old practices of chunked learning and some of those things that we'll talk about today? How do we keep people though engaged and, again, building those long term memory pathways? And then finally, motivation also comes from a connection to the work or the learning experiences that we as individual learning learners are being exposed to and how those connect immediately and contextually to either our current career goals or our future career goals. Whether they are, whether they are embedded in the industry we're in or we're looking to make profound career changes, these that the career connection becomes really powerful when we wanna try to work back through some of the engagement challenges, some of the access challenges, and even some of the ability for us to schedule and manage the kind of time we need to as learners. So with that context, let's talk a little bit about some of the key pieces that are transforming adult learners, and then we're gonna lean into four strategies to help you address both those barriers, but then to leverage some of these key things we know about adult learners today.

First we know and this is from a really great report. Again, I mentioned earlier in the conversation, we will be sharing the slides, so you will get to have a link to the reference of this full report. But what we're seeing is that roles are significantly going to change in the next five years. Now I know we've been as a as a collective workforce, space, we've seen this and we've heard this over the last ten or fifteen years, yet what we're seeing is an acceleration of this. Things are rapidly changing, and not only do individual employees know this, but leaders know this.

And they don't even know what the change is going to be. They just know it's going to change. And on top of that, we know that within, specific industries even, we're going to see significant technical disruption. It's gonna apply across the board. Generative AI has has definitely been a key part of this technical technological transformation, but it's also gonna be very targeted in some key industries where that role shift that we see that employees know those the changes in their roles are coming, leaders know that, that's going to, very particularly impact the kinds of skills we need to be developing in learners today so that they are successful in that change over the next five years.

And and we're talking major transformation in jobs. So I think we know this. We're feeling this. We're experiencing this. I think about what my job looked only five years ago or ten years ago and what my job is now.

While the same role, it looks drastically different than how that work would have been conducted. And how am I future proofing myself? And how am I future proofing my workforce? How am I future proofing the learners that come into my institution so that they're successful well into their future? So let's talk about how to do that. And I'm going to share four larger strategies for supporting adult learners or how do you make how do you overcome those challenges and barriers I've shared? And we'll get to some specific examples and a couple of case examples, actually, of some really great work that's being done to address adult learning, and, you know, and and to implement these kinds of techniques into teaching and learning practice. Now the first one is probably the one that we're most familiar with, and it's really about how do you design your overall program. How do you structure? How do you think about what your offerings are in order to best align to the kinds of learners or professionals that you're attracting? Now while this feels like, yes, of course, I you know, and and a lot of people immediately say, okay.

Well, I have hybrid learning or in my case and where I teach my courses entirely asynchronous, There are no required synchronous activities in order to align to a busy professional schedule. So, of course, you you you give these different options, right, to synchronous versus asynchronous, and you give different options to where do you have access to what and how and when. But it becomes even more more important to think about how you're structuring this specifically to match to your particular professional audience or learner audience. Can be either way. This, again, can be in a corporate setting.

This could be in a higher education setting, a professional development setting, whatever it may be. But understanding and unpacking your intended audience is gonna be really important because they're gonna have different constraints. So if you're educating, you know, cybersecurity professionals, to better understand the impact of artificial intelligence on their work, their kind of work looks very different than if you were, creating learning opportunities for sales professionals or creating learning opportunities for, therapists. Right? Those schedules all differ. Those preferred types of interaction styles different.

Those technology experiences differ. So you wanna map to your audience as you're thinking about your different options. And this is where asynchronous really can lean in well. Asynchronous learning opportunities now need to be very thoughtfully and artfully constructed so that they are meaningful and not just checklists, which they can often become, but they give you maximum amount of flexibility. And this is we're also leaning into the type of technology in which those experiences are delivered on.

So if you're delivering this through an LMS or a CMS or some sort of online learning platform, modular content, chunking experiences, bite sized progression. I often say implementing game based approaches, not necessarily games, although they can be really helpful, but game based approaches to how you segment out your learning chunks so that people feel a sense of your learners feel a sense of progression and satisfaction as they're working through building that longer skill set you desire. This leads into access. Right? Thinking about where and how they get these materials, even thinking about how materials are unveiled over time. If you have learners, that are mapping through a set period of time, or even thinking about how you can create personalized learning paths in whatever technology you're leveraging.

