LERNLUST #18 // Fast, Faster, Rapid Learning

tts employees always place a high value on quality in their training and the learning products they create. So it does grieve the soul of one or other of them when speed is more in demand here and there than conceptual depth. And yet, a wide range of studies in recent years have shown us that short, quickly created learning units have become important for learning in a corporate context. And perhaps we are doing an injustice to nuggets and rapidly created content, because there are application scenarios in which they really make sense. This applies particularly in the IT context, where faster software cycles mean that learners have to stay on the ball permanently. Some of our customers face this challenge every day. Do you too?

Rapid learning products have been complementing the portfolio of learning products offered by tts for some time. Nuggets, screencasts, videos, audio and more make learning diverse and fast. And that makes the range of tts products more diverse than ever. Perhaps rapidly created learning products will be even more important in the future than traditional learning in the context of user adoption. Is this thesis too bold?

Shownotes

Host:
Susanne Dube, Teamlead Learning // LinkedIn

Guest:
Lisa Müller-Gebühr, Learning Consultant // LinkedIn

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Higher, faster, further – that's not really my thing. I love taking my time to develop sophisticated training concepts. But in times of agile software development, adaptation and training cycles are getting shorter and faster. At the same time, we have seen in the last two years how easy it is to create videos with learning content. Today, every expert records anything and everything on their topic and puts it online.

But can this model simply be transferred to companies? Rapid learning, i.e. quickly created learning content, has been a familiar concept in companies for quite some time. But doesn't this come at the expense of training quality? Or does it perhaps present an opportunity to combine this quickly produced content with well-thought-out concepts to create new, tailor-made formats for today's world of learning?

Perhaps this is another piece of the puzzle on the road to user adoption. Together with my colleague Lisa Müller-Gebühr, I talk about what rapid learning means to us, whether we still enjoy it and how we rate it in the current learning world. Enjoy listening!

[Susanne Dube]
Hello Lisa, nice to have you here.

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
Hello Susanne, nice to be here.

[Susanne Dube]
We are here today on the Lernlust podcast to talk about a quick topic: rapid learning production. Before we get started, I have a quick question for you:

Lisa, we haven't even worked together for a year, but you've already impressed me a lot. What is your attitude towards learning?

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
I think learning is something you do all your life. I don't know about you, Susanne, but for me it's something that has totally influenced my life. Some topics have so fundamentally shaken my way of thinking when I first heard them that I thought to myself: you can never stop learning. Here at tts in particular, this is a central point that I find incredibly exciting – the opportunity to always learn new things. There is no upper limit, no such thing as “too much”. It's precisely these challenges that I like so much.

[Susanne Dube]
That's a wonderful thought, and it's precisely this attitude that you should keep for the rest of your life. That's how you stay open and never stop learning.

[Susanne Dube]
Now I'm curious, of course: How does someone like you get involved in rapid learning? And what exactly does rapid learning mean to you, that we want to talk about today?

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
Yes, I got involved in Rapid Learning because you asked me if I wanted to work on one of your projects. Of course I said yes immediately! Since then, I have been working with a customer where I supervise Rapid Learning and implement it in my daily work.

For me, Rapid Learning basically means greatly accelerating the usual didactic processes – such as conception and production. While extensive learning formats such as WBTs often require more elaborate and detailed processes, Rapid Learning is about providing information as quickly and efficiently as possible.

We mainly use video production for this purpose in order to quickly make the essential content accessible to learners. The idea is to get straight to the basics so that learners can focus directly on the most important information.

This is particularly exciting because the customer is constantly bringing up new topics. We have new content that we have to process and provide on a weekly basis – a real challenge, but it also makes for incredible variety!

[Susanne Dube]
Our listeners might wonder what kind of context it is in which new topics arise weekly and what that has to do with learning. When you talk about rapid learning production, i.e. the rapid production of content based on rapid requests, what is a typical environment in which this rapid production makes sense?

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
For me, it makes sense to use Rapid Learning when you are getting into a topic and want to provide a rough explanation. If the content is not very in-depth, it can be produced quickly without much didactic effort. The advantage is that it is quick, the disadvantage is that less didactics can be built in. But that's fine when the aim is to give learners the basics of a topic so that they know it, not necessarily can do it.

[Susanne Dube]
I understand that the idea of using less didactics could trigger an outcry among many trainers and educators. The reason for these quick, short information units lies in the agile way of working. Information no longer comes in the long term, but in short sprints, especially in software cycles that constantly require updates and new information, which then has to be rolled out quickly worldwide.

