With the recent ad server rebuild, Twitter is positioned to grow their advertising revenue. With the new infrastructure in place, Client Partners can now better serve their customers, provide more insightful marketing data, and have a new-found confidence that customers can achieve their marketing goals with Twitter like never before.

Conducting a full analysis of the LMS is step quite often overlooked by instructional designers.

Being a strong advocate of overall “experience” and “human-centered” design I often look for areas of technology to help influence the design of learning material to bring the most amount joy (and least amount of friction to learners and managers.

• How learners progress?
• How assessments are embedded?
• What kind of material and files can be uploaded?
• What kind of tracking mechanisms are in place?
• Do we need additional tracking such as Google Analytics or a Learning Record Store?
• Are points, certifications and badges built-in?
• Can learners be notified on upcoming/past due courses?

The first step is to determine what new information and skills you want learners to have mastered when they have completed your instruction, expressed as goals. These goals generally come from:

• A sub-list of goals from a performance analysis
• From a needs assessments
• From observations & data that clue us in on learner/business underperformance with a current system being used
• And/or from the analysis of people who are doing a job or from some other requirement for new instruction.

After you have identified the instructional goals, you determine step by step what people are doing when they perform that goal as well as look at subskills needed for complete (and ongoing) mastery of the goal. At the end of this step we will determine the skills, knowledge, attitudes  that are needed by CPs to be successful in their roles.

• For example: As part of a basic job function today, CPs need to learn how to sell in a virtual environment. Subskills in this area might include navigating new software/hardware, improvements on email outreach to potential clients, storytelling & data presentation.
• An info architecture/curriculum overview is generally developed in this part as well and continuously refined up until Part 6 – Developing Instructional Materials

In addition to analyzing the instructional goals, there is a parallel analysis of learners, the context in which they learn the skills needed to do their jobs effectively. Learner’s current skills, preferences and attitudes are determined along with characteristics of the instructional setting and the setting in which the skills will be used. This helps shapes a number of succeeding steps in this methodology, especially instructional strategy.

Based on the instructional analysis and the description of entry skills, you write specific statements of what learners will be able to do when the complete learning material and activities. The POs also need to take into account the organizations short term and long term business development goals to maximize shareholder value.

These Performance Objective statements (we identified in the Instructional Analysis section 2) identify the skills needed to be learned, the conditions under which the skills will be demonstrated and criteria we set forth  to deem them successful to the org and maximize shareholder value.

Based on the objectives set forth in the previous step, you would then develop assessment instruments that are parallel and that measure the learner’s ability to perform what you describe in those objectives. A lot of emphasis is put on relationship between the North Star Objective(s), our Performance objectives in step 2 and what we are assessing the Client Partners on – especially the criteria that we deem as passing or certification achievement.

In this step we also need to evaluate the capabilities of Absorb so we know what’s possible and what’s not. In most instances, diving into the delivery platform shapes your thinking and creativity.

Assessment instruments would include:

• Mid-learning quiz injection;
• Demo sales presentations in front of managers and peers;
• Case Study development to contribute toward content pool ( I envision a template to be provided to CPs or Managers so they can draft Case Studies and earn extra points/badges.
  • This can help with new hires as well. Giving them real contextual examples with data that will get them in their comfort zone quicker.

Based on the previous steps the designer now identifies a theoretical strategy to use in the instruction to achieve goals.

This may include:

• Pre-instructional activities, such as stimulating motivation and focusing attention.
• Presentation of new content with examples and demonstrations.
• Active learner participation and practice with feedback on how they are doing.
• Follow through activities that assess learning and relate new skills to real world applications.

This is where the fun starts and where you get true ROI on a highly-skilled, and versatile instructional technologist.

All of our strategy creation is now put into play with the creation of the curriculum structure, guidance material, interactive elements, and assessment instruments.

This step also can include an audit of existing materials in normal use cases.

Learning activities & assessments will be measured and tracked with Absorb’s built-in analytics tools, however, implementation of XAPI/LRS/Google Analytics will allow us to go deeper on select content and discover:

• best retention rates
• highest completion rates
• overall learner satisfaction
• and identifying high performers to praise publicly.

Following the development of instructional materials a series of evaluations is conducted to collect data used to identify problems with the instruction or opportunities to make the instruction better. We use “formative” because of the purpose to create influential core learning material that aligns to core business objectives and maximizes shareholder value.

The formative evaluations can take place in the following ways:

• One-to-one with Client Partners;
• Small group with managers;
• And Field Trial to make sure the learning environment and material fits the busy, always on-the-go salesperson work schedule.

The final step in the design and development process (but first step in a repeat cycle) is revising the instruction. Data from the formative evaluation are summarized and interpreted to identify difficulties experienced by learners in achieving the objectives and to relate these difficulties to specific deficiencies in the instruction. The dotted line that leads to the “Revise instruction” step does not signify revising instruction itself, but are used to re-examine the validity of the instructional analysis and the assumptions

Revision is not a discrete event that occurs at the end of the ID process, but an ongoing process of using information and data to reassess assumptions and decisions that shaped our original thinking and strategy.

This is where we can attach absolute or relative value to the instruction we’ve put into motion and usually occurs after the instruction has been formatively evaluated. However, this is typically done by someone other than the instructional designer, like an independent evaluator.

Procedures for summative evaluations are taking place more and more today in training orgs due to the increased interest in the transfer of knowledge and skills into real work settings – such as sales based roles.

There is also an increased interest in the effectiveness of eLearning across organizations on a national & global scale.

For example: will eLearning developed for CPs in the U.S. be effective for a similar audience in Europe or Japan? While the multimedia assets are most likely developed with high quality, what will our learning experts a world away think of them? This is where we have a much deeper discussions about:

• Learner Verification
• Materials Effectiveness
• Assurances of Materials Effectiveness

These items are much at the forefront today with global learning orgs now that materials transportability is more economical and effortless than ever before.