And this is where making sure that the technology that you are leveraging aligns back to that audience that I was mentioning before. Are they going to be on desktops all the time or no? Are they gonna be mostly on an iPad or, a tablet device or a mobile phone given where and how they work and and the times that they have available? So really designing for that audience and what a busy professional needs regardless of whether that is a full time or even part time, learner. It doesn't matter. It's really guiding towards who and how they might need the best connection to the the program and the content that you're presenting. Now a great, example of this is a nonprofit organization called Generation.

And this nonprofit organization focuses very strongly on bringing workforce globally, workforce ed aligned education in order to best, to best promote, and I apologize that I clicked one too many, to promote, success, economic success and social social success for learners that traditionally might not have pathways towards progressing their career. They, they have a combination of both live and on demand because there are certain professions and there are certain parts of an adult audience. There are certain learners that do want live experiences. You think about it, many of you are listening to this live and in that, you'll ask live questions, you'll exchange, there's an energy to that and people can feed off of that or seek that. While others are gonna want fully on demand experiences, and so they've created flexibility where you can pick and choose and even implement a HyFlex model.

For those of you aware of that, that is where somebody can choose when they wanna be live versus when they wanna be on demand. It's not a set path. You are either live or on demand. They've enabled self paced progress checks. They chunk the content so that it progresses.

You feel accomplishment. You understand alignment to your own outcomes as you move through content quickly, and they are mobile first in all of their designs from the technology they implement to how they build their courses. If you haven't checked it out, they have great information on their website that can, talk more about their programs and their styles and approaches. Now the second, component to this or the second strategy is delivering learning in small, actionable steps. And I've alluded to this, but let's lean into this a little bit more.

So we often think about chunked learning as a way to address, at least my history as an instructional designer and as an educator, has been you wanna chunk learning because people's attention spans are smaller and smaller, and we're multitasking more and more as humans. There's all sorts of research that talks about how our brain is evolving to manage multiple things at once, but the depth at which it's managing those things is lessening. So if we know this, we're thinking, okay, chunking. I'm gonna, you know, I'm going to create not only, the ability for somebody to just focus in a small period of time, but I'm gonna let them weave in and out their learning with their daily lives. Yes.

That's all important. But where will we start to think of meaningful subsegments or chunks of content and how we use that in a learning progression approach as we design courses, teach courses, deliver courses becomes really important. This is where microlearning, and and there's been quite a few studies recently around microlearning, where microlearning can, create this this understanding of growth and contextual context unlike traditional learning. It's actually more meaningful. So if you think about it, we're talking about creating an experience or a task or a chunks piece of of of, knowledge or skill work that you want someone to do.

You align that to a learning outcome and a skill outcome, and I strongly believe those are two separate things. You align them to both of those, and as that person completes them, they see, okay, as a learner progressing in this content, this is where I am at in my learning, and I have developed part of the skill or all of the skill at this point. It is, it is a a game based principle that I alluded to before. It helps people get engaged. It's it's a game based principle and that it levels people as well.

It creates opportunity for personalization based on previous chunks interactions, and it allows you, as the deliverer of this learning, to track interaction with those learners to better monitor engagement. It also, again, allows for that alignment to skill alongside alignment to learning. And the reason I said before that those are two unique things is because if we think about ourselves as learners, when we learn something, we are understanding it. We're we're often unpacking it. If we wanna think of higher order thinking, we are, you know, taking on the the ability to do something, or we are trying our best to do that in a learning context.

So in a context in which we can better understand and experiment and play and fail and then succeed. Right? There's a there's a nature to a learning context. You can extract out of that a skill, and that skill can be that skill that you're going to use. So I'll give you an example. In the class I teach, I teach interactive elearning design.

In that class, a learning outcome for one chunk of my course is to be able to understand how best to leverage brain science in the construction of your learning experiences. An extractable skill out of that is is the ability to implement a nudging technique where you are regularly bringing back a learner to a particular piece of information or, you know, bit of knowledge or skill that they're developing? How do you implement a repeated technique? Because that is one way to lock things into, long term working memory. So they're very different things. They had come together, but this is where chunking in bite sized pieces really empowers that. And this also underlines that learners, adult learners in particular, are much more interested in skill based approaches versus role based approaches.

And these are two different things. There's roles. As we mentioned before, I might be an instructional designer, and then there's a skill, I have instructional design skills. The difference and the reason why we're seeing adult learners be much more attracted to skill based approaches is because they can be utilized in multiple arenas. It is not specific to an industry and a particular role.