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
Exactly.

[Susanne Dube]
You put it well: the price you pay is that it is more about informing than learning. But we will come back to that later to consider how to frame it meaningfully. Rapid is mainly about producing quickly, not necessarily consuming quickly. The goal is for learners to have the information close to the rollout, especially if the rollout is continuous and there is little time for preparation.

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
Exactly, right.

[Susanne Dube]
When I think about the situations in which it is useful, then it is definitely in the context that we have just described. But I think we can both agree that there are also cases in which we consider it to be completely useless.

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
Yes, definitely. I didn't want to annoy the listeners by saying that it is not as didactically sophisticated. Of course we have a different aspiration, and Rapid Content is not always ideal. It depends entirely on the context, as you said. With weekly new rollouts, we have to react quickly, but it's not always sensible to use Rapid Learning. If I want to cover a complex topic in detail, Rapid Learning wouldn't be the best choice.

[Susanne Dube]
Or only part of the way, used in conjunction with other measures and then integrated into a deeper concept. We also do that with some of our customers.

[Susanne Dube]
We have now discussed when it makes sense. When we talk about the products we develop, what exactly do we produce and what needs to be considered to ensure that it is truly rapid?

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
We mainly produce learning videos, but also short presentations and screencasts. In addition, we accompany the whole thing with webinars, Q&A sessions and other materials so that learners not only have the rapid learning content but also the opportunity to ask questions and get more information.

[Susanne Dube]
The little “nuggets” we create are usually five to ten minutes long. The content is deliberately structured in this short form to serve as an introduction. These rapid learning units are just the beginning – they are followed by exchanges, for example through workshops, to delve deeper into the topic. The concept of rapid learning is to provide a self-learning medium that learners worldwide can access. Later on, I make sure that questions are answered and understanding is deepened. This also reduces the workload of the user helpdesk, as fewer questions arise.

[Susanne Dube]
If we say something is told faster, how long do you think it takes you to build a small explainer video like that? How quickly can you do it and what do you do?

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
It depends on the initial situation. The content serves as an entry point and is intended to encourage learners to delve deeper into the topic. We work closely with the customer to develop the content and provide didactic support, albeit on a smaller scale.

A typical process for creating a rapid learning nugget is as follows: the customer brings a topic and ideally already existing content, for example PowerPoint presentations. Then we check together which format makes didactic sense and how we structure the content. We decide what belongs at the beginning and which parts are less relevant for the learners. This process also involves a certain amount of consulting, which you can certainly confirm.

[Susanne Dube]
Exactly, we really do provide advice at the beginning because it doesn't always make sense to just create small units. Sometimes more is needed, a well-rounded concept such as blended learning, self-learning or a complete training course. After this consultation, we sometimes come to the conclusion that a small nugget should be provided for the moment because more will be added in three months, but this knowledge is needed now.

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
This often happens quickly, within one to two weeks. I sit down with the experts or a professional speaker and prepare the content for a screencast. The content is visually prepared, and I edit the sound recording and visual elements together. The editing effort varies depending on the format. Recently, we had a Q&A format in the video where one person asked questions as a learner and two experts provided the answers. This required more editing effort, but it was very well received by the customer.

[Susanne Dube]
That's when you realize how fluid the path to a more sophisticated concept is. I had to smile when you said that it takes a week or two. Some listeners might think that's not short. I remember a colleague who said she only needed two hours. But she works alone. For us, there is also the coordination with the technical experts and the scheduling. The actual effort for the technical expert is minimal – he simply takes part in the call, speaks his content and is present at the preliminary discussion, similar to a podcast.

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
The production effort is actually much less than the one to two weeks, but it does happen that the content still needs to be coordinated internally at the customer's site and may need to be corrected or revised. I have included this in the time planning. Ideally, however, the production could be completed in one day if everything goes perfectly.

[Susanne Dube]
That actually sounds exciting and fits well into an ongoing process, especially in an environment of constant change and agile software cycles. Rapid Learning is particularly useful here because it works in a continuous change that does not rely on one-time rollouts but requires ongoing adaptation. However, I wonder if there are also situations in which the effort could be made even faster or more efficiently – like the colleague who said she could do it much faster.

[Susanne Dube]
Do you think that the person creating this content needs more expertise? Or what do you think is needed to increase the speed of creation?

