The Centre for Learning Impact offers a range of leading-edge workshops designed to help your organization enhance the quality, impact, and productivity of its learning and talent management investments. Our workshops are available as public or in-house offerings.

High Impact Evaluation™ Workshop

A proactive learning evaluation model and toolset to maximize performance, value for money, and ROI

Evaluate Capability • Job Transfer • Business & Organizational Results • ROI

(2 & 3-day Workshops)

Learn a new results-focused methodology for evaluating and enhancing the impact of workplace learning programs. This evidence-based approach goes beyond traditional evaluation models because it is forward-looking and prescriptive It is supported by innovative and proprietary toolsets that help organizations not only evaluate learning’s effectiveness, but also enhance job performance and training’s impact on business outcomes.

You will learn how to systematically apply the High Impact process and use the new tools to ‘forecast’ impact and ‘red flag’ serious risks to success. Gain from powerful insights from the three-year, Canadian Investing in People project—one of the most comprehensive studies ever of the impact of learning on organizational performance.

You will learn to ensure all learning initiatives deliver maximum value at all stages along the Learning Value ChainTM—capability, job performance, business and organizational outcomes and ROI: Using group learning and real-world case studies you will enrich your professional skill set with effectiveness as you adopt

• The Learning Value Chain™: a new proprietary evaluation framework to measure, monitor, deliver actionable results
  • Capability and Transfer Instruments: new End-of-Course and Transfer toolsets to measure learning effectiveness and ‘forecast’ potential impact on job performance and organizational results
  • Capability and Transfer Indices: result-at-a-glance dashboards…  quickly and clearly communicates the big-picture results to all stakeholders
• Impact Mapping Tool: a critical tool to align training with critical organizational outcomes and business results
• Risk Management Tool: another proprietary tool to help organizations forecast outcomes and ‘red flag’ potentially serious risks to positive impact at the earliest stages-even conceptualization and design
• Results-Based Thinking: infuses instructional design (ADDIE) with results-based thinking

Impact Mapping

Creating a Clear Line-of-Sight from Training to Bottom-Line Impact

(Half-Day & One-Day Workshop/Clinic)

Impact Mapping is the critical first step in all major initiatives designed to impact the organization—all major Change Management, Training & Development, and HRD investments. Impact Mapping encourages results-focused thinking from team members at all levels of the organization. It is a collaborative activity that leverages the expertise from all stakeholders including senior management. It helps ensure program's design and objectives are solidly aligned to key performance requirements and drive business outcomes and/or organizational goals.

Impact mapping is an easy-to-learn process that becomes your organization's roadmap to success. It brings clarity and consensus to the confusing-and often conflicting-swirl of objectives, assumptions, and expectations that accompany critical decisions to purchase, develop, or discontinue major organizational initiatives.

Key reasons for using Impact Mapping…

• Focuses attention on results
• Ensures alignment between training and bottom line outcomes
• Creates a shared understanding between all stakeholders
• Focuses design and implementation on priority outcomes
• Lays the foundation for effective evaluation
• Improves communications
• Most important… it improves job performance, business impact, and value for money

In the workshop you will learn what an Impact Map is, where it is employed, and when to use it. You will also have a chance to create an Impact Map to address a real world situation.

Specifically, you will learn to…

• Apply the Learning Value Chain™ framework in training evaluation
• Identify the appropriate level of evaluation for all types of training
• Identify appropriate "transfer outcomes" for design and evaluation
• Differentiate the three kinds of organizational results:  tangible business outcomes, intangible business outcomes, and strategic outcomes
• Learn when ROI evaluation is appropriate-and when it's not
• Use the 3-step process for aligning outcomes to create an Impact Map

The Art of Writing Effective Multiple Choice Questions

(1 & 2-Day Workshop/Clinics)

The Multiple Choice format is one of the most effective, practical and objective ways to assess learning. It is also the most widely used learning assessment tool in business and academia. Because they can have significant impact on the lives and careers of those taking them, the ability to develop high-quality, valid multiple choice tests is an essential competency for learning professionals.

In spite of its importance, it is widely acknowledged by experts such as professor Nicholas Vacc of the University of North Carolina, that “most test developers construct tests based on ‘folk wisdom’ rather than a systematic application of principles of effective item development.”

This workshop focuses on establishing solid understanding of what constitutes an effective and valid multiple choice test item. In this hands-on, participatory learning experience participants will develop the critical skills to identify the most common flaws of item writing and create high-quality, multiple-choice questions based on the sound application of established principles of test construction.

At the completion of the workshop, participants will be able to:

• Recognize best practice and common question-writing errors
• Distinguish between recall and application questions
• Write effective scenario-based, application-level, multiple-choice questions with feedback
• Identify types of MC formats and avoid using those that are invalid or ineffective
• Review, critique, and improve multiple-choice questions
• Identify and defeat test-wise strategies often used by test takers to guess correct answers

In the last two hours of the workshop, participants write multiple-choice questions for their own material and receive critiques and advice from item-writing experts.

Blended Learning

(2-Day Workshop)

Choosing and Blending Delivery Methods to Maximize Training Impact

A new wave of new learning tools and technologies has entered the market over the last decade.  These innovations present trainers and educators with a confusing array of delivery options and potential solutions. When is a web-based course better than the classroom?  Where can social networking and collaboration tools add most value? What's the best role for e-presentations and webinars?

Dr. Lynette Gillis draws upon more than two decades of practical, real-world experience and research to present effective strategies and guidelines that cut through the confusion.

Dr. Gillis provides a primer on the range of available delivery tools-from the power tools for creating blended learning solutions to the precision tools for maximizing impact and optimizing cost. Learn about the key constraints and costs to consider when selecting learning delivery options. Learn the key steps for choosing learning delivery tools appropriately and blending them wisely.

Workshop Objectives

Participants will be able to:

• Describe the delivery methods available for creating blended learning solutions and key characteristics
• Select delivery methods appropriately to meet instruction needs
• Select delivery methods appropriately to meet practical requirements and constraints
• Apply a 3-step process to create cost-effective blending learning solutions
• Create and swap blended learning recipes
• Critique the quality of blended learning solutions