If you think back to that data that I shared with you before, employees know their jobs are changing. Leaders in organizations know jobs are changing. So being able to have nimble and change oriented skills becomes much more important, and learners are seeing this and adults are attracted to this. Being able to pull extract out technical skills versus what people sometimes call durable skills or soft skills also becomes important and they're equally valuable, but being able to extract those different kinds of skills out will also help best attract and retain your adult learners because, again, you can map it back to that curriculum that you're unfolding. So here's another great example of what this looks like in practice.

So, New Energy New York, specifically a nonprofit that's focused on, workforce development again, particularly, and as you see to the right, energy, and and they have a whole badging certificate around battery, technicians and battery managers. But beyond that, the idea is how do we take and chunk their a combination of very practical hands on skills immediately with ongoing bite sized continued learning. And how do we pair those two and weave those two together? So it's not you're learning one thing in an online environment and another thing, and then you go learn another thing in your hands on practicum. Right? We also traditionally do that. Learn it, go practice.

Learn it, go practice. Learn it, go practice. But, actually, what they're doing is what I often think of, it looks like a Jenga game. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it's those games where you see people stack blocks. And the hope is that when you pull out a block in your stack, the entire thing doesn't fall.

That should be the way online and in person activities interweave. If you take any activity out, the structure of your learning experience should still be consistent, tight, coherent, and meaningful. If you take something out and that whole structure falls, that does give you the indication that either that structure that was not meaningful in the way that you've constructed that or that it is not aligned to, again, the overall experience that you're hoping for. So they do this, and they build these really interesting, not only skill based programs, but they also now stack, their micro credentials. They stack these experiences to continue engagement of those learners, which leads to our third technique, which is providing clear pathways for growth and career advancement.

So this technique is really powerful because it aligns to this desire of continued improvement or continued skilling or upskilling. So learners are looking to again, they want those experiences where it's contextual, it's relevant, it's real world, but they also wanna understand how to interact with learning over time, and they wanna be able to come back to it and continue to build their skills and development. So if we think about this, Pathways become a really, substantial piece to this. And Pathways, not only can help engage and reward learners as they're working through skills, but, again, this also helps level up in complexity and application over time and overcomes that challenge of, I don't have the time necessarily to do all of this at once, but I can see how I build my pathway towards accomplishing my professional or personal goals over a duration of time through a collection of programs or courses or however this is being stacked so that I can I can get where I wanna go and I can see it? It's not overwhelming. It's not a nonstarter.

It's not, it's not, you know, leveraging what some of my, potential weaknesses are as a learner instead. It's helping me build my confidence and build my engagement as I go. The other thing that this does is it also helps create connection with organizations, employers. This is where we see when learners are continually developed, whether, again, it's through corporate training or development or it's through higher education that's partnering with industry or through just purely professional learning associated with your field or profession of choice. Regardless of where that may be coming from, these pathways, the stacking also creates alignment to or connection to or brand awareness of those organizations that you continue to leverage for your, professional development.

What we hear and what we see, again, this reference is in these slides. And if you joined a little later, or you didn't catch at the beginning, you will get these slides after, so you'll have these references. But if we think about this skill development, so not only are employees looking to or learners looking to develop their capabilities, but they want to continue to upscale because they wanna do their current job better, or they want opportunities for growing from their current role either in their particular organization or discipline further, or they wanna grow into a new role. And in fact, we're seeing this, need or desire by learners to wanna continuously grow, continuously upscale, not only become a really important attraction to an organization that supports that. So companies that are really supporting this lifelong learning notion, but it's also matching some of the really interesting research out there.

And if you haven't seen it, Stanford Longevity, their research is talking about we're gonna have ten careers, not six or three or whatever we might have all known. We're gonna live much longer lives. We're gonna work well into our seventies. So this upscaling, this transformation of ourselves as learners and as professionals is becoming part of our ethos, and, and our and our learners coming to us know that and expect that from us in the way we craft learning. So pathways can look a a number of different ways.

You can think of credential pathways where badges collect, and then you get a bigger badge that can collect and get a completion badge. You can also think about pathways as stackable. So perhaps I am taking chunks and I'm badging chunks so that I've been awarded specific skills. I've got a collection of skills that's now a broader skill set. I can give you an example again, an instructional design example.

