Recall the time when you had started your career as an Instructional Designer or when you were inducting and leading a fresh graduate into your Instructional Design team. In the first case, you might have been drilled by your lead (reviewer) to demonstrate a consistent writing style. In the second case, you might’ve drilled your resource to be consistent with their writing. Traditionally consistency and Instructional Design in the corporate sector have been the great buddies. It is norm that a course, which is consistent, is a good course. However, the belief that being consistent leads to a good course is a myth.

“What? How the hell can a course be effective if it is inconsistent? You’ve lost it!”

Calm down my friend. I didn’t mean inconsistent in a literal sense. I accept and understand consistency for certain aspects of writing. For example, you just can’t deviate from the standards that define the way you should write abbreviations at their first occurence or whether to follow American or U.K. english. However, you should never stop yourself from being inconsistent in cases that will help the course:

  • Gain and retain learners’ attention
  • Enhance content retention
  • Meet learning and business objectives of the course
  • Enhance the course’s appearance
  • Facilitate knowledge transfer
  • Reduce the thickness of the Student Guide or pages in a Web-based Training

  InconsistentandConsistent

Exploring Inconsistency in Detail

Considering the present economic turmoil, organizations and individuals are cutting down their learning expenses. So, when they make an investment with your organization to develop or provide learning, you must ensure that the training meets the learning and business needs of the client. In addition, the client would want each of their participant to gain maximum knowledge from your training and result in better on-job performance. A client would not appreciate if they don’t realize a measurable Return On Training Investment (ROTI). Hence, to retain existing customers and win new ones, you must continuously innovate and break the realms of limitations (consistency) caused by:

  • Restricting innovation by mandatory templatization
  • Referring to the same pool of ideas
  • Reusing strategies successful in previous courses
  • Discouraging new suggestions

 Scene1

In the adjacent comic strip, two instructional designers, with different perspectives, are discussiing the way in which courses need to be developed. One instructional designer has developed a course that is significantly different from the previous courses on the organization.

Scene2

Learner Types and Being Inconsistent

Types of learners can be classified into the following three categories:

  1. Visual learners
  2. Audatory learner
  3. Kinaesthetic learners

When you design and develop a course, could you be sure the type of learners who will take the training? Or, will you design a course for a particular learner type? The answer to both the questions is a big NO. You can never limit your design to meet the needs of a particular learner type. Hence, you, either conciously or unconciously, must design a course that is neutral to learner types. To achieve this, you have to be inconsistent in your approaches. For example, during an Instructor-led training, if the trainer presentation includes nice visuals, but no demonstrations or practice sessions, you miss out on teaching kinastheitic learners.

So, you just cannot limit the scope of your courses by saying, “It is our standard to have a maximum of one demonstration during the training. The client won’t pay for the extra effort that we will put in to include three additional demonstrations.”

In such situations, you must help the client realize that additional demonstrations might increase the development cost by (say) 20%, but if we don’t include additional demonstrations, then we are most likely to waste the remaining 80% of the investment and effort.

Moral of the Story

So, moral of the story is:

  • Encourage innovation in your organization. You may wish to
  • Do what is best to meet the training needs. Clients pay a significant amount of money for a training. They will not mind shelling out some additional bucks if it helps in adding significant value to the training.
  • Organize knowledge sharing sessions in which employees share the innovative strategies that they have used in a course.
  • Run competitions where employees are free to develop courses on topics of their liking. Such competitions could be the best form of bringing out innovative ideas from employees as they would be free to apply their innovation.

Moral

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