Myths about Learning Styles, Personality Types, & Generations: In Conversation with Jane Bozarth

CommLab Podcast with Jane Bozarth

Sherna Varayath 0:05
Hi there. Welcome back to the Elearning Champion Podcast where we discover the strategies, trends, and triumphs shaping the world of digital learning. In today's episode, we will study common L&D myths and what to do instead. From valuable tips to inspiration, this is an episode you will certainly enjoy. I am delighted to introduce our guest for today, Jane Buzart. Hi Jane.

Jane Bozarth 0:46
Hi, thank you for having me.

Sherna Varayath 0:49
Jane is the Director of Research for the Learning Guild, a veteran classroom trainer, eLearning instructional designer, facilitator, and learning program manager. In her previous job role as the leader of the state of North Carolina’s Award winning eLearning program, Jane specialised in finding low cost ways of providing online training solutions while leveraging informal social and community-based learning opportunities. Her work focuses on research to enable L&D practitioners explore evidence-based practices and get a view of the pulse of the industry. A popular conference speaker, Jane holds a doctorate in training and development. Welcome, Jane, we are glad to host you today.

Jane Bozarth 1:42
Thank you. Thanks for having me. These are always fun to do. It's good to see you.

Sherna Varayath 1:47
So before we dive in, make sure you never miss an episode by hitting that follow button from wherever you are listening in to us. All right, let’s get started and champion some incredible eLearning. So, Jane, what are your goals when choosing the topics to research?

Jane Bozarth 2:06
I try to fix it up. Sometimes I do a literature review to talk about what we know about something, what the historical research has been about something, what experimentation has reported about something. Sometimes we survey our members to see if and how much they are using a particular type of technology. For instance, AR VR or XAPI or something like that. Occasionally somebody who is an expert in the field, one of our thought leaders, will write something for us on a particular topic that is their area of expertise like microlearning or chat bots. So with the goals for that, I try very hard to provide evidence-based material that is accessible to people who don't spend their days reading research. It can be very difficult to wade through academic material sometimes, and it can be a little bit daunting. So I try to be a good translator.

The other thing though, I was a practitioner for many years, I've been in this job for 7 years, but before that I was a stand up trainer. I was an eLearning designer. I was somebody who was at meetings trying to explain to HR people why we don't want to just put words from the policy on 100 slides. So I try to present things in such a way or choose things in such a way that I can help people have better conversations and get better outcomes. Because many times we are having to deal with stakeholders who don't understand L&D. They don't understand how people learn. Mostly they think learning looks like school. They think you sit in a chair, and someone teaches, and you take an exam and then you're trained. But that's education, right? We also see a lot of people come into this business from education. They were schoolteachers, they were academic people, right? So trying to make sure we give them things that are useful and actionable. My favorite thing is when someone tells me I was able to print that out and I took it to a meeting and I showed management, this is what people really do, this is what is really accomplished. this is what doesn't get results. I love when that happens, and I think it happens pretty often.

Sherna Varayath 4:11
So what are some of the myths about learning and designing learning for L&D practitioners?

Jane Bozarth 4:38
The ones that seem to be the most common in our business and before I forget, I want to say Clark Quinn has written a wonderful book about this. And I had it handy earlier, and now I've moved it. It's the goldfish and millennials book where he breaks down a whole lot of the little myths. I thought I had it right here. I'm sorry, Clark Quinn, Goldfish myth and millennials, something in the title.

Sherna Varayath 4:56
We are all fans of Clark Quinn.

Jane Bozarth 5:08
The ones that I run into the most in my own practice and the ones we run into at conference presentations and questions from people who are in this business are about learning styles, whether teaching 2 learning styles makes a difference to outcome. No, they don't. It doesn't. Generations at work and personality type instruments and what we do with those. I find that those are 3 areas where we run into a lot of what feels like intuitive practice, but it's not evidence based practice.

Sherna Varayath 5:42
Right, so let’s start with learning styles. What does your research say?