Perhaps I now have built skills to be able to storyboard, be able to implement game based techniques, be able to implement, you know, credential approaches to my teaching and learning that I am creating creating. And perhaps that together leads towards a, you know, an an elearning larger badge that shows that I have a collection of skills. I can connect all of those skills together so that I can deliver more engaging elearning. Well, that might then be a large part of a larger program, related to or it might stack into a larger credential that's related to, you know, teaching and learning design or learning experience design, something even larger than just that engagement learning engagement component. And so as you think about it, it's not just a couple of things equal a bigger thing, but it can be a couple of things lead to a bigger thing, which lead to a bigger thing and a bigger thing.

This is where you can also use unlocking content as a as a carrot, to attract people as they work through those learning experiences as well. And then this leads to our last recommended technique, and then we will have plenty of time for questions. But this last technique is really giving learners personalization and choice, and I'm actually gonna step back back to that pathway again. One of the powerful things as we think about choice is, not only is it engaging for learners, but think about all the the choice inherent in building pathways. We're not crafting or forcing particular structures on individuals.

They can start to take ownership of their own learning journeys, their own paths, their own upskilling as we talked about before, their own schedules so that they are crafting themselves a learning track or a skilling track right alongside the other tracks within their lives. Okay. So empowering personalization and choice, and why does this particularly matter? I alluded to this at the beginning of our conversation when I talked about audience. I can't stress enough thinking about building content that aligns very specifically to who your audience is. And as instructional designers, I know we often get asked to build content or as teachers or as educators or program leaders.

We often get get asked to build content that applies to as many people as possible, applies to all employees, applies to all learners that might come into a program. I recommend shying away from that and trying to find a happy medium between scalability and audience alignment. And this is because personalization, feeling connected with my learning drives engagement. Feeling connected and understanding how my learning leverages my background, leverages my skills, but also expands those becomes important as a learner. I naturally, as a human, want to be able to relate to and contextualize the learning happening around me.

And one learner to another, though, they can look very different and bring very different experiences to the table. So being able to create a level of personalization becomes important. And we'll talk even more about more deeper personalization. But I recommend trying to balance between scale and, you know, over overly individualized instruction and find a happy medium as you're thinking about how you are engaging adult learners. The other key part to this, not only does it help engage, connect, contextualize, align, do all those things we want learning to do, It also actually helps knowledge retention.

So personalization can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but one of the key things is with through personalization, if we know I am locking in, I have a specific skill. I keep answering varying questions or prompts or, I'm able to demonstrate it through projects that I do as a learner, or my skills in the workplace. If I'm able to do that two, three, four times in a row, and I'm good. Right? I I have shown that over a period of time. Where personalization can do is it can step away from that and lean into the things that I struggle with.

I may get it right once, but then I struggle with it the second time, or I can't apply it to the same depth. So personalization also helps us with knowledge retention because it allows us to acknowledge what quickly and easily gets built into long term memory given all of our other skills, experiences, and and context that we already have. But it also allows us to build new pathways because it's it's incorporating in teaching and and content design approaches to regularly repeat in meaningful ways the application of skills that are harder for learners. So it becomes more than just what we all think of as compliance training, and we've all done it. I've done it.

We've all done this, where we go in and we are, you know, we need to be I I used a cybersecurity example earlier. This is probably one that everybody's gone through regardless of your organization. There are other flavors of compliance training for different industries that we all experience. But that training is a one size fits all. Back to my coaching of, like, yes, it may scale across multiple organizations.

It's often content that's, you know, leveraged across all aspects of multiple organizations or systems or very large global companies. But if you go and you you meet people in the middle, where perhaps some of that is leveraged, but then you wrap that around with immersive interactive learning experiences where an individual learner immediately applies this to their own world, you now have the ability to move beyond training into true skill development. How are they applying what they're learning in their particular profession, workplace, or leveraging it for a cred career transition that they seek. This is where things like simulations and gamification and scenario based learning really play in. And if I were to say one of the best things that's happened with generative AI is it's making simulations and scenarios more approachable from a content perspective.

They have, for a long time, been one of those really hard things for educators, teachers, designers, for all of us to build because it takes so much content. It's really time consuming to build, particularly simulations, but even really good scenarios. Yet now with baseline content and the leveraging of AI, we can actually build these and align them to real world application so much more quickly that these can be embedded. Remember how we talked about chunking? These can be embedded experiences throughout a learning journey. And now you've had application opportunities, connection and engagement opportunities, contextualized opportunities within what could have been or maybe traditionally was something that was a very passive interaction from a learning perspective.

