Appendix: Learning Environment Blueprints

In this section, you’ll find three examples of learning environment blueprints. These are all globalized fictitious examples based on specific experiences and scenarios.

You can also find examples of learning environments on the Internet as many people and organizations have embraced the value of curating resources for specific purposes. Professional organizations, government entities, vendors, authors, and others often provide learning resources for their constituents. You’ll be able to see a reflection of learning environment design concepts and ideas in their structure, and you can note the ways that they are effective and ineffective to give you further input for your own designs.

Sales Team Onboarding Resources

BACKGROUND

This environment plays off the story of Cara and Yuri from the introduction. We imagined an L&D team curating a learning resource portal for the newest members of a sales team so that they could quickly locate the information they need to come up to speed and gain foundational skills. The salespeople are expected to know what they need to know to some degree.

There might well be opportunity to expand this learning environment to bring in resources and activities that will help the more experienced and tenured salespeople to fine-tune their skills, but in this scenario, the focus is exclusively on onboarding.

PURPOSE

Guide salespeople to the most useful resources for self-directed learning.

CONTEXT

Business goals supported:

• Increase sales by 20 percent over the next two years.

Relevant performance objectives:

• Establish adviser relationships with decision makers in territory.
• Maintain book of business year after year.
• Oversee preparation of request for proposal (RFP) responses for potential clients in territory.

RELEVANT LEARNER CHARACTERISTICS

• New hire salespeople
• May have some sales experience or some internal company experience
• Expected rate of hiring is four to ten per year
• Geographically dispersed around the United States

TOPIC AND SCOPE

• Focus on first six to twelve months on the job—help new hires come up to speed.
• Include both core sales skills and technical information about products and competitors.
• Focus on providing general sales skills found to be successful in this environment, rather than materials to deepen all competencies necessary for long-term success.

INITIAL COMPONENTS

NOTE: All materials on this component list are fabricated for illustration purposes.

RESOURCES

Orientation:

• Home office in a box (how-tos for systems and technology)
• Transition playbook (information on clients in territory)
• Corporate onboarding resource site
• Sales incentive information pages

Product and industry information:

• Competitor intelligence materials (website links, analysis, whitepapers)
• Sales portal (detail product information, product briefing sheets, marketing materials, archived sales team webinars)
• Product app for smartphones
• RFP database (copies of all RFPs tagged with categories for easy search)
• Sales bulletin and archive (monthly newsletter that includes news, tips, profiles, upcoming events, and more)
• Industry news feeds

Sales skills resources:

• Books provided electronically or in paper form
• Success stories (internally recorded interviews that break down lessons learned from big wins)
• Trusted adviser webinar series (recorded)
• Sales superstar podcast subscription (vendor materials; many topics available and downloadable)
• Access to The Sales Professional article database
• Suggested Twitter feeds (provide at least six)

PEOPLE

• Assigned mentor for onboarding period
• Team member profiles on company website (make it searchable and include skills profile and client experience)
• Sales team asynchronous discussion board and messaging tools
• Quarterly regional informal get-togethers
• Sales Institute membership (or similar professional organization)

TRAINING AND EDUCATION

• Sales simulation e-learning
• E-learning series on company products
• Consultative Selling course (or other publicly offered training course)
• Corporate onboarding series
• Annual sales conference (includes concurrent workshops on timely topics)
• Monthly sales team webinars (topical education, usually about new products or competitor information)

DEVELOPMENT PRACTICES

• Coaching guide provided to assigned mentor
• Sales presentation coaching by management team
• Sales call partnering (ride-along)
• Road Ready Assessment (sales manager checklist and assessment to validate new salespeople are up to speed)
• All hands huddle conference calls (arranged by salespeople for assistance with time-sensitive challenges)

EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING PRACTICES

• Observations by experienced sales execs
• Individualized coaching

CULTIVATION PLAN OUTLINE

• The site will be pilot-tested with salespeople who have been hired in the last 12 months.
• The L&D team will be notified when new salespeople are hired, and they will remind managers and mentors of this resource for onboarding new people.
• New hires will be made aware of the resource on their first day on the job (included in a welcome note from the L&D team).
• During the first year, the L&D team will follow up with new hires, their mentors, and their managers once a month over the first three months and again at the end of six months to assess the usefulness of the environment and learn what needs to be pruned or added. The team will use a quick survey for the evaluation. This practice could be continued beyond the first year, but it will be decided at that time.
• Because the industry is so volatile, the site will be reviewed on a quarterly basis to make sure that the most recent material is available.
• The sales management team will name a senior salesperson as the ongoing “owner” of this project, and that person will be involved in the survey and review process.

