This week I am at ASTD’s International Conference and Expo in Dallas. If you haven’t been to this conference or haven’t been in a while, you should really plan on attending next year. It’s really an amazing event.
Some of the hot topics this year are Agility in learning and development, creativity, whole brain learning, mobile learning and social learning. Of course there are many other topics but these seem to be the hot ones. You should go to the ICE Conference website and look at the conference page to get an idea of how big this is and the types of speakers that are here. Really impressive!
It’s time to update your toolkit with a process called Agility. Software companies have been using it successfully for years. Agility is the ability to rapidly respond to change. In software development Wikipedia describes the process this way:
“Agile methods break tasks into small increments with minimal planning and do not directly involve long-term planning. Iterations are short time frames (timeboxes) that typically last from one to four weeks. Each iteration involves a cross functional team working in all functions: planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, unit testing, and acceptance testing. At the end of the iteration a working product is demonstrated to stakeholders. This minimizes overall risk and allows the project to adapt to changes quickly. Multiple iterations might be required to release a product or new features.”
So how does this apply to training? It’s a whole new way to develop a program.
Another big take away was the new data on how long we have before we need to switch activities. According to Ann Hermann Nehdi, we should be using 8 minutes before participants lose interest. If the activity is online, we have 4 minutes.
Social Media and Mobile learning have been themes in L&D for some time. The big takeaway is to have a strategy for both areas. Participants are using them anyway, we should at least be in control of how they use them. Even if you don’t use them in your organizations, have a strategy as to why you don’t.
I’ll have more as the days go on but for now, it’s off to the next session.
What do you think about all this?
Leave a Reply