Addie On A Shoestring

ADDIE ON A SHOESTRING

ADDIE ON A SHOESTRING

Michaels & Associates Docntrain, Ltd. dba Michaels & Associates 11639 E. Wethersfield Road, Scottsdale, AZ 85259 USA [email protected]

www.michaelsandassoc.com

Phone: 480-614-8440 Toll-free: 877-614-8440 Fax: 480-614-2775

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Copyright © 2008 Michaels & Associates Docntrain, Ltd. dba Michaels & Associates. All rights reserved.

ADDIE ON A SHOESTRING

ADDIE ON A SHOESTRING – MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR TRAINING TIME

Many instructional designers follow the ADDIE model to develop effective training programs. Completely sticking to this methodology, however, is quite a challenge when you’re faced with reduced budgets, tight timelines and other demanding priorities. How can you use the tried-and-true principles of ADDIE on a shoestring, without sacrificing the effectiveness of your training program? Here are a few ideas shared during a recent

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Q&A session on LinkedIn.

ADDIE ON A SHOESTRING

Analysis During the Analysis stage of the ADDIE model, you should spend time identifying the learner audience, the job and tasks that comprise it and the learning/work environments. Some ADDIE experts say that you should spend at least 33% of your time on this phase. However, if you’re running on a shoestring budget, here are some ideas for cutting this stage down to a minimum while still achieving the desired results. 

Why spend valuable time determining the necessity of training if your customer is already convinced that training is needed? Instead of wasting valuable time challenging or proving your customer’s belief, go ahead and begin designing the training materials. In an instance like this, you can then step back and analyze tasks when you find inconsistencies or holes.

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If you decide that analysis is the way to go, develop and use a task analysis template to help you save time. This template should include common questions to ask during a task analysis as well as areas to help you organize your findings. As a matter of fact, if you spend time now developing detailed templates for most of your instructional deliverables (like design documents, job aids, assessments and facilitator guides), you’ll reap the rewards with every project. For some ideas on effective analysis templates, visit this website.

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Instead of performing a task analysis, needs analysis and/or skills gap analysis from scratch, spend time with successful existing training materials for the target audience and related subjects. Examine the materials to identify basic processes. You can also use them to identify content gaps. Then, concentrate your

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interviewing time on filling the gaps you find during the initial analysis.

ADDIE ON A SHOESTRING

Design After you create a strong infrastructure with a succinct but effective analysis, you can begin the formal design of your course. Consider these suggestions to create a thorough design document without spending excessive time and resources. 

If you’ve developed training for the target audience before, stick with what works. There’s no need in reinvent the wheel if learners are benefitting from designs and methods you’ve already created. Instead of spending valuable time prototyping new formats and deliverables, jump ahead to development based on what methods have worked in the past.

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When designing the training, allow for lots of learner discovery activities. In other words, don’t design training materials that teach a process to death if the learners can discover it on their own. Instead, design training around realistic scenarios and activities.

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Consider the time, cost and effort to develop training materials early on in the design stage. Use the table below as a guideline, but use your own experiences with the target audience, too. Then, choose the instructional methods that work for both the audience and your budget.

Hands-on

Role Play

Case Study

Panel of Experts

Guest Speaker

Facilitation

Discussion

Small Group

Discussion

Instructor-led

Exercises

Questioning

Lecture

Course Development Characteristics1

Time

L

M

M

M

M

M

L

L

M

M

M

Cost

L

L

L

L

L

L

LM

L

L

L

MH

Effort

L

L

L

L

L

M

L

L

LM

LM

M

Hassell-Corbiell, Rives. Developing Training Courses – A Technical Writer’s Guide to Instructional Design and Development (2001): p. 154.

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5

Legend – Requires a high (H), medium (M), or low (L) level of cost, time or effort.

ADDIE ON A SHOESTRING

Development Once you identify what should be taught, you have the foundation upon which to build the training materials. To reduce development costs and still create valuable materials, consider these ideas. 

