Building Bridges

Keeping Your Seat at the Table

As a Learning & Development partner, do you have a “seat at the table”? This is a question we were asking and struggling with [ahem, ahem] decades ago, when I was coming up as an L&D manager. It’s as pertinent a question as ever. After all, if we don’t have that proverbial seat, how can [...]

A, B, C, or All of the Above?

Have you ever taken a learning assessment—aka test—that was frustratingly difficult or fabulously easy? Did you get distracted taking the test, wondering, “What were they thinking?” as you tried to regurgitate trite facts or parse out a complex question and series of responses? Early in my consulting career, I was asked to review a learning [...]

Looking for Gold: Vaulting through Evaluation Challenges

We’re all enjoying the Rio Olympics right now, and witnessing incredible athletic feats. Some sports achievements are very easy to measure. Take track and field, for example. In a race, the runner who crosses the finish line first wins. In soccer or water polo, the team that scores the most points wins the game. In [...]

Polishing Your Gems – And Showing the Value of Your Training Efforts

Have you ever gone on a treasure hunt, or maybe seen one in the movies? The seeker searches for a treasure chest—usually attending to challenges along the way. Imagine large rolling rocks and a few poison darts, all difficult to control! Eventually the seeker locates the elusive treasure chest, but not all its contents are [...]

Heating Things Up: Pilots Provide Useful Feedback

Practicing a classroom course polishes and improves it. Typically, practice comes with a pilot, during which instructional designers and trainers iron out classroom kinks. Two pilots (an abbreviated pre-pilot and a full pilot) were employed in a class entitled Operationalizing Emergency Plans: Incident Command in Action, on which EnVision consulted for a public agency. The [...]

Get to the Head of the Class in Writing Learning Assessments

A college midterm for Introduction to Psychology. The Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exam. The MCAS (the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System – if you’re a parent to a school-aged child, you know it!) What do these three items have in common? Yes, we commonly refer to them as “tests” or “exams,” but like the MCAS acronym […]

Evaluation Enhances Blended and Online Learning

EnVision Performance Solutions and our elearning collaborator, Illumina Interactive, recently competed in the LINGOs (Learning in Non-Government Organizations) Global Giveback 2 Competition. Having developed dozens of online/elearning courses in the past few years, we jumped on this opportunity to “push the envelope” and integrate a variety of approaches. For the competition we worked with Management [...]

Learner Feedback On-the-Go: Formative Level 1 Evaluation

Blank stares? Smiles? Droopy eyelids? How is your class going? In this e-letter we’ll explore methods to better evaluate learner reaction throughout a class (formative evaluation), rather than relying solely on physical symptoms (which may not be sending the intended message) or waiting until the end to have learners complete a (summative) course evaluation. Why […]