Ron speaks to the subject specific classes offered by Learning Without Scars.

A brief history of our development of the classes; from my involvement in teaching education at McGill University, to training employees with process and procedure changes up to and including installation of dealer business systems. This Podcast describes the seven steps in the learning process from the reading materials, to the pretest, to the training video, with embedded film clips, and quizzes, to the final assessment, student survey and finally the certificate of accomplishment.

Visit us at LearningWithoutScars.org for more training solutions for Equipment Dealerships - Construction, Mining, Agriculture, Cranes, Trucks and Trailers.

We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:19

Aloha. Today I'd like to talk with you about our subject-specific classes. As many of you know, I've been involved in teaching for a long time. Early in my career, I taught education at McGill University. And that created the foundation for when we got into the consulting business. Obviously, there's a lot of process and procedure changes, in some cases, dealer management software changes, and I got involved with training employees in the new way of doing things. Early in the 1990s, most of the equipment manufacturers and dealer associations walked away from management training. They said it was too expensive to operate, so they were stopping it. The economy was a little tight, and any expenses that people could cut, they did. Well, with my teaching background, I thought that we could enter into that arena. So in the summer of 1992 or 1993, using Vioice software, I started creating textbooks. One for the parts department, one for the service department, one for product support salespeople, and one for parts and service marketing. In the process of doing that, what I was doing was putting down on a piece of paper all of the content that I'd been dealing with over the years in consulting, and even when I was an employee at the two dealerships in Canada, so that I was itemizing, describing things in a formal manner that I wanted to be able to transfer to students. Then we started talking with different dealers around the country that had been clients and asked them what they would visualize as their tool to help in employee development, growing the skills of their employees. And we fussed back and forth and ended up with a two-day format where we would talk about operations, selling, management, and customer service. So we took the two days, 15 hours of training, and made four distinct blocks, each of them kind of matching to the subjects that we talked just a moment ago about. And in that four-hour block, we started cutting down to a one-hour to two-hour type of subject matter expose, if you will. And we ended up having eight subject-specific classes that I was talking about, that I was teaching, if you will, in the classroom. And we did that through a company called Quest Learning Center. We use the term Quest because employee development, having employees seek out and try and achieve their individual potential is what we are involved with in everything that we do. That's our purpose for being here: helping people identify and work towards achieving their individual potential. We ended up having then a one-year program for management for the parts department. Let's just talk about them for a moment. And we did the same thing with all of the others. And the businesses then that I stayed in very close contact with because I was trying to satisfy their needs of employee development. And they said, Ron, one year is not enough. And that's perfect. But we also need to get them involved with satisfying market potential, getting performance excellence, different aspects. So we created, we evolved into a three-year program, then spanning 24 individual classes. In the late 1990s, early 2000s, again the cost component rose its head, and everybody started looking at webinars. That's an interesting concept. You created a slide deck, do a one-hour program that's maybe going to be 90 slides, 75 slides, and have somebody talking, teaching, over the telephone the subject matter that relates to the slides. So the Associated Equipment Distributors, that association wanted me to provide webinars, so we started doing that. We would do oh between 12 and 25 webinars in a year. Well, as a teacher, that bothered me. I couldn't see my students. I didn't get any feedback as on the learning process. You can see people when they get it. That aha moment. It shows up in their eyes. They get it. They understand what it is you're talking about. And with anything and everything that we do in life, it has to all start with understanding what it is we're trying to do. Then the important part that most people miss is the acceptance of what we're trying to do as the right thing to do. And that's where in the classroom we can have a lot of debate about, you know, is this the right thing to do? And once we have gone through the understanding stage, my ability to transfer the knowledge to the student, and the acceptance stage, our ability in the classroom to have a debate about the subject matter, then, but only then, in my opinion, will you get commitment from everybody to give that a shot and work in that direction? In every classroom I've ever been in, I always start with three questions with people. Can you give me a definition of ignorance? Can you give me a definition of stupidity? Can you give me a definition of insanity? Of course, this is early in the first day and people don't really know, they're not comfortable with each other yet, there's a little bit of a shyness, if you will. So they don't really understand what I mean by what is ignorance? And very rarely does anybody come up with the answer. The answer, of course, is ignorance is not knowing what to do. It's pretty straightforward, isn't it? And then we move on to the next definition, what is stupidity? And by now people are starting to catch on, and several pipe up and say, well, stupidity is knowing what to do, but not doing it. And I agree a hundred percent. That is stupid, isn't it? You know what you're supposed to do, but you don't do it. And the final definition of insanity comes to us from Albert Einstein. Insanity is continuing to do what you've always done, expecting different results. And at that point in the class structure and the time limit that we're together, I give them an idea. I said, well, at the end of those two days, you're not going to be ignorant because I'm going to tell you what to do. And looking around the room, I don't see many people that need a padded cell. So I'm assuming you're not insane. I'm only going to leave you with one choice. That is, when you leave here, you know what to do. And if you go back to your dealership and you let your job get in the way from implementing change, that's really stupid, isn't it? Well, we continued with webinars for a while. I I changed the format a little bit. We put up an eight foot by eight foot screen. I used a projector, connected the projector and the computer to the system, and I was recording using a high def camera, which meant that with a remote device I could turn the slideshow off and walk in front of the camera, and the students on the webinar would be able to see me. And to make a little bit of a signature statement, I started wearing Hawaiian shirts, make it a little bit more exciting and more engaging for people. But I still didn't