You’ve probably heard this before, but develop the final assessment first based on your learning objectives. This ensures that your learning objectives are met and also identifies where you should spend time developing content. There’s no need to develop content that doesn’t related to a learning objective and assessment item.

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Develop brief job aids instead of detailed participant manuals. This actually has a two-fold benefit: it saves you hours of development time, and the learners have tools they can use long after training is over.

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Set strict review schedules. The biggest money pit of a project can be the time related to getting and implementing SME feedback. One great way to do this is to set appointments (either live, by phone, or by a conferencing system) to review materials with the SMEs. Then the SME can give you all the feedback you need in one meeting, instead of trying to fit multiple reviews into his or her busy schedule.

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Videotape a SME demonstrating a process instead of documenting the process in detail. You can use this videotape to create a job aid,

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and you can also use it during training as a primary teaching tool.

ADDIE ON A SHOESTRING

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If you have SMEs or other experts as trainers who really know the material, you can devote less time to development of facilitator guides. Then take time during the train-thetrainer or pilot classes to take notes on what the SME says, and beef up the facilitator notes if/when other trainers take over the delivery.

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Why spend time creating the training yourself if you have SMEs that can put all their knowledge into something you can use? You can easily create a website portal (such as a discussion board or forum) or spot on your server where SMEs can create some of the content for the course. For example, they might be able to suggest good test questions or scenarios for exercises. They could also provide links to documents or other resources you can use.

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Create shared objects that you can reuse with all your training projects. For example, if you are developing software training, create generic ―chunks‖ of training for activities like installing, creating, deleting, updating and troubleshooting. Include learning objectives, facilitator notes, participant activities and other elements common for those tasks. Then use the chunks as templates for the new similar pieces that need to be created. You can use a content management system to hold these objects, but it’s not a necessity. An organized folder on your server works just as well. Instead of copying graphics and other objects directly into your training documents, embed the objects by reference. Working with these dynamic objects stored on a central server allows for easier updates—if an object changes, all documents that link to it are automatically updated when you open them. However, be sure to keep the objects in the

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same location on the server to avoid broken links within your documents.

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ADDIE ON A SHOESTRING

Implementation and Evaluation When it’s time to roll your training solution out to the public and evaluate its success, you can reduce

Related resources: 

No budget? Great! - blog http://blog.cathy-moore.com/?p=171

costs and still have a great result. Try the following tips for completing these two stages of ADDIE on a shoestring budget. 

If the target audience hasn’t changed from the last project you developed, use the same or



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADDIE_Model 

similar delivery options. There are two benefits of this approach: the learners are already

don’t fix what isn’t broken! 

Whether or not you are reusing a delivery method, standardize and streamline your delivery models as much as possible. Analyze the steps you take to deliver the training, and trim unnecessary steps. This way, your focus and time can remain on the training content rather than spending excessive time on new fangled presentation development/deployment ideas. Save those ideas for when you have the time and resources to try something new.

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Attend the train-the-trainer session to combine implementation and initial evaluation. This

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allows you to see how the training goes and get valuable input on its success.

Training and Performance Management http://www.nwlink.com/~Donclark/index.html

familiar with the delivery mode so they need less ramp up, and you can achieve cost savings by sticking to a method that has already been planned and carried out before. Once again,

ADDIE Model – article



Rapid Instructional Design - article http://www.stc.org/ConfProceed/2003/PDFs/S TC50-048.pdf

ADDIE ON A SHOESTRING

Remember: Effective training does not have to be expensive or take months of development. By taking the time up front to develop reusable tools and templates, and by analyzing your process to trim any unnecessary steps, you can achieve the results you and your audience want. If you’re not sure where to start, or if you’d like help analyzing and streamlining your process, drop us a line and we'll be glad to get you started. Michaels & Associates — making training a little easier.

toll-free: 877-614-8440

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www.michaelsandassoc.com

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