Rachel
Burnham writes: Here
are some wonderful, practical yet inspiring books to help you to create
relevant and useful learning opportunities that aren’t limited to face to face
delivery in a training room. They aren’t
brand new books – but they are full of useful advice that can help you to try
out different approaches and build on the experience of experts.
‘The
Blended Learning Cookbook’ 2nd Edition by Clive Shepherd (2008)
Published by Saffron Interactive.
As the title suggests this book is all about blended
learning and how to design learning effectively using a mix of learning
methods. It opens with three short
sections which provide some background to the topic and overall thinking,
before moving onto the core of the book which is a series of practical examples
of different blended programmes designed to meet a range of needs. The great thing about these examples is the
sheer variety and this means that it can give you some great ideas for starting
points for designs to meet needs in your own organisation.
‘Informal
Learning At Work – How to Boost Performance in Tough Times’ by Paul Matthews
(2013) Published by Three Faces Publishing.
In this book Paul Matthews explores informal learning –
those very many learning opportunites beyond formal courses and education. He sets out the advantages to be gained from
recognising & encouraging informal learning in organisations and sets out
how L&D teams can encourage a learnscape that facilitates this. He includes many examples to illustrate his
points and provides evidence of the effectiveness of informal learning. He includes lots of examples of different
forms of informal learning, so that you get a great sense of the range of
possibilities.
My only criticism of this book, is that there are
sometimes so many examples provided that you lose the narrative thread (well I did!), but this does make it a great
resource bank.
I have also written about informal learning in an earlier post 'Lift off for Informal Learning'.
‘Social
Media for Trainers – Techniques for Enhancing and Extending Learning’ by Jane
Bozarth (2010) Published by John Wiley.
This book has a very special place on my bookshelf, as it
played a significant part in getting me into using Twitter. I had taken it along to a workshop to share
with some CLDP students, one of whom was already on Twitter. Before the workshop started she tweeted Jane
Bozarth and by the time we broke for morning coffee, we had had an answer back
from Jane! I was sold on Twitter from
that moment!
The book is both great as a guide to key examples of
social media – Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and Wikis and even better at providing
many, many suggestions of how these can be used to enable learning. These suggestions are set out so clearly,
that you don’t need to be particularly tech-savvy to see how these can work and
to give them a go.
‘Job
Aids & Peformance Support – Moving from Knowledge in the Classroom to
Knowledge Everywhere’ by Allison Rossett & Lisa Schafer (2007) Published by
John Wiley.
Job aids & performance support are playing an
increasingly important role alongside learning opportunities. Performance support enables us to draw upon
resources at the point of need to enable us to do a task efficiently &
effectively. This means that there are a
whole range of work related tasks that we no longer need to learn in their
entirety, but can rely on finding the resources to help us, either to prepare
or to use during completion of the task.
At a time when there is more and more that we need to be able to do and
constant change in the information we need to work with, it makes sense to not
only use learning to meet these needs, but also performance support. Sometimes learning on its own will be
appropriate, sometimes performance support will be sufficient and sometimes
both will be needed.
Again, this book is packed out with examples &
illustrations to enable you to see the possibilities and start to make use of
them yourself.
‘The
New Virtual Classroom’ by Ruth Colvin Clark & Ann Kwinn (2007) Published by
John Wiley
I found this an invaluable guide to designing &
delivering webinars/virtual classrooms ie usually short learning sessions
delivered via the internet which bring learners at a distance together at the
same time. It provides excellent
suggestions and tips for creating effective interactive webinars to meet
different sorts of learning needs from computer based skills to knowledge &
understanding The book is all based very
firmly on research and experience. I
have also found that it has influenced my practice in face to face delivery, as
many of the points have a wider application.
I have also written about my own experience of webinars in a previous post, which you may find of interest 'My Learning About Webinars'.
Each one of these five books has earned its place on my
bookshelves. With this collection to
draw upon, there is no reason to limit yourself and your organisation to face
to face learning in workshops and every reason to consider other options.
I would love to hear your comments on these book
suggestions and also your own ideas.
What has been your experience of making use of these other learning
methods?
Rachel
Burnham
15/9/14
Burnham L & D Consultancy helps L&D
professionals become even more effective.
I am particularly interested in blended learning, the uses of social
media for learning, evaluation and anything that improves the impact of
learning on performance.
Follow me on Twitter @BurnhamLandD
