Excellent post about content and context. This is such a great reminder that even if developers are pushing out excellent courses, just throwing them at the learner won’t be as effective as providing opportunities for practice.

Great example for simple analysis. This is the five “whys” in effect. I think it is also an example of why leadership should talk to their teams rather than just jumping to the assumption the team is “doing it wrong.” The employees would have been able to tell them the frequent cleaning is done because of the enormous amount of pigeon poop. Some organizations would not only have just changed the cleaning schedule but would have set up a training for the employees on when they should clean. Orgs, let me tell you, your employees go through these trainings patiently and then roll their eyes because you don’t have all the information but you are dictating actions. You just lost credibility in the eyes of the employee and the next time you send down a decision, they won’t trust it and may circumvent it.

Mary Arnold offers an interesting model for encouraging, rewarding, and measuring interactivity with either synchronous or asynchronous learning. I especially appreciate the example of Yahoo! Answers since I “owned” Answers as a trainer during my time at Yahoo!. I like how she has taken that model and used it, really effectively I think, in an elearning model. This could be highly effective in getting learners to engage in the activities.