On my office wall, opposite to my desk, hangs a banner that proclaims, It’s the activity, Stupid!
It is a gentle reminder that I should focus my attention on designing activities and not content.
My Naïve Beginning
In ancient times, when I designed and developed instructional materials, I pored through books and talked to experts to make sure that my content is the latest and the best. I spent a lot of time creating the training content: PowerPoint slides, handouts, web pages, manuals, glossaries, job aids, facilitator guide, presentation scripts, and so on. And then, if I had time, I threw in a few activities (usually Jeopardy® game variants) as an afterthought.
Now that I am older and have been sufficiently punished by my participants, I have learned the importance of active training.
Learning Through Activities
Sometime during my graduate school days, I conducted a secondary analysis of research on learning. One of my findings: People learn through activities and not through exposure. Since my workshop participants are not interested in replicating my meta-analyses, I give them this demonstration: I told everyone that my name is Sivasailam Thiagarajan, doing this slowly and deliberately. Later in the session, I randomly select a participant and asked him to tell my name. I acted surprised when this person hesitated, faltered, or mispronounced my name. I solemnly repeated the famous words of my colleague Harold Stolovitch: Telling Ain’t Training.
After this demonstration, I discuss traditional training design and delivery and elicit that most designers focus on the content and ignore activities.
Content and Activity
Content is abundantly available. In my training design workshops, I invite a participant to name a corporate training topic. I do an online search for this training topic to show that millions of documents are available. I also browse online bookstores to display the thousands of books available. (As of right now, on the perennial training topic of leadership, Google displays more than four billion items and Amazon shows 40,000+ books.)
An enormous amount of experimental evidence emphasizes the importance of learning activities. When I undertake training design projects, I frequently begin with valid training activities before searching for the content. I don’t present any content that is not immediately incorporated in an activity. I keep reminding myself that content without activity results in dormant knowledge.
Let me repeat a rule I use (and train others to use) in designing training packages in a faster and cheaper fashion to produce more effective learning and application: Focus on designing activities, not content.