StyleLearn Origins

Daniel Escobar is an experienced Learning and Development leader who is passionate about bringing individuals and groups together to build engagement in the company culture and personal accountability for their performance and results. Daniel discussed teamwork and how to best foster it as a leader. Check out this 1944 issue of Army Talks magazine emphasizing the role of discipline in teams https:...

Sales Enablement is the most exciting area where LnD professionals can work based on my experience. It has the best salaries, and IDs supporting it need be well versed in performance support practices rather than course making. This week I talked to Karen Sanderson who has been a leader in this field that started at the turn of this century. Karen share some important nuances about what sales enab...

eLearning has been a beacon of innovation since its rudimentary beginnings in the 70s with Don Bitzer's PLATO system, then transitioning to PC use with Michael Allen's Authorware. There's no one better I could have had this conversation than the always innovating and inspiring Anna Sabramowicz. She was one the first eLearning developers in look up to and still admire on a daily basis....

Literally, the term "soft skills" can be traced to the U.S. Army efforts after creating its Human Resource Research Organization aka HumRRO. However, upon close inspection you may find that the context in which it was examined in 1972 does not mirror what is mostly understood today as soft skills. My guest in this exciting episode is Ioanna Mantzouridou Onasi, an entrepreneurial woman, C...

Not many people can handle change at work, and then even less people can fathom drastic changes in their life. Dr. Mandolen Mull's story of personal change seems like a godsend since she was already studying the science of change. This is the most impactful episode I have ever experienced and Mandolen is just an inspiration to everyone. She's living proof of the power we all have to transf...

Amber Watts is a good friend in the LnD space and a champion of all things everboarding. Considered an innovative approach for onboarding, everboarding emphasizes a continual effort in connecting and valuing employees. Amber stops by to chat about how her firm Radical Learning addresses the onboarding practices of businesses this way.

Tim Bruce "The Training Guy" stops by to share his wisdom on effective training design. We explore the basics and the strong historical evidence of the Herbartian Steps, which led to the J-Methods used in the Training Within Industry TWI movement. These were training methods that are still in use today and were part of the foundation of the Association of Training Directors today known a...

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was an American psychologist well known for his work on the Theory of Motivation from which, the Hierarchy of Needs was established. The reality is that he never placed the needs in a pyramid and the order of the needs is not a fixed hierarchy. Follow Alex on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stylelearn/ 1943 Maslow's Theory of Motivation https://bit.ly/3SNg9uK 20...

Since the invention of the radio by Guglielmo Marconi, audio became an essential medium in the way we communicate and learn. Marconi's "wireless telegraph" was just the beginning as other names like Reginald Fessenden expanded the use of radio waves in the early 1900s. Today, we have audio as a very popular format in the way of podcasts and audio conversations in social media. This S...

Instructional Design (ID) models are visual representations of the ID process grounded in theoretical frameworks. One ID model that gave birth to the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) process is the Interservice Procedures for Instructional Systems Development or IPISD model. Although there are many ID models and only a few seem to be in use in workplace learnin...

Human Performance Technology or HPT is the use of science and tools to enable performance in the workplace. It goes beyond course development and it comes out of the Golden Era of Systems Approach to Training (SAT) in the 70s. There are several authors to recognize out of a time where instructional systems design reached is most advanced practice. Guy Wallace has been an HPT practitioner for about...

In today's episode I had a great conversation with Matthew Schmidt, Associate Professor of EdTech at University of Florida. Matt has been leading efforts on establishing standards for Instructional Design (ID) and leads the research and practice of Learning Experience Design or LXD. The LXD monicker as been rejected by many and embraced by some. In many contexts, LXD gets conflated with ID, so...

In 1998, educators Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe published the book Understanding by Design (UbD) and within it the Backwards Design (BD) model. Since then, they have revolutionized the way school systems, particularly teachers, approach curriculum planning. The model consists of three stages known as: Identifying desired results, determining acceptable evidence, and plan learning experiences and...

In its long trajectory to try to improve itself from a school-based methodology, training departments have been attractive by various ideas the promote informal learning over anything else. The 70:20:10 framework/model is one of these ideas which stems from 1980s research by the Center for Creative Leadership. I wrote before about this topic during a time where LinkedIn was buzzing with discussion...

Comics are a form of visual language that has captured the imaginations of many since the early 1830s. Of course, one can think of visual language far predating the 19th century with Egyptian, Greek, Roman civilizations. However, the comic is a force of its own and turns out, comics have been influential in several instructional scenarios since the 1940s. Today, we explore the world of comics and...

The concept of Micro-Learning has been extremely popular in recent years but did you know it emerged as a strategy for human resources in 1963? Since then, many researchers have expounded on this concept and its methodology. The common theme to remember is that it's not about the length of the learning experience but rather the attainment of a single skill. This episode takes a quick look into rel...

Edgar Dale was a prominent proponent of the use of instructional media for better learning experiences. His 1946 book Audiovisual Methods in Teaching, presents the Cone of Experience, an audiovisual instructional model. Dale's Cone of Experience (CoE) is a visual representation of different types of learning experiences, arranged in the form of a cone. The cone consists of various levels of learni...

What drives you to learn more? What is a hobby or skill not related to work or school that you can do really well? Why does that happen? Ever asked yourself these questions? More likely than not, a secret force sparked by curiosity took you "there", and maybe that force is interest. In this episode, we take a look at the early observations by educators and theorists about the role of interest in o...

The concept of thinking machines and human-like technology has been around for over 70 years if we consider the impact of Alan Turing's revelations. In this episode, Myra Roldan answers the questions: What is Artificial Intelligence? How does ChatGPT intersect with corporate learning? Myra is a personal friend of mine, a passionate advocate for educational equity and the democratization of Ai. We...

Psychometrics is the the art and science of intellectual and cognitive measuring. It has heavily influenced our academic, military and corporate performance prediction practices but it also has a deep, dark past related to the practice of Eugenics. I had a very insightful conversation with guest Dr. Nathan Thompson who holds a PhD in Psychometrics and is the CEO/Co-founder of Assessment Systems. D...

From the times of Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, to the publishing of The Adult Learner: The Neglected Species in 1973 by Malcolm Knowles, there are several takes on the meaning of adult education. So who was the first person to bring up the need for andragogy aka adult learning, and who were the real pioneers of andragogy before Knowles. This episode of StyleLearn origins takes a deep dive into adul...

The need to evaluate the effectiveness of knowledge transfer predates the Kirkpatrick Four Levels by at least 20 years. From the need to observe workers performing tasks well after instruction, Ralph Tyler's 1930s eight-year study of curriculum evaluation to Raymond Katzell's papers on responsive evaluation; the interest on evaluating learning results has been there. However, the most known model...

The Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation (ADDIE) process is the center component in the Interservice Procedures for Instructional Systems Design or IPISD Model. It's composed of five volumes addressing each phase in the process and originally was set to have the last phase labeled as Control which focused on quality control and process improvement. This is a model and proce...

The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives aka Bloom's Taxonomy is a classification system created by college examiners and led by Dr. Benjamin Bloom in 1956. Its purpose was to classify educational objectives for test items that can be exchangeable among educators. There were many forces that inspire Bloom's epiphany at the American Psychology Association Convention of 1948 to gather with colleagues...

Are learning styles the product of cognitive style trends? Are they just learning preferences that impact learning outcomes? On this episode, I'm joined by Dan Hirt, a Canadian learning professional with a decade of experience providing learning solutions, and also host of the Mosby Learning podcast. Dan and I look at different views on the subject of learning styles, where does it come from and h...