You also have the ability, again, AI is giving us and unlocking this even more, to create learning recommendations. You remember those pathways I was talking about, and I mentioned unlocking of content in those pass in those pathways? Well, this is where this can come in. You you don't have to use AI for this. You can just unlock new content based on performance of previous, content, from a learner, or you can start to leverage AI and build. If you've if you're interested in this or you've taken this combination of learning experiences or upscaling, we recommend these because these will continue on this pathway.

Often learners don't know what they don't know, and they there aren't adding their learning path ways up. They need coaching sometimes within their pathways, so this gives you an opportunity for that. And, again, it also creates a very continuous learning culture. This is where you can pull individuals. You can create the live experience or the mentoring, the group experience, the partnering experiences.

If you've got good chunked content and you've now personalized it with these immersive simulations and scenario kind of experiences, you're creating recommendations or coaching learners along their paths, and then you're embedding humans because humans need to be part of this learning. You're embedding humans into the application of and reflection on the learning as well as the skills. You now created a very personalized experience for an individual learner that engages them in their learning. So as an example, Southwest, Kuna Management School did this exact thing. And this is where they actually paired bite size, like, chunked learning experiences over time and then embedded pure prompts and embedded pure matching, pure interaction, and it it not exactly a mentor, but, like, a a a collaborative development program with others in the in the program.

I've seen this also. I've had a a number of my team members go through a women in leadership program. And in that program, it was you would have some content that you would do asynchronously. You would come together once a week where you would do, a bit of synchronous work, and then you would do some group collaboration work, either asynchronously or synchronously to whatever you preferred, then you would roll into a simulation, and then it was rinse and repeat. So it became this pattern of content interaction and experiences, people, and then application in scenario or simulation based experiences.

This also is a way to develop alumni, develop connections with learners. People will naturally gravitate and wanna come back and be a part of the experiences that they've had positive learning experiences, influence their professional career trajectories. And so this is also a great way to build more instructors, volunteers, alumni, people to get connected back into these programs, mentor programs. It's it's just a way to deepen engagement, not just in learning, but in the various contexts in which the learning that you're encouraging is applied. So with that, I shared, and I'm going to, open up questions.

I shared four techniques for best thinking about how to address adult learners. We shared some, stats and content around what do adult learners expect. And then finally, we talked about different strategies for best engaging adult learners and driving to learning outcomes and success. So So I will stop my share at this point, and I will hit up Bianca if there are any questions that people came through. I think I saw some chat going on or any questions that you cooked up as I was sharing this content.

Yeah. We've absolutely got a few questions that came up Great. While you were presenting. Now one that came up earlier was, this question. One of the biggest barriers that remains for many learners is finding the time.

We often see higher engagement with synchronous learning because people have to block the time. Are there any tools to help with this? I would also throw approaches that can help too, probably. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I love this question because you're so right. When you commit as a human to showing up someplace at a certain time and other people are counting on you, you tend to show up more often than not. And so people will use synchronous in that way. The other, suggestions learners, I've encouraged.

Whenever you're building content, enable, and and I've just done this manually. I know there are CMSs and LMSs and other tools out there that will help read your content and and give you this information, but put time around how much time is this gonna take. So, for example, in each week that that I've taught my classes, I'll have reading and I'll have, like, a collection of they're all open education resources. There'll be six links. I will figure out average read time, and I will say this collection of resources, and I don't do big chunks, is probably twenty five minutes of your time so that people can look at it and go, okay.

That's twenty twenty five minutes of my time. I'm gonna go book. I'm gonna and I I even build it in such a way where they can copy and paste that task and put it on their calendar and say, I'm gonna go take twenty five minutes to do this. I do it with all videos. Make sure you're always time stamping videos.

If you're gonna have them do practice quizzes or practice, reflection, kinds of activities, time that so that they know going in how much time. Then the other thing for all of you using, things like Articulate or other, design instructional design tools out there, also create progress bars. I cannot encourage this enough. So it can be built into the tool so people know where they are at any point in learning. Or if it's not built into the tool, you wanna give them prompts.