NOTES

As you imagine how to assemble this site, it might become apparent that materials will need to be annotated and contextualized so that new salespeople have the background they need to make sense of what they find; otherwise, they may not understand how some of the resources could be utilized.

While the components of this environment were strategized using the component categories, the environment probably won’t be organized that way on the company’s Internet site. The team will work with web designers to organize the resources so that they can be accessed from several angles, including timeline (week 1, week 2), actions (researching competitors, preparing a sales presentation), and type of resource (books, articles, videos).

Faculty Development Resources for New Adjunct Faculty Members

BACKGROUND

The instructional design (ID) team at Stone College wants to provide more support for new adjunct faculty to become successful in their teaching role. The ID team has already developed several onboarding workshops (webinars), which are blended designs with preview and follow-up resource materials, and one-on-one support and coaching. These have proven to be well received by the faculty, but they have limited scope. The faculty’s additional learning needs are more specific and need to be addressed in a timely way, often by calling the ID team for advice and coaching. The ID team has a number of resources they share in these one-on-one conversations.

The ID team hopes that by expanding available online resources, faculty may be able to find what they need in a more timely and efficient way. They envision creating a blended learning hub to expand learning beyond orientation and basic courses. The learning environment will be set up in the college’s course management system, and all new adjunct faculty will be automatically enrolled in the “course.”

PURPOSE

Provide on-demand resources to support excellence in teaching.

CONTEXT

Relevant faculty tasks and job roles:

• Design and deliver courses to meet the learning objectives as defined by the curriculum plan.
• Engage students actively in learning.
• Effectively integrate technology in teaching.

College goals supported:

• Improve student success rates.
• Improve new faculty student evaluations.
• Reduce new faculty turnover (stay less than two years).

RELEVANT LEARNER CHARACTERISTICS

• Primary focus: new adjunct faculty
• Assume they have expertise in their subject matter, but possibly little background in teaching or course design
• Employed on one campus, but 50 percent of the faculty teach online only and may do so from a distance
• Total number of adjunct faculty: 750; there are 50 to 100 new faculty members every year
• Hired primarily for subject matter expertise

TOPIC AND SCOPE

• Four main topics: course design, online techniques, classroom techniques, and instructional technology.
• Focus on start-up curation and plan for resources to build over time.
• Reorganize and package what is already available and identify high priority additions to find or create.
• Focus on new faculty. Expanding for experienced faculty will be taken up in additional phases of the project.

INITIAL COMPONENTS

GENERAL INFORMATION

• Welcome video
• Faculty mentoring program
• Learning path recommendations (courses and readings based on background and skill)
• Adjunct faculty handbook link

FACULTY DEVELOPMENT COURSES

• Adjunct Faculty Welcome and Orientation
• Core Instructional Design Concepts and Processes
• Creating Engaging Courses
• Online Course Design
• How Students Learn
• Teaching With Technology

COURSE DESIGN

• Design overview (e-learning)
• Syllabus templates
• Required syllabus elements
• A guide to learning objectives
• Syllabus feedback process and request form
• Copyright legalities
• How to arrange an instructional design consultation

GENERAL TEACHING RESOURCES

• My best day (video and essay series about teaching successes by college faculty)
• It worked for me (a database or discussion forum of in-course exercises and techniques, categorized by department and delivery method: classroom, online, or webinar)
• Faculty to faculty (Q&A discussion forum)
• Link to the Faculty Focus newsletter or blog (an external resource)
• Our favorite bloggers (faculty blog roll organized by discipline)
• SlideShare archive (from previous one-off workshops by instructional designers)

CLASSROOM TECHNIQUES

• Recommended resource books (annotated list)
• Links to a selection of articles on effective classroom learning techniques

ONLINE TECHNIQUES

• Recommended resource books (annotated list)
• Links to a selection of articles on effective online learning techniques

TECHNOLOGY RESOURCES

• Course management system (CMS) help links
• CMS tutorial link
• CMS job aids
• Webinar software help link
• Guide to Google Docs
• Projection equipment job aid
• Clickers (Instructions on how to use them effectively and how to reserve for class)

