Don’t code the (eLearning) content – soap! 2019 techcomm conf

Have you met me? If yes, the below won’t be a surprise, hehe… If not, here we go, nice to meet you!

WORKSHOP

I love giving workshops and the tradition continued with me teaching people how to use Lightning Decision Jam (affectionately called LDJ) – a creative, but structured process to solve problems quickly and without useless discussion. Read more about it, and learn more about it, from my blog post about LDJ, just click here!

CONFERENCE

soap! conf will always be my conference alma mater, where lots of my unconventional ideas are presented. Last year I challenged the thesis that innovation is actually a good thing and presented my view on how to approach it for successful results. This year, I circled back to my career roots and the field that I deeply love and respect, just to… disrespect it. I decided to turn the tables and forget about the rules for writing content. Focus on the content, don’t apply anything not by conscious choice. What does it mean? Let me explain!

The idea came to me when I was developing quite a boring piece of content for the call center. Talking to my colleagues, I figured that we all follow so many rules – a certain code to our content – that I suddenly felt the content itself got second place, and applying the rules, which whichever result, was more important. Rules I considered as „code for content” were:
+ ADDIE model
+ Learning goals/aims/objectives
+ Bloom’s Taxonomy
+ VARK learning styles

The thesis I set out to test said: if we follow the above „code,” content gets a second place – so why don’t we put content first, coding second?

Below is the retelling of my experiment. Enjoy, and excuse all the „ummmms”!