Unless you were one of the lucky 50, you probably missed out on our recent workshop - Instructional Designer's Toolkit facilitated by Megan Torrance. Thankfully, ATD St. Louis member, Derek Kindig from Rabo Agrifinance, was willing to share his insights.

Recently, I attended a workshop facilitated by Megan Torrance about her “Instructional Designer Toolkit.” Along with 40+ others, I absorbed as much information as I could and began to think about how I can implement these ideas. Below is a summary of my takeaways but if you’d like to learn more about Megan’s toolkit, visit torrancelearning.com/toolkit. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you want to discuss my experience.

Rocketbook app

I must first admit that I’m incredibly biased on this topic. Some time ago my wife was on one of her Kickstarter rampages and ran across the Rocketbook Everlast and thought I would be interesting in the product. She was right.

Essentially, the app scans pages and can send a PDF to just about any location you want; OneDrive included! Megan went on to explain that Rocketbook has some of these pages available for download on their website and she enlarges them up to use as a flip chart. She agreed that making the printouts even larger to laminate and mimic a whiteboard would be a good use of this resource as well.

Learning Personas

Megan and her team uses Learning Personas as a way to gear their training for a specific audience. This goes deeper than identifying that a general audience needs the training. Rather, it looks at that audience and defines characteristics about 2 or 3 types of people within that group. When it comes to instructional design knowing your audience is arguably the most important piece and this concept can really help with driving home the training. I’m really excited to try using this on an upcoming project.

Action Mapping

We briefly covered Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping and how it helps keep the end goal in mind during the design process. I like action mapping because it helps me stay focused on the things my learners have to do. It also helps me refine content so that I’m not just throwing information on a screen because “it’s important.” We got to practice action mapping in small groups which was nice to get that practice in.

Evaluations

This one is definitely a can of worms but… The main point was that the 4 levels of evaluation in the Kirkpatrick model doesn’t really work. Megan uses 8 Ls (not actual levels) for measuring training and to be honest I don’t remember them all. The one that stuck out to me was learner experience. I believe it could be the center of our measurement if we can create a standard definition for learner experience. I could go on for a while here but am hoping I haven’t lost you just yet; feel free to contact me if you’d like to dive down this rabbit hole together. 

Learning Moments

Some of you may be familiar with Bob Mosher and Conrad Gottfredson’s 5 Moments of Learning Need, but Megan believes there are 9 moments. Regardless of it being 5 or 9, I am a big proponent of this concept as it approaches what a learner needs from a different angle. Megan went on to say that although she has 9 moments mapped out, not every project will use all of them. It really depends on your audience and the business goal. I like that it makes you think about a time in which a person would need training. Are they in the middle of doing a task and need help? Are they completely new to it? Do they need a refresher?