At a workshop yesterday, one of the participants came up to me and said something like: "You know - you should put together a kind of defence kit for people doing creative learning design. There are so many pressures on us at the moment to be uncreative and just produce rubbish (that's not the word she used)...we need help NOW..."

Well...I work very quickly. But not that quickly. Here's the one I wrote a few years ago.

Introduction

What is creativity?

Why do you need creativity?

When do you need creativity?

The seven deadly sins 

Although it reads a little dated to me, I think most of it is still relevant. 

It's about learning in a multi-sensory environment, and engaging the whole brain. In the UK, people like Colin Rose  have shown how effective the approach can be – that is, how learning can be accelerated – using this approach. More fashionable gurus like John Medina ( here ) has shown how stimulating multiple senses helps people learn.

People appear to learn better and quicker using AL, which makes its invisibility in the e-learning industry a little hard to understand. Having looked at many hundreds of e-learning courses in the last twenty years or so, it's clear to me that AL has had little influence on e-learning producers.  

It feels like the e-learning business has missed the point about accelerating peoples' learning. We've put a lot of effort into getting learning management moving more efficiently, providing access to content, reducing course duration and above all producing content as quickly as possible. But has this actually accelerated the pace at which people learn (i.e. change their behaviour)? I don't think so. It's simply reduced the time it takes for people to encounter learning content that, on the whole, makes little difference.

My personal view is that e-learning producers can accelerate learning in two ways:

1. Taking more user-driven, less bureaucratic approaches to development
2. Adopting AL approaches

I completely agree with Harold Jarsche and Mark Oehlert here. How could I not?

And of course the same is the case for adult education, in large organisations...corporations...everywhere...

"Our education system needs to drop the whole notion of subjects and content mastery and move to process-oriented learning."

But aren't we, as learning specialists, the ones who should have the expertise to shift peoples' understanding? If we can't, nobody can.

So...who are the learners? What's the performance issue we're trying to address? Etc. etc. etc...jeez - this is gonna be a hard one...

I've just started dabbling with a new blog: it's over here: http://innovate2engage.blogspot.com/

I'll keep going on this one as well, but Innovate2Engage will be entirely focussed on new ideas, tools, processes and products intended to get learners fully engaged in learning.

Do join me there!

There's a lot of work going on at the moment by training companies and e-learning agencies aimed at training people in large organisations how to do learning/instructional design (e.g. Trainer1, Prosell, LINE, the wonderful and quirky Ministry of Instructional Design, and many others...).

But this hilarious video reminded me of one of the main outcomes of a piece of research I did a few years ago about the factors that determine the success or failure of design briefs. In a nutshell it showed that organisations get better value for money if the staff they use to commission work from agencies are well trained - kind of obvious really. Clients that know how to handle agencies get better results, and it feels to me like the sign of a mature, well managed industry is that the interface between buyer and supplier is managed by experienced individuals on both sides. 

So shouldn't there be more activity training those in large organisations who commission e-learning? 

Anyway - if you've not seen this yet, enjoy!