Sarah Slade

It’s not you, it’s me. I haven’t been here in a while because, well it’s been a bit manic over the past couple of years.

I moved to another role in July 2021, this saw me pivoting sideways into designing classroom learning and doing quite a bit of programme management. I’m slowly updating my portfolio, because it’s good to keep up to date, and I realised the last time it looks like I did any actual learning design practice is back in 2018. I’ve done a lot since then, I promise.

So what has happened and what did I learn?

Live classroom experiences are great

They’re great for facilitating conversation, making connections and encouraging collaboration, particularly as you move up the management ladder and it becomes more about how you bring your best self to a leadership role than learning a set of models.

Virtual classrooms are tough – but you can make them work. Factor in plenty of time for thought and group work, and lots and lots and lots of reflection points to keep the learners from checking their emails on their phones.

Death by PowerPoint is A Thing

Consultants love PowerPoint. I too love PowerPoint, but sometimes it’s like using the Encyclopaedia Brittanica to read a bus timetable.

I really really like Articulate Rise

It’s brilliant. I can draft a skeleton site with the stakeholder in the room. We can muck around with interactions, test our thinking and I can go away and create a proof of concept within days, not weeks.

I’m a 5MON designer now

And I think I’ve worked out a way to combine Nick Shackleton Jones’s 5Di framework with Bob Mosher and Conrad Gottfredson’s 5 Moments of Need for projects. But I still need to work on how we use the Deploy/Iterate stage to create learning drops that keep the learning cadence going.

I’ll post a bit more about 5MON when I have a little more time, but this post is just to poke the blog back into life and start recording some of my thoughts. I’ve missed you.