Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year! As the Holiday Season is upon us, we find ourselves reflecting on the past year and on those who have helped to shape our business in 2017. At Synapsys we have welcomed three new team members this year: Alistar Wickens our new Animation expert and Senior Instructional Designer, Nigel Young as a Senior Consultant and Karen Gillie our LMS Lead. Our Christchurch office has also relocated into a larger space in the City Centre. This year we have developed new relationships and worked with new clients, including recently we were very excited to be selected for the NZ Post L& D Panel. Happy Holidays and warm wishes for 2018! Engaging your team with system change: no frills, big impactLast month I was running a requirements workshop with a Synapsys client who are at the start of their journey with Learning Management Systems. For the uninitiated, a requirements workshop aims to pull together all the different things that an organisation wants its system to do. It’s not about the functionality of a LMS but more about the business problems the LMS needs to address. Anyway, one of the things that struck me about this client was how engaged everyone was. There were 20 or so people there; all enthusiastically talking about how learning worked for their staff, their services and their organisation. We got some great foundation information that will really help them get the system they need. Later, I was talking to their project manager; commenting on how positive I’d found it and how interested everyone seemed. You’ve got to see our tree he said. Turns out this PM had crafted a huge poster of a stylised tree, representing the LMS project, which was on display in a high staff traffic area. Next to the poster was a glass bowl full of paper leaves. Every time the LMS project completed a key action or reached a milestone, the people involved wrote the action on a leaf and put it up on the tree. As we were talking we duly wrote Complete requirements workshop on a leaf and added it to the foliage. As I was driving home I reflected on what the relationship might be between the level of organisational engagement and the PM’s tree. Too often we see organisations roll out systems seemingly out of nowhere. Small groups create requirements, choose systems, devise project plans and launch sites without much in the way of connection to the wider organisation. Sure, we may talk to leaders or circulate documents but how much do we really support our people to connect to the change? The tree in question wasn’t high tech, time consuming or expensive but it was certainly a way that staff could visually track the progress of what will be their learning system. Thinking it through, I suspect that this poster, and the approach it represented, was a key part of why this team were so engaged. When you’re rolling out a system it’s easy to get embroiled in all the tech stuff; the core functionality, the plug-ins, the data requirements. Perhaps we can all challenge ourselves to think more about the people who will be using the system and how we can bring them along for the ride. Karen Gillie, LMS Lead A Christmas Gift As our Christmas gift this year we made a contribution towards fees for a student enrolled in the Signal ICT Grad School. Our donation went to Felicia Sacramento who has completed her Computer Engineering degree and is enrolled in the Shift course with Signal. Click here to learn more about Signal their Shift course.
Tourism New Zealand boosts global sales with a Totara Learn platform used in 26 markets worldwide Synapsys and Tourism New Zealand have worked together on an ambitious project to deliver Tourism’s amazing 100% Pure New Zealand Specialist Programme. Using Totara Learn as a platform, the system delivers the training to 26 markets worldwide with agents and market managers able to track performance of their teams real-time on their dashboards. The high levels of configuration of the site include the setup of over 185 audiences, 50 dashboards and 100 certifications in eight different languages. Read the full case-study here Design thinking in Instructional DesignDesign thinking, or Human-Centered Design, has been a buzzword in the business world over the past decade. A diverse range of companies including Apple, Google, Pepsi, many financial institutions, and even government departments, are using design thinking to create innovative products, services, and processes that put their customers in the middle of everything they do. Replace “customer” with “learner” and the design thinking model can be applied equally successfully to instructional design – a key part of the learning design process that can sometimes be overlooked when budgets, time constraints, audit and legislative requirements, or pre-existing ideas about what the learner needs start to drive the design instead. Design thinking for learning starts with trying to understand your learners through observing and talking to them. Once you understand your learners you may find that the real problem isn’t something learning can solve alone and there could be other issues to resolve first (e.g. workplace setup, access to tools or resources, poorly designed processes, or software limitations). From there you can start to think about how you might solve the problems. Stepping back and looking for as many solutions as possible is a key part of the design thinking process. Be prepared to diverge from the solution you thought you were designing, or had been asked to design. Once you’ve come up with a range of ideas it’s time to start focusing on an idea and developing it further. As you develop your learning solution put it in the hands of your learners as early and often as you can to observe them using it. You may find you go through many iterations of a learning solution as you continually test, iterate, and retest. It may sound like more work, but as you’re working in smaller bursts and making changes before you get too far with an idea or solution you’ll find you can save time through the process. These are just a few of the ways you can use design thinking to help improve learning – there are many more, and many specific techniques from design thinking that you could use. If you’d like to find out more, check out IDEO U, or the Stanford d.School for resources and online courses, or get in touch to find out how we can help you apply design thinking to learning. Alistar Wickens, Instructional Designer & Animator |