Jane Bozarth 5:57
So that was the first big project I did for the Guild. I have written 10,000 words on learning styles and then came back and wrote some more. The idea of learning styles is very appealing. We like to think that we all learn in a certain way. Schools like to tell parents that we tailor instruction to your child. We meet your child 's unique needs and that kind of thing. It's a very appealing idea and and let me just say this because I'll get in trouble otherwise. I am not saying people don't have preferences. You may very well prefer a video over a podcast. You may prefer a podcast over reading something. That's fine. It doesn't mean you learn better that way. And there is nothing in the research that shows that teaching to that preference makes any kind of difference to outcome. In fact, it can hurt it. But the important thing with learning styles is to remember, you don't learn to swim by reading a book about swimming. You don't learn to play a piano by watching videos of people playing pianos. You may pick up some technique or something, but you have to do those things. You need to tailor the instruction to the content, to what you're trying to teach. It's like saying we should do an anatomy book with no pictures because people are auditory. That makes no makes, right? So kind of combating that. Some things that you find in the literature and things you find in the research is that there has actually been very little in the way of true experimentation that shows anything different. There's lots and lots of studies, but here's the thing. In order to examine this thing about whether teaching to outcomes matters, you have to have people identified as a certain type and they have to learn better from that kind of material, and not from some other kind of material. And very few people do the depth of experimentation they need to do for that. One of the most interesting pieces I ran into when I was initially writing that first bit on learning styles was a 2018 piece by O'laughlin. This is what usually happens with the learning styles research is I ask you to take a little quiz or identify yourself as a certain type of learner and you will say you're visual or you're auditory or whatever. And then as the instructor, I would give you some intervention. I would give you materials that were visual or I would give you materials that were auditory. That's how almost all of it is set up. These 2 did an experiment where they asked college students. It's fascinating to identify their type and they would say yes, I'm visual, yes, I'm auditory, yes, I'm kinesthetic, whatever they were using. And then they asked the students to choose the material they wanted to use to learn something. And the students did not choose the thing they just said was their preference. So I think at some level if you want to play the piano, you know you'd need to play a piano and not just look at videos about it. I think we know. I don't know that our people think about learning with a capital L like, we think about learning. I think they just think about solving a problem or I want to know more about this. But I thought it was very interesting, that left to their own devices and not having a treatment put on them, that they still didn't choose what they had just said. The interesting thing though is that in the literature there are 73 learning style models identified. Some of them have clearly become more popular than others.

And let me just say this is something important about research. We may find out tomorrow that there is proof that something works. We may find out tomorrow there's a 75th model that is right. So that's the thing about research. You have to keep your mind open to it. But generally with learning styles, when we start talking about applying it to practice, it's fine to say people have their preferences, but you also need to say what am I trying to teach? How can I teach this so they can learn it? We're not just entertaining people, right? And I think that's where we can get into trouble sometimes. I know when I have been involved in Train the Trainer work, training people to do stand up, training people to be eLearning designers, very often they justify something fun or entertaining or decorative by saying Oh well, we need the dancing cats for the visual people, Oh well, we need to do a hula hoop game for the kinesthetic people, and it's not legitimate. We are justifying something fun or cute. We want to do, and it's not to say don't ever do those things. It's just a great deal especially of both. I have spent a lot of time in live training, playing games that really didn't have a thing to do with the content, doing Ice Breakers that did not break any ice. And in any eLearning, you see interactions that are just busy work. You see what my friend Cami calls clicky, clicky, bling, bling, bling, design, where everything is spinning and moving and dancing but that doesn't contribute to the learning. So I just think we need to be careful when we're saying we can justify what we're doing. Are we really improving the instruction in the the outcome or are we really just entertaining people? And to be fair, I worked in HR or attached to near around under HR for many years. It was a blessing and a curse that I was good with really boring content. I could make it more interesting because very often that policy stuff is just murder to try to figure out anything to do with it. I understand why you end up with dancing cats. But figuring out how we can develop a treatment or an approach that helps people learn better rather than just click things and move around and play games. The games are not important, it's just they need to be related to the instruction and the outcome. I think is a real challenge for us.