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
That's a good question. Of course, it always makes sense to be well informed, not only in Rapid Learning. If you know what you're talking about, it's easier to provide didactic advice because you have a better understanding of what learners need and what is relevant. With Rapid Learning, it's also important to engage with the content, but often it's enough to understand it only superficially. Sometimes that's enough to develop the content well and to make the video clear and structured.

[Susanne Dube]
I just realized that this only works well because you're doing it in combination with the subject matter expert.

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
Exactly.

[Susanne Dube]
And that is perhaps also where you save time. It's not the case that a trainer or someone else has to create sophisticated texts or familiarize themselves with the topic. Instead, you accompany the subject matter experts and we trust them to be able to describe their topic well. We just help them with the method, which may make the process a little faster.

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
Yes, we have a clear division of roles. The subject matter expert provides the content, and we provide the didactic input and the production. You also have to be able to rely on it, because you don't always have such in-depth knowledge of the topics yourself.

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
I've talked a lot about didactic and conceptual consulting. I should say that we also create storyboards sometimes. Rapid isn't always equally fast either. There is very fast content, but also medium-fast content, where we provide even more consulting. It varies depending on the topic and the customer's needs.

[Susanne Dube]
There are also large rollouts for this customer, for which we develop sophisticated training concepts that follow a blended learning approach, especially for globally distributed teams. Even before the pandemic, we were considering how we could reach everyone, from Australia to Los Angeles. When we talk about rapid production, we think of small screencasts, explainer videos, quick webinars, which we combine with Q&A sessions and workshops, as well as homework (which we don't call that). Storing content in an LMS with a blog structure also offers good possibilities for combination. In general, any well-made PowerPoint could be considered rapid learning by a subject matter expert, even without our help.

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
Surely, yes. However, in my experience, subject matter experts have a lot of expertise but are not always good at explaining it. Maybe I'm stepping on some toes here, but it's sometimes helpful to have someone who can present the material in an understandable way. This is where we come in, acting as “translators”. We look at the topic from an external perspective and ask ourselves: “Do I understand this as a learner?” In exchange with the subject matter expert, it is then about optimizing it so that it is clear and comprehensible for the learner. I find this particularly important – to support the customer in the exchange.

[Susanne Dube]
That was nicely put. The thought I have right now is that rapid learning should not be seen as a competitor to traditional learning. I don't think it can work on its own by simply saying, I'll just make a lot of screencasts, send them somewhere and store them so that people can get them via pull. It is rather a way to reach learners in today's world, with the rapid change of knowledge and the constant new inputs that need to be learned. They can watch the content and, if they want, delve deeper. To do that, parallel offerings are needed, which are also being developed. The nuggets we create are therefore a mixture of the 10 and 20 percent of the 70-20-10 model. They are formal, but something that learners can access themselves and continue to work with. And in the broadest sense, they can also be used for performance support, although there are of course other solutions for this, such as click instructions in an IT context. For me, producing short nuggets quickly by working closely with the customer and subject matter experts is a nice addition.

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
Rapid learning is a gateway to the topic. After that, you can go deeper.

[Lisa Müller-Fee]
What I also actually find nice is that we are currently in discussion with the customer about how we can take this even further in a community of learners.

So that rapid learning is not only through the learning nuggets, but that learners also exchange ideas with each other. I know this is actually Claudia's topic, but I'll just take it on for a change because I think it would be really useful for this customer. Since it's always the same or a similar target group that we address with these nuggets, it would be good if they could support each other and exchange ideas on the topics.

[Susanne Dube]
That means, in fact, I always find the topic of community totally exciting because you often think you just have to put a community online and then something happens because people talk to each other. But actually a community arises out of the topic. The topic is that people enter into an exchange, and supporting that is also an important task that you have to fulfill in parallel so that it can work really well together.
That's right, I think it's a nice approach. And I don't think we're stealing the topic from Claudia. She can tell us that herself.

[Susanne Dube]
Okay, great. Yes, I think my questions have been answered for now, but if any more questions arise, we can certainly go into them in more depth, discuss them here and there, and also find other topics that can be linked. Then, dear listeners, write to us on LinkedIn.
Our colleagues would also be happy to hear from you on Yammer or other channels. We look forward to next time. Thank you, Lisa, for taking the time for today.
I really enjoyed talking to you.

[Lisa Müller-Gebühr]
Thank you for having me and for letting me talk about it.

[Susanne Dube]
And then I'll say goodbye for now and see you next time.

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