Posted: February 15

Two thousand people made their way to Atlanta this week for this excellent conference. The conference host and master of ceremonies again this year is North Carolina’s own Tony O’Driscoll.  The keynote sessions were even more plentiful and as entertaining and informative as last year. Each session includes two to three interesting thought leaders who present their topics and then chat with each other at the end of the session. It’s nice to see this combination of scripted and unscripted exchange of information expertly facilitated by Tony.

Posted: February 7

Last week we looked at some pros and cons of why we should even spend time writing Performance Objectives. I think the evidence is certainly stacked in favor of having them, whether learners use them or not. Now let’s talk about how to write them so that they benefit your design efforts. We can all agree that we don’t have time for anything that doesn’t benefit our learning solution design.

Posted: January 31

It appears to be widely accepted that performance objectives are a good thing because most instructional designers write them and most organizations use them. But since their introduction by the likes of Mager and Gagne decades ago, I find many instructional designers are unsure of the many things for which they can be used.

Posted: January 17

On Thursday evening, January 12, ISPI Charlotte’s 2012 year got off to a great start with an outstanding program.  We met in our new location in the UNC Charlotte building uptown with a great turnout.  It appears the new location will be a healthy change for us.
 
Our presenter Cal Wick told us a story about a learning solution that his company designed for one of his clients that appeared to be a great success.  The only problem was that when he visited the company a few months later, everything seemed to have reverted back to the behavior that was causing problems before the learning event.  Now who hasn’t been there?

Posted: January 5

I had a good year last year teaching performance consulting skills to a few hundred people within my client base and at conferences and professional societies. By far the most common reason anyone attends these classes is because they are dissatisfied being order takers for training requests and they want to have a measurable impact on the business. Another possible motivation for improving skills in performance consulting should be the current economic situation. One would think that with increasing layoffs and tightening budgets, two factors would come into play: