Should we scrap our New Year’s Resolutions..

and go for New Year’s Visions instead? I went to a talk by Professor Richard Boyatzis last month. He said that after working in addiction therapy for a few years, he could spot when somebody was going to fail. It would happen right at the beginning of their treatment – when the addict was askedContinue

Begging, Pleading and Cajoling

How can we motivate people to learn? First challenge: learning is a wonderful thing in itself, so why would anyone need motivation? (see also: vegetables, exercise).  Second challenge: if people aren’t turning up to things, they’re giving us indirect feedback and maybe the problem is us, not them.  Third challenge: learning is happening all theContinue

Nine things that surprised me

We’re just finishing a cycle of experimentation at the Diplomatic Academy.  We’ve been using the FutureLearn platform to run a free public MOOC (Diplomacy in the 21st Century – still open) and a private course for our global community of learning designers. This is the first of a few reflective blogs.  I’ll start with theContinue

It’s the Participation, Stupid!

I really hope the diplomatic academy will run more courses in this style in the future -it’s been very engaging (I’ve been excited to click the new link every Monday!) and much more motivating than our usual solo e-learning modules.. discussions bring out so much more than just being in ‘receive mode’. – end-of-course feedbackContinue

The Evolution of 70:20:10

Congratulations to Owen Ferguson and the team at GoodPractice who have produced a really interesting report into L&D industry views of 70:20:10 (downloadable here).  It teases out a range of professional views and practices in a great format. It also has the finest illustrations of insects and crustaceans I’ve ever seen in an L&D whiteContinue

The Learning Conspiracies

I’ve been working on a book called The Learning Conspiracies and I’ve reached that point where, although I know it still needs work, I really need to start sharing it. It’s 50,000 words of non-fiction about Learning & Development and fortunately it breaks down into sections quite easily – well, quite easily after three yearsContinue

Learning: The Evidence Is Out There

We have reasonable excuses not to engage with the evidence on learning.   ResearchED founder Tom Bennett identified four of them in a recent speech on the “evidence revolution”: we don’t have the time (heard that before?) we don’t need to know the research to be good teachers or educators research is disputable anyway learning is notContinue

Please help with a good question from my boss

My boss has posed a rather good question: How do professional services organisations justify the time which is spent by their expert staff on Continuing Professional Development (CPD)? – time during which they could have been earning individual consultancy income, or working on project teams.  What is good industry practice in terms of demonstrating value? How do consultanciesContinue

L&D and Improbable Aiming Skills

This is a homage to http://www.tvtropes.org , a labyrinth of wit about TV, film, comic and gaming clichés.  The clichés we’re all familiar with.  The sort of website you can get lost in for hours. At some point the clichés started to remind me of L&D because if you’re in the L&D industry, you tooContinue

Nine Ways to Avoid Dropout

British Embassies employ more than 15,000 people scattered around the planet, so online and remote learning are a crucial part of the mix for the Diplomatic Academy.  Crucial, that is, as long as people take part. We all know the dropout rate on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) looks like the 62m drop on theContinue