May Meeting Review: Secrets of Training Design

by Jim Korth, PR Committee member

Why does most instructional design start out with the best intentions, only to fall flat on its face or simply run out of gas, with the audience bored and unmotivated and the materials soon gathering dust as with so many similar programs? The answer is, most audiences are not cognitively engaged at an appropriate intellectual level throughout the program. Most instructional design programs simply do not hold audiences’ attention, and cease to be fun because participants’ active collaboration is not continually solicited.

Sivasailam Thiagarajan, popularly known as Thiagi, was the featured speaker at the May 8th meeting of the LSC, and the title of his program was “Rapid Instructional Design.” In his many years in the profession, Thiagi has heard all of the complaints about instructional design. He has provided a new approach based on his CCCC (continuous, creative, concurrent co-design) model that has been used on both hard- and soft-skill training topics.

By actively engaging his audiences and sometimes changing his subject matter on the fly, depending on how the audience is reacting, Thiagi is very unconventional in his approach. As a one-time magician in India (he once sawed a woman in half; she now lives in both Madras and Delhi), Thiagi regularly turns his audience on its ear by introducing material that is entertaining, engaging and thought-provoking.

Because the process of instructional design consists broadly of first determining the current state of learner understanding before it is possible to define the end goal of instruction, Thiagi knows that he can't be certain of where the instructional design will be going until he gets in front of his audience and begins interacting. For Thiagi, the more money spent up front on training packages, the less effective the program will be.

Thiagi believes in designing activities, not content. Let the activities influence the content, not vice versa. Suggest goals to the audience, engage participants in collaborating and competing with one another, and don't be afraid to change things mid-stream if it may be beneficial. Build the airplane while flying it. Design training while delivering it.

The training environment should reflect the work situation as closely as possible so participants may adapt training material directly to their work activities. Most important, keep all of the participants actively engaged, require them to be creative and motivate them to produce tangible material they can put to use in their daily work. By the end of the evening’s program, the LSC was entertained, motivated and fully persuaded by Thiagi’s interactive and fun approach to instructional design.