Recapping TLDC: Evolving Tech Trends Beyond the LMS (Sara Stevick)
This is a series of posts recapping and reacting to sessions from the recent January 2023 Training, Learning, and Development Community (TLDC) event to support teachers transitioning to L&D. The full event recordings can be found at the TLDC website.
Summary: Sara introduces teachers to a variety of business technology solutions for learning in this conference, including some modern features of the LMS and where learning technology is beginning to overlap with business data analytics and human resources tools. She does a great job also covering the “why” of technological changes in business and the purpose of various tools: most of which comes down to better employee experience, creating and storing learning content, tracking and analyzing data to drive performance, and making systems work together efficiently within an organization. Sara’s Slides make excellent notes framework if you’re hoping to capture all the acronyms of it all! I do think she makes the point though that many of these systems overlap, work together, evolve (an LMS can become an LXP with new features etc.), and fit together differently based on different organizational needs. It is not one size fits all! This is a great training for some basic general level awareness of the current state of learning technologies in L&D and organizations in general.
I love this quote because it aligns us to our purpose. We track behavioral change through KPIs (Key Progress Indicators) and as she emphasizes throughout the presentation, that improves the business performance and profitability and the employee’s experience, performance, and possibly compensation (directly in cases like sales commission, indirectly in other cases). An instructional designer does not just create and manage learning — an instructional designer solves performance problems or improves performance to create value for the business. This is a mental shift the industry is undergoing, I believe, but also one that may be confusing for teachers who are upskilling on that content development (good to do) and not as familiar with the business acumen to understand L&D’s place in the pie—an easy thing to misunderstand because some organizations also treat L&D like a “content shop” they order from. But that is really in many ways the lowest value part of L&D and the part that makes it feel like a cost center and not a crucial part of operational success.
I’ll point out she doesn’t focus on authoring tools and only really mentions them in response to questions. I think one big shift teachers struggle with is this: authoring tools are not all of the tools instructional designers use, and designing and developing content uses different tools than the analysis, implementation, and evaluation phase of instructional design may. What Sara highlights are all the technologies that help us implement, evaluate, and analyze learning solutions, not just design and develop them. While some instructional design jobs, especially entry level, may focus heavily on content development, I want to emphasize the importance of the whole instructional design skillset. Many instructional designers (and many teachers, give the time and tools they often don’t have in the classroom) are great content developers. Some even have excellent media production skills, some light programming skills (or heavy ones in a few cases, though it’s rarely needed), graphic design skills, etc. Those are all areas teachers may need to grow and should potentially upskill, depending on their goals. But that’s not all instructional design is, and it’s not all learning technology is.
So, our homework this time is about beginning to explore learning technology here:
No need to become an expert user
Explore G2 to build awareness of different L&D and business tools
Learn and begin to understand key acronyms
Jot down technology you see in job ads
So, what exercise do I have for you? Let’s set up a Tool Journal: You can use this for authoring tools as well, because you will probably be studying some.
(I suggest dedicating 5-10 pages in a notebook for this, but here’s the PDF if it helps: Tool Journal
So here’s your assignment:
Jot down tools you already use and the purpose of them.
Track connections you see to business tools, be sure to write HOW they connect in your mind. This might be in purpose, but it might also be in functionality, etc.
Spend some time on G2, LinkedIn, learning communities, and YouTube researching tools and jotting down a brief summary. Maybe star ones you want to actually learn in depth, but understand some of the work is just researching what tools exist and are used. Get a sense of which tools require practice in most people’s eyes (XAPI, Adobe Illustrator, Articulate, etc.) or are considered “pick up able” on a tech level by anyone with tech proficiency (Trello, Canva, Rise, etc.). There’s wild variation here, of course. But you’re just trying to build a foundation.
Why is this helpful? Well, I use lots of tools, many I used before education or that aren’t strictly educational tools, but I also obviously used educational technology in the classroom, and I’ve learned plenty recently. It has gotten to the point that when people talk to me about tools, I know “enough” in most areas that most people come to the conclusion that I’ve used something like it or several things like it, which reduces their concern over “exact” experience. Most people don’t really care if you’ve used the exact tool (there are exceptions) as much as if you can use the tool fairly easily. Once you use enough tools, the learning curve goes down dramatically and most people realize this.
More in this Loom about what I mean:
About this Activity (Watch on Loom) (Loom Transcript)
The point of this homework is to begin to get you comfortable with L&D technology and tools, talking about them, adopting new ones, and generally understanding how organizations and instructional designers might use them.
Resources:
About the Speaker: Check out Sara Stevick on LinkedIn or at the Teaching: a Pathway to L&D website.
