Life Long Learning …

A quick way? Did I just write this?

I was producing a Podcast during the last three nights and since then I don’t think of it as a quick delivery tool any longer. Maybe I was doing it the wrong way: I had a few interviews with different people who were involved in a change project. The project went really well and everybody is excited about the change. So I asked them a few questions about what made the project so successful and they answered. I had 4 hours of recorded material at the end.

Then I went back with my laptop and started cutting the material. My goal was to only use the peoples voices - no additional speakers, no intoduction, no explanations. What those people had to say should be enough, I thought. In order to find the parts of the interview that I could potentially use I had to listen to all of it again - 4 hours. Then I had to cut the stuff and modify some of it (some of the candidates spoke way too low). Then I had to bring it all into an order that made sense, re-shuffle and add some music to make it a bit more interesting. All in all I spent 16 hours - not counting the time for the interview - to get a 10 minutes piece worth sharing with my client.

I wonder, if that’s the normal rate for a project like this. To me it felt way too long. I don’t think I will ever be able to sell a Podcast as a quick and easy solution to distribute content ever again.

’spicy, hot, fresh and fragrant’ - these are the four words that best describe the Sichuan Cuisine.

The Sichuan Approach for an e-learning initiative is similar.

Instead of just providing a traditional Web Based Training - and maybe even make it a mandatory training for the company - try to speak to the hearts of the learners by spicing the thing up.  An engaging video campaign that tells a story about why this specific topic was so important for a group of people or a single person and why knowing about it or behaving in the same way would be of great benefit for everybody. Spend some money on this video - rather than spending it on making a dull WBT a little bit less dull. Make this video fresh and fragrant so that people start talking about it. With this layer of the mix you will grab the attention of your audience. And they will learn a lot about the motivation of thinking about the topic.

On a second layer you can always have the - mandatory - e-learning to explain the pure basics of the concept or tool or process. Once people are engaged and motivated to know more about the background, they will much easier accept a less engaging WBT - and in the best of all cases you don’t need to make it mandatroy because people want to do it anyway.