Instructional Design Tips for SMEs

2009-03-30T20:09:00.117-04:00

Let's face it: companies are scaling back these days and training is almost always the first department to experience cuts. This puts more and more Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) into the position of participating in and sometimes even providing the training to incumbents. In theory, that sounds great: let's get the people that have the knowledge train the people that don't have it. Again, that's in theory. In reality, the SME tries to juggle her "real job" while trying to come up with a new training program at the same time. Enter the dreaded bulleted list training sessions we have all attended.

The solution? Empower these SMEs with a few simple instructional design principles. By no means am I advocating you cut your entire training staff and give the workload to SMEs. Rather the opposite, I am advocating you give SMEs the knowledge to disseminate the information in a manner that will help you pull it all together and put your final design touches on it. Whether you use the information to develop an online course, design a classroom course, or some combination of these or other options, you will get better results from your SMEs.

In this post, I will cover two of the easiest tasks to transition to SMEs. Let's get started with an oldie, but goodie.

The 80% Rule
Train 80% of the users what they will do 80% of the time. This is what I like to refer to as the "needs analysis in a nutshell" concept. This is where you decide which information is "nice to know" versus the information that is "need to know."

So, how do you collect this information? Start with a survey or, even better if you can swing it, a focus group of recently-hired employees. These employees can quickly help you determine what they needed to know (but, potentially didn't get) and what they didn't need to know (and got anyway). I have also found that polling managers can be very effective. They are on the front lines every day and know what employees are lacking when they "hit the floor" after training.

The deliverable milestone here is a list of topics that will make up the course. Let's say I am creating a course on customer service. The topics list might look something like this:

Chunk It
Once your SMEs have created the list of topics, they should be "chunked" or broken down into distinct modules. Not the SMEs...the topics. My rule of thumb is that I try not to put more than seven key pieces of information into a module. The reason? Research shows that learners can understand and recall no more than seven items of information at a time...it's called the "Rule of 7" (hint: most phone numbers are seven digits).

Another rule to remember when chunking content is the "Rule of 20," which states that the average attention span of the adult learner is 20 minutes. If you are like me, trying to take training, answer the phone, respond to e-mails, figure out what to feed the kids for dinner, it is more like 10 to 15 minutes, tops. To combat all this learner noise, try changing things up at least every 10 minutes...add an interaction, exercise, or move the rest of the information to the next module.

The deliverable milestone here is a detailed outline of which topics will be presented in each module of your course and the order in which they will be presented. Continuing with the example above, the detailed outline might look like this:

Filling In The Blanks
Your design document should now be shaping into a nice course shell. From here, you need to jazz it up a bit with graphic placement, rock solid objectives, interactions, oh, and don't forget the actual content.

Brooke M. Schepker

Instructional Design Tips for SMEs