really like that approach. So in 2015, we started creating all of our product, all of our learning modules. We started putting it on the internet to the point that we discontinued Quest Learning Centers at the end of 2016 and opened up a company called Learning Without Scars. Learning Without Scars Today covers classes for the Parts Department, the Service Department, and selling and marketing, which we merged together. We have thirty-six classes in each of those three areas. Our classes have taken on a different type of structure as well. Recent research in education has found that the 50 minute class that we've used at universities for the last forty years or so, maybe longer, is not contributing to good understanding of subject matter nor good retention. What is more productive is to have eight to twelve minute blocks. So let's go back to the 50-minute class. That means every 10 minutes, five times through that class, the teacher, the professor, the instructor will stop and have a quiz. Now, the first couple of times this happens, the students aren't ready for it, so they, you know, they didn't necessarily pay attention. You know what's it's like in a conversation with somebody, you check out, you understand what they're talking about, and you just your mind wanders. Well, that happened in the classrooms as well. And they found from research that changing and blocking things in 10 minute spans increased knowledge retention by 50%, and entries the understanding of the content by 50%. That's astounding. So if we've applied that logic to our structure of classes, each one of our Learning Without Scars classes consists of a list of reading material. It's optional, but it's beneficial, then a pretest, not something that's graded, but we want to have an idea, an understanding of what the knowledge is, the skill set is of the student before they take our class. And then we've made a video out of slides with audio tracks, with film clips that we've been bedded every eight to twelve minutes, and with quizzes tied to the content at that moment. So we have the reading material that leads to the pretest, then this video that spans 125 to 165 slides. The time slot we aim at is about an hour, two hours. Some people can do it in an hour and a half, some people take as long as three. It doesn't matter how long you take. What matters is the knowledge you're absorbing. And after that film clip, which you can start and stop if you get interrupted, you can stop it and come back there, or you can rerun the whole thing. You can go back and forth as long as you want for as long as that class is on your system. At the end of all of this, we give you a final assessment. Now, this is where we get serious. We have 20 questions, multiple choice, and we expect anybody who wants to move on to another subject to achieve an 80% score. Well, a lot of the people that are doing the jobs know the jobs. So when their company signs them up for these classes, they, well, I know this stuff, so they go right past all of the content and go to the final assessment test. They take it. I know this stuff, I should be okay. They don't get 80%. So now they go back to the beginning and they kind of what I call skim and scan. They go through the slideshow, the videos, and go to the assessment. They still don't get 80%. Now there's a bit of a panic. They pay attention, and they do end up with 80% or greater. Now, if at the end of three attempts they don't hit the 80%, we'll open it up again for them. But they the student has to go to their company and say, I didn't get enough, I didn't score well enough to get out of the class, and they've locked me out. Can I get back in again? I know the material better than I'm scoring. Let me let me have at it. So they have to acknowledge to their boss that they didn't score. That's the first problem. And then they call us and we open it up and away they go. And very, very rarely, after that little exercise, do the students not get 80%. And it's interesting because once they go through that once, they never go through it again. So we end up having then a score of 80%. And to help us, we require, we ask that the students take a short survey. What did they like about the class? What didn't they like? What would they like more help with? Are there suggestions that they might make? And we pay serious attention to those surveys, and we require the survey if you're going to get a certificate. So if you want to go all the way through and have a certificate of accomplishment from Learning Without Scars, you have to give us that survey. And we're constantly tuning, tweaking our products. There's another interesting aspect to our classes. We have 36 as it indicated, and on our website you can see the full list. But you can also tie the classes, the subject-specific classes, to addressing gaps in your skills and your knowledge. As most of you know by now, we have job function skill assessments, a ninety question, multiple choice determination of what you know. And we're following the education criteria on how we categorize those scores. There's developing, beginning, intermediate, and advanced. You've also noticed that we have specific job functions identified for the parts department. For instance, telephone encounter sales, parts office, warehouse, inventory management, purchasing, expediting, leadership, which covers the management and supervision. Those six subjects each have a job function skills assessment. And from the score, then they know what category of learning they're in development, beginning, intermediate, advanced. Because of the tens of thousands of people that have been through our classes from Quest Learning Centers and with different manufacturers programs around the world, we know what classes individual students should take to fill in the gaps according to what their skill level is. So we've identified eight classes for each of those four developmental areas, developing, beginning, intermediate, and advanced, that we recommend that the student take as a result of the assessment. And then they can progress through the different skill levels. Remember, our purpose in life is to help people identify and realize their individual potential. So by starting with a skill assessment for their particular job function, we're helping the employee, we're personalizing, if you will, the learning experience. So they go out and they have a choice of these eight classes and they pick them. They know which ones they're weakest at. So we give them the guideline. Here's the eight classes that you should be considering. They pick the classes and they can take the assessment as often as they want, whenever they want. We have a podcast that you can listen to that addresses our assessment program and why and how we suggest you use it. So that's our subject-specific classes. We have structured it to keep up to date with learning knowledge and how learning is impacted by how class design and programs are put together. We have different modules that we go through from reading materials to a pretest to a video that consists of slide tracks with audio on them, film clips that we embed, quizzes we embed, a final assessment to determine the individual students' skill level, a survey to help us continue to evolve and make the programs better, and a certificate of accomplishment. That's our subject specific classes. I hope that shed some light on this subject. And I look forward to having you take these classes. I'll see you next time.