CULTIVATION PLAN OUTLINE

• Most handouts from courses will be linked in the learning environment instead.
• New faculty will be given access automatically, and the ID team leader will send a warm welcome note to introduce resources and services.
• All newly created job aids will be added to the learning environment.
• ID team members will take turns weekly to actively monitor discussions (and comment).
• The ID team will identify popular links and articles shared by faculty in discussion boards and store them in a more permanent part of the environment so they can be retrieved more easily in the future.
• A blog will be instituted to share emerging technologies and ideas for engaging students; guest blogging (authored by faculty) will be encouraged.
• The ID team will review the entire site every July to prune and identify additional resources to add.
• Questions about the learning environment will be added to the ID team satisfaction survey, which is already sent to new faculty at the end of their first term.

NOTES

In this example, you see the way that a set of resources can be curated to form a learning environment that is bound to get richer over time. This team started by drafting an environment based on the specific aspects of a role and pulling together a short list of quality materials and activities. They can add to that over time through a solid cultivation plan.

Notice that the components here are organized topically, rather than by component categories. This approach will make more sense to the stakeholders of this project. However, the resources and activities listed here represent all six categories.

Carving Collaboratory

A suburban amateur carver enjoys learning from fellow enthusiasts, and he was surprised to learn that there were a number of like-minded hobbyists in his town. While he is able to learn from a number of online sources, he much prefers studying craftsmanship person to person. He has gradually gotten to know a few folks well enough to organize a regular meeting for sharing projects, getting tips, and receiving helpful critique on individual techniques.

Over time, the group has started referring one another to web resources and sharing video tips that provide refreshers on lessons they have given one another. It has become clear that a shared website might be a better way to communicate rather than through email. A member’s daughter has agreed to set up an online space that will serve their needs. While they might never document it this way, this is a good representation of what the group’s collaboratory looks like.

PURPOSE

To support one another in learning and fine-tuning a variety of carving techniques.

CONTEXT

Desired performance:

• To make high-quality carved wooden pieces, such as figurines, home décor items, signs, sculptures, or other handmade treasures.

RELEVANT LEARNER CHARACTERISTICS

• Members are an invited group of men and women in the vicinity of one town; the group currently has 27 members.
• All have access to computers, with varying degrees of comfort in using advanced features.
• All have been carving for a number of years as a hobby, and their styles vary, as well as the kinds of items they create.
• Twelve of the members are retired; the rest have other full-time jobs.

TOPIC AND SCOPE

• Components will focus on carving techniques and tools.
• The primary space for learning from and with one another is the monthly meeting, which is scheduled for the third Saturday of the month from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

COMPONENTS

MONTHLY MEETINGS

• Show and tell (and critique)
• Occasional invited speakers and workshops
• Time to carve together and discuss ideas and techniques

ON THE WEBSITE

• Profiles and contact information for members, as well as links to any personal websites and social media sites they want to share.
• Web links organized into the following categories:

  o   Favorite websites dedicated to carving

  o   Carving supply vendors

  o   Regional and national carving shows

  o   Online video channels

• An extensive multiple-author blog that is set up to allow members to tag posts with categories, which organize the posts on separate pages or sections on the site. The tags include:

  o   Tool reviews

  o   Carving technique videos

  o   Finishing technique videos

  o   Question and answer forum (Q&A and miscellaneous posts)

  o   Photos (for completed projects and commentary)

  o   Vendor reviews

  o   Upcoming shows

  o   Upcoming workshops and demonstrations

CULTIVATION PLAN OUTLINE

• Member’s daughter is on call to play webmaster to tweak the site if the members see additional needs.
• Members will encourage one another to share resources between meetings, and plan to continue some discussions from meeting to online and vice versa.
• Time-sensitive material is scheduled for archiving when posted.

NOTES

This is an example of a learning environment that the learners designed for themselves with help from someone who could assemble the resources effectively. You can imagine the daughter sitting in on a meeting and gathering some ideas about what the group needs, and then attending the next meeting to showcase and tweak the format she put together.

The components can be aligned to categories in the learning environment design framework. There are plenty of resources, and the group adds to them frequently. The meetings and online profiles help connect the learners to one another. Occasional workshops provide training, as do some of the videos. The group has some development and experiential learning practices covered by their commitment to supporting one another through active engagement with the club.