So as they're working through stages, great job, you're a third of the way through, you've got three more tasks to do, or you you're constantly reminding the learner of where they are so that they know because oftentimes disengagement comes from, I'm in the middle of this. This is hard and, oh my gosh, it looks like there's five more chapters I have to do so I'm out. Right? You wanna you wanna mind for that. And so like I said you can use tools that have this built in or you can program it in where you're giving a learner step by step how far are they working through something so they always have a moment to bookmark themselves, step away, and come back but not give up. So those are just some techniques on how you can be really upfront with learners, time, time on task, and how to chunk their time.

Yeah. That's that's really nice because it's something that you can do even if you don't have a budget. It doesn't require a special tool. It's just be upfront with your audience and help them make decisions about how they're spending their time. And I'm that person who is always like, oh, that's gonna take me thirty minutes.

I'm gonna go block off time in my calendar too. You too? Yep. Yeah. Always. Always.

Alright. So our next question is, is a a logistics one. Do you have recommendations for designing learning pathways? In this case, it's nonprofit, but I think this could question could work for anything. Learning pathways for organizations that don't have access to an like a traditional LMS. Yeah.

So, I do. So there are if you're a small organization, you can build learning pathways simply by, you know, you can use, like, if you have a company intranet, you know, you know, I know that some people use, SharePoint from a Microsoft perspective. There's Google collaboration. You could use a Google Doc. I mean, you probably have access to some sort of office collection of tools and just build within that learning steps.

And and I always recommend building with a backwards design model. So where what are the skills and where do you want a learner to end? The the big thing. And then how are you breaking it down into the little pieces. You can use mind maps. There's a bunch of other really good, brainstorming tools that can help you map how you get from something to bigger to bigger to bigger or vice versa, how you backwards design things, use some visual tools to figure out how to break down the skills and the learning objectives.

And I know I'm crazy to say this because a lot of folks will say it's just about the skills or it's just about the learning objectives. I think it's both, and you wanna be thinking about those. Now you might not have learning objectives every step. You might have a skill at every step. So it could be a badge to a skill, a badge to a skill.

You might not have a learning objective at every step, but you will have them at key points in the journey. And you wanna make sure you're thinking about both because the learning objectives are gonna create the cut the the environment in which learning is happening. The skills are the demonstratable output of that learning that somebody that can then go apply in their workplace or go demonstrate for a career path. So so use just even, you know, the free tools out there. Honestly, again, generative AI, a lot of the tools out there, especially if you have a closed license within your company, you can upload, skills, job profiles, things like that.

And if you're using a closed, I highly recommend closed LLM because if you use open ones, who knows who's gonna use that content. But but as you're using this very simple closed interaction, you can even have generative AI build learning paths or back you know, at least give you a start to that from a backwards design perspective of what those look like. Once you have them, it can all be depending on your your you know, how you're bringing people together. You can do it all over Zoom. You could do it over simple, read this, and we're gonna have this discussion.

You could do some very simple, not complicated, complex things without having, any sort of paid for LMS or CMS. Yeah. And we had someone in the chat as you were talking saying that they they just built their SharePoint site. This is really helpful for that. Like, use the stuff you have if that's Hundred percent.

Something that's gonna get it done. Yeah. Yeah. If we've got programmers on there, you can do this in Jira. So use the technologies that you might have other in other departments.

There's lots of ways. Asana, you can use a project management tool for this. Just think creatively about how to visualize that, right, like in Asana or other project management tools. You could totally we've built full learning pathways, in those. Nice.

Alright. Another question. If an organization hasn't done credentialing in the past, is there a good place to start? How do you dip your toe into that? I love it. So it depends. I'm gonna give two answers.

One, if you're higher education organization and you haven't done it yet, find a, don't I wouldn't even go after a full program. Get get a couple teachers in a program that are open to thinking about what they would badge within their course, or in their executive experience or whatever continuing education experience that you might be offering if you're in higher education, hit up a couple of teachers to, be willing to experiment with it and start small and build from there. What I found so this is how, I was the first instructor in the program that I teach in to align learning to a batch. And what I found was, you know, you started to get other instructors interested in it, and then you got you you started to see newer programs, went back into, k. We're gonna make this a credentials program in addition to sort of this the traditional way we've approached programs.

So I would do grassroots if you've never done it in higher education. In a corporation, I would say it's a little bit different. I would highlight I would find, a a particular department. So I, for a long time, worked in a customer experience department. I would find a department that's particularly interested in this and say, okay.

