email us at amarts@artifact3.com

Name: Amin Marts. No worries if you mispronounce the first name, I’ll correct you.

What I’m interested in: Simply, finding solutions for problems, excuse me, challenges.

What I bring to the table: Big picture thinking. Ruthless execution. The ability to distill complex topics into bite-sized and easy to digest contextual stories.

Turn On’s: Smart design. Simple solutions to complex problems. Billboards that make me stop, think, and take a picture to share with you. Jargon. Most of all, flowy singletrack.

Turn Off’s: Jargon. Overly complex solutions that don’t scale. Ambiguous messages. Unintelligible handwriting. Skiers who wear Starter jackets.

My Favorite Tools: iPad, Keynote, Mindmeister, DropBox, old skool whiteboards, OmniFocus, Glenn Beck.

Things I (admit) I read: HBR, Economist, anything Seth Godin writes, WSJ, on occasion the International Herald, when feeling snarky The New Yorker.

January’s Wish: To lose the twang I’ve developed from watching too much CMT during Christmas.

Best way to contact me: Through my twitter or email. I’m easy to find.

Failing is Good

The use of web delivered learning activities by organizations has grown substantially. With respect to the economy and how it has reduced budgets, common business activities are still required. In regards to training; partners, customers, and sales teams, still need to be enabled. Although organizations get it, they are having difficulty creating and implementing sticky learning activities.

Most audiences view elearning as required reading and the associated exams as annoyances. The fundamental issue with exams of this nature is, approximately 95% of learners pass on the first try. The method we’ve developed to mitigate this, is building exam failure into the design process. Designing in this method, improves the quality of the supportive materials in addition to increasing the audience’s attentiveness to detail. No one likes to or wants to fail. For our purposes, failing is positive in that the exam forces the learner to review the content again in search of gaps in understanding. Something we as humans naturally do. This method improves information retention while deepening the level of engagement and interest.

This requires a marketing type approach. Many instructional designers and learners view learning activities as one-time events with zero follow up. The marketing type approach centers on a learning campaign, which is matched to a learning path. The learning path represents the menu of learning activities and the order of consumption. The learning campaign, is designed around a learner’s digital body language. This language is derived from their job function, material they’ve consumed, exam scores, product release dates, marketing campaigns, etc.

Engaging the learner from this perspective aligns activities and materials to job functions and to what their audience will be asking them. The innate benefit of this is approach is, a high level of engagement and the development sticky content overall.

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