Teacher Tube!

Another great technology resource to integrate into your company's educational efforts (and is Free!) is TeacherTube:

TeacherTube is an online community for sharing instructional videos. It is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill.

Among other things, with TeacherTube, community members can:

1. Upload, tag and share videos worldwide.
2. Browse hundreds of videos uploaded by community members.
3. Integrate TeacherTube videos on websites using video embeds or APIs.
4. Make videos public or private - users can elect to broadcast their videos publicly or share them privately with those they invite.

TeacherTube - Try it out! http://www.teachertube.com/index.php

The Problem May be Your System

The father of quality management, W. Edwards Deming, believed in the Use of Statistics in the management of quality control in the corporate world. The need for a working understanding of basic statistical principles is at the heart of Deming's teaching. "Statistical theory has changed practice in almost everything [in business].”

Composing music was one of his many talents, and when thinking of the difficult-to-sing national anthem, he created a clever Metaphor for the work process:

• Don’t blame the singers (workers) for not hitting the notes
• The song (system) is the problem
• Instead, rewrite the song (fix the system)

If you are having trouble meeting your company goals, don’t necessarily point a finger at the workers; the problem may well be your system.

ASQ: American Society for Quality
http://www.asq.org/about-asq/who-we-are/bio_deming.html

The Six Sigma Strategy

As we have discussed before, Six Sigma is a powerful business strategy that utilizes data and facts, rather than intuition for making sound corporate decisions. The key methodology of Six Sigma is DMAIC:

• Define process improvement goals that are consistent with customer demands and corporate goals
• Measure key aspects of the current process and collect data
• Analyze the data to verify cause-and-effect relationships
• Improve the process based upon data analysis
• Control to ensure that any deviations from target are corrected before they result in defects

Even if your organization does not wholeheartedly adopt Six Sigma, it can still benefit from many of its precepts.

Kirkpatrick's Model for Measuring Learning

It can be argued that it is pointless to provide instruction to people if you have no idea whether they are learning anything.

Donald Kirkpatrick first published his widely recognized four levels of learning model in 1959:

1. Reaction of student - what they thought about the training and the instructor
2. Learning - the resulting increase in knowledge or capability (can be measured with a pretest and posttest)
3. Behavior - extent of behavior and capability improvement and application to their job
4. Results - the effects on the business or environment resulting from the students' performance (often quantified in ROI)

If you do not know what your learners are gaining from your instruction, you cannot know if you are succeeding in your educational efforts.

Fink's Five Principles of Good Course Design

Whether teaching young people or adult learners, most course design criteria are the same. This applies to the corporate world, as well as academia.

A "Good Course" is one which meets the following five standards:

1. Challenges students to higher level learning
2. Uses active forms of learning
3. Gives frequent and immediate feedback to students on the quality of their learning
4. Uses a structured sequence of different learning activities
5. Has a fair system for assessing and grading students

L. Dee Fink, University of Oklahoma Instructional Development Program, July 19, 1999.
http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/finks5.htm

Benchmarking

Why is Benchmarking important? Simply put, “If you do not know where you have been, how will you know how far you have come”? Another way to think about it is to ask yourself, “Well, I think we are doing well, but how do I really know”?

There are four basic ways of benchmarking. Think about which one may apply to you, your department, and/or your company:

1. Internal Benchmarking
   Compares one department’s procedures to another
2. Competitive BenchmarkingCompares organization’s procedures to those of a direct competitor
3. Functional BenchmarkingCompares how dissimilar businesses perform similar functions
4. Generic BenchmarkingSearches for the “Best of the Best”

Benchmarking will help you know how far you have come, and how you stack up against the competition.  And that, as Martha Stewart would say, "is a good thing"...

Crosby's Four Absolutes of Quality

Phillip Crosby, PhD, former president of the American Society for Quality, established Four Absolutes for Quality Performance. These "Absolutes" are just as applicable to service industries as they are to manufacturing:

1. Definition of quality is conformance to requirements, not goodness
2. System for causing quality is prevention, not appraisal
3. Performance standard is zero defects, not “that’s close enough”
4. Measurement of quality is the cost of nonconformance, not indexes

Although "Zero Defects" may be an impractical goal for most businesses, it nonetheless is an interesting a worthy ideal parameter. The broader point is, of course, to know what you are measuring and what the proper standard of measurement should be.