We're gonna credential three skills and partner with me specifically to credential these in the context of your department, but know that then this could be a practice for how we roll it out into the overall organization. So those are two different approaches depending on where you're coming from. If you're in k twelve, that's even a little bit different because you need to go through some alignment and regulation within your district. Yeah. That's that's really good practical advice.

And the the idea of start small so you can iterate and get to where you need it to be. Yeah. And that works across the board no matter where you work. Absolutely. It's how you get adoption too.

Yeah. I see people over architect complicated credential programs, and then they're two years in. And they're like, you know, we either don't have enough learners or we can't the instructors aren't into this. It's because you crafted the big thing, and you didn't start small Mhmm. And build momentum off the small.

Yeah. Well, I'm gonna shift a little bit from credentialing to scenarios because you talked a bit about the the power that scenarios have. But, Hassan, what tools do you recommend to help build scenario based learning modules? Yeah. It's a it's a great choice, a great question. So natively, in a lot of the Articulate tools, whether you're using Storyline, whether you're using, Rise, Rise three sixty.

You can do some you can do some basics, scenario building. They they branch. Basically, they're technologies that can branch. The the the challenge is you wanna make sure you have a place to host those and that people can experience those. The other way you can do them is you can you can backwards design these.

If you do happen to have access to either, like, an LMS or a CMS or discussions, right, if you're using a community based tool within your organization and you've got something that's discussion, so bear with me. I have backed into these because what you can do is depending on how you release content and who you release content to, you can now create a scenario in your class. So not everybody might or your your collection of learners. So not everybody might do the same scenario, but everybody participates in the bigger scenario. Give you an example, a town hall.

So I have done situations where a community is coming together and debating, a new, you know, building construction that's coming. Okay. So you're gonna have certain students in your discussions or however your however your asynchronously having people collaborate. So a group of students will represent, environmentalists. A group of students will represent the building company.

A group of students will represent the businesses that want to move in there. A group of students will represent local, politicians. There might be a PTA organization because the school's next door. Right? You you create this, and then people respond to prompts from their different roles. You've now created a scenario.

People are working through the thoughts, behind what how would you manage a really complex situation, but they're acting in their particular role. And then what you can do is you can have people reflect on their role at the end, or you can have people switch roles, you You can have people summarize other people's roles. There's a lot of kind of play that you can have there, and you don't need a single technology outside of a place where people are adding written collaboration. Now you can get fancy. Like I said, you can do really some really interesting fancy things, but you can also then use generative AI to build these scenarios.

And somebody was posting that. I I saw somewhere in the chat that people have started, you know, using generative AI for scenarios. I love that, because you can really do that well. So let's say you have it, grasp that, and then you've presented this interactive experience that your entire group of learners get to exchange in. So it's a very low budget, but yet conceptually same approach to thinking about how to implement scenario based learning.

Yeah. There's some really interesting things you could do with scenarios, and you don't technically have to have tech to do it. But, also, there's some really tech tech out there. And someone in the chat I think has mentioned Twine too, which you can use for planning, or you could actually develop an entire thing in Twine. Absolutely.

Doing it pretty low res. Yeah. Yeah. I had an accessibility question here. Someone here asked about a way to we were talking about time stamps earlier, and this had come up while you were asking that.

What's, a good way to time stamp things that account for any learning accommodations that might be needed? Yeah. It's a great question. I and I'm gonna be honest. I don't think technology does this very well yet. We're still learning how to expose, you know, accommodations to to an instructor or a teacher from a student without, invading their privacy in that process.

Right? Like and so you'll see people do things like, okay. I'm gonna put students in individual groups, and then I'm gonna have different release schedules. Or I'm gonna put all of these students because I know they all have accommodations in a group. You don't wanna do that because you've now exposed other people's, you know, private conditions in which they might want these kinds of accommodations or need these accommodations. But so it's this is a tough one because technology's figured it out to a certain degree with quizzes, but when you start to get into some of the more complicated, kinds of assessment where you're doing project based assessment or you're doing, group assessment.

This is where this can be a little more complicated. So, you know, from a time stamping perspective, you know, I think you you you need submission moments or posting moments. Those can be time based moments. But you also, I think, need to understand again your audience and figure out within if you know the accommodations of your audience or they have come to you and you know which students need accommodations for whatever reason, think about step back and then think about as the instructor or the designer of that content, what are my learning experiences, and what do I already have as ways to deal with accommodations? I'll give you an example. I do a project.

