I’m really enjoying a new podcast about learning and design that I thought I would share with the eLearning community.
I’ve started listening to The eLearning Alchemist, a Podcast from Clint Clarkson. You might know Clint from his series of comic strips called L&D Scenes: Comics for Learning Professionals. They are great snapshots into our lives as L&D professionals. He captures all the things L&D professionals roll our eyes at when they happen to us. He posts them to Linkedin and they are frequently shared within the eLearning community.
Anyway, the podcast, which I was unaware of until just a day or two ago, is really well done. It’s clear that he scripts them out, which is a good thing. I record my YouTube videos off the cuff and I suspect that it shows. In Clint’s case, he is essentially writing long-form blog posts but turning them into audio recordings. I like this approach because when I see an article that’s going to take more than a few minutes to read, I usually turn away (I guess that’s why I make YouTube videos).
In the summary of the first episode, he says “We spend too much time trying to create great learning experiences, instead of getting to behaviour change and performance results that actually drive business performance.”
This really spoke to me. I recall a fellow elearning developer who spent a week unsuccessfully trying to create a series of advanced actions to create four true-false questions on one slide because that’s what the client wanted. I blew the designer’s mind when I suggest create a standard multi-answer multiple choice question with the stem “Which of the following statements are true?” which achieves the same thing from a learning perspective.
Clint’s podcast also referenced some other podcasts that are worth mentioning as well. Here are a few others…
Please feel free to share this within your L&D team. I think most will enjoy this podcast, especially if they have a bit of a commute each day.