They do a five step project over eight weeks. They check-in in each step. There's a hard due date each week of each assignment. However, some students do, need accommodations where they don't have those hard stamps. So I tell them, it is okay.

I'm already prepared. You can do steps one, two, and three by week five. It's okay if you don't get one and two done on their deadlines, but you've got to be here by week five. So that builds in a lot of flexibility. If you get there by week five, then as long as you get there by the end of the the the course or you've told me that you need an extension already and we plan for that, you should be good.

So I know there's gates going up. I've designed my assignments that way so that I have optimal flexibility should students need accommodations in the more complex settings. Again and technology doesn't really do much there. It really is just the cuisine areas where most of the accommodations we're seeing right now. I think this is gonna change a lot, though.

I think we're gonna see rapid evolution of this in the next two years because the best thing generative AI does, I think, personally, is translations and mapping. And this is this is about getting the right information to the right person and creating personalized learning paths. I think we're gonna see some transformation in this space. Yeah. But it sounds like for now what you're saying is in the cases where people aren't self identifying, just giving them the information they need and and being open and flexible and not putting where you can is going to be in a a good accessibility aid.

Even if you don't know what people need necessarily need. Exactly. And and let them know what why. Right? Yep. We never talk about why we're teaching a certain way.

So I need you here at five at week five because if you don't get to this spot at week five, you're never gonna finish week eight. I've watched this time and if you could explain just that, they're like, oh, okay. Now I get it. So give them the why and give them options as needed within the context of your your learning. Alright.

Well, we've got time for probably about one more question. And so, this one's what's the best practice when it comes to the amount of resources that should be available around the the learning experience or the topic. In this case, the person says, we have a repository of resources available on demand on our company Intranet. Yeah. This is one, and so do we.

And I would say they probably get used twenty five percent of the time. The problem with large collection of resources is is how do you navigate them more than the fact that it's a large collection of resources. So my recommendation is building, within your big repository, building in a top twenty question list or a top ten question. I can't you know, I'm gonna do something as simple as I'm trying trying to figure out how I do annual reviews. That's what you do as the prompt.

Like, think about this from an AI perspective, actually. Like, if you were gonna go ask a conversational prompt to somebody in your business, what would that prompt be? And then have links to all the resources that address that prompt. Because if you organize it in such a way to which somebody is actually seeking the information in the context in which they need it, they're more likely to build those long term pathways because now they're immediately applying the need to the skill, to the situation. So that's one way to think about it. The other way is when I build courses, I'm really careful with, you know, I think and I do all open education resources, mostly articles or some some papers that I have folks read.

I don't typically use a book, but if I used a book, you could apply this to chapters. I try not to give people more than an hour, like, working professionals. If they're working full time, I try not to give them more than an hour of reading a week and more than an hour of any kind of video content a week. And all of that is deeply chunked. Much beyond that, it doesn't it it the the learning, like, it it over it overwhelms people, or it feels it it's often too deep for what you're trying to accomplish in a shorter period of time.

So those are kind of my just personal gates. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense because just putting everything in a repository, if it's not getting used No. It's not the greatest use of your time. Could we do another stuff? Nope.

We organize around departments. Right? Okay. Here's the department. Go get the information. Here's the list of top used resources, but we never tell people why.

And so you never can go find them contextually Yeah. To use them. Awesome. Well, that was a fantastic session. A fantastic q and a.

I'm sorry sorry to everyone who, had a question we didn't get to because there's a whole bunch of fantastic questions. But I'm sure you can reach out to Melissa, at any later point. Now we're reaching the end of our time here together today. So, of course, thank you to our sponsor, Instructure, today's speaker, Melissa Lobel. Now Melissa, if someone wants to get in touch with you, how can they get in touch with you? And that's what I was just trying to type in the chat and typed it wrong, but I just put my email in there.

It's melissa at instructure dot com. You are more than welcome to reach out to me at any time. I would love to hear your ideas or answer any questions. And, of course, a big thanks to everyone here in the audience, whether you were joining us live or maybe you're watching this session recording later on. We're always so happy when you choose to spend your time at one of our webinars. So thank you all for being here, and have a fantastic rest of your day.