Sherna Varayath 12:09
Makes sense. So the idea of categorising people by type is really appealing. Where else have you seen this in play?

Jane Bozarth 12:23
We love to put people in boxes. My favorite example of this is astrology, to put people into boxes and name those boxes. Then we understand people, we can predict people, we can label people, and life becomes much easier. And I understand the inclination. I understand why people want to do that. It does make it easier, particularly when you can sit a terrified new manager down and say OK, you've got 14 people and Jane is this way, and Sue is that way. And it makes it convenient, but it doesn't mean it's very right. And I will go back to the thing about the learning styles. I think we have all probably either in our own lives or known friends who have seen a child get mislabeled or a child get stuck with a label that works against them. Or there's actually some talk in the field that the whole idea of kinesthetic learning came from the fact that some kids are just very athletic and maybe they're not terribly book oriented. And this was a way to appease the parents. One of the things that happens with learning style is that it's a way to excuse the learner from learning. For instance, the parents can say, oh, he didn't do well on that test because you didn't teach it right? He didn't do well on that test because he's auditory and you made him read, right. So it takes the onus off of the learner. I don't think we should be doing that either and went back to why we like to categorize people. It's very easy. It's very convenient. It sort of distills our problems down to simple solutions, and very often it puts the burden on that human. It's not your fault you're this way, you're just this type. It's not my fault I can't manage you. It's just that we're different. I mean, I have seen people who have done particular personality type instruments who will say things like, Oh well, you're a feeler and I'm a judger. And that doesn't make the relationship better, it doesn't make it all right. It's very dismissive and I think it's particularly become very contentious when there's an employee employer relationship there, or supervisory. But it's handy and it feels a little bit intuitive. I can't deny that learning styles does feel a little intuitive, that personality types feels a little bit, but it doesn't mean that they're valid. It doesn't mean we need to take much action on them, right? Just based on the category, yeah. So I have seen it with learning styles, I've seen it with personality types and the other thing we're going to talk about, the things today in generations, putting people in these boxes. And it really limits everybody involved. I've seen it quite a bit in our business and there's many, many variations of all those things, there's variation, there's a lot of variations on personality type.

Sherna Varayath 15:23
Right, yes, that makes sense. So apart from learning styles and personality type instruments, how else have you seen people being categorised in the workplace? What are the possible problems with this approach?

Jane Bozarth 15:39
Yeah, part of the problem with personality types, is again a little bit like astrology, where you put someone in a box, and you predict. The personality type instruments don't have much in the way of predictive value and they don't have much in the way of professional performance value. I may have a dentist who could be any one of the types. I want a dentist who's nice to me and doesn't hurt me, right. I don't care what his profile says and there's not really a one of the 16 or 25 or 9 types or whatever that says this will be a great dentist. This will be a great pilot. They might have leanings that way, but I don't care if my lawyer and my dentist and my accountant all have the same personality type. It can get us into trouble. We oversimplify people, and we make too many generalizations. So the fact that those have very little in the way of predictive value or construct validity is I think a problem. But some of these personality type instruments are huge industries on their own. There's nothing wrong with you having a product that's popular, that makes money. But I think you need to be aware of how much commercialization is behind some of these products and the overwhelming amount of advertising and free samples and all the levels of certification and stuff. Very few people are aware of a personality type indicator called the 5 factor model. The acronym for it is Ocean, also canoe, because of the spelling. It's openness, conscientiousness. I can't remember all 5 of them right now. But it actually does track a little bit to job performance, to job stability, impulsiveness, sticktuitiveness. It does tie a little bit to job performance and to workplace application. Very few people have heard of it because it's free. It is an open source product. It doesn't have all the advertising money behind it. You can Google it right now. You don't have to go anywhere to be certified. Take a look at it. I have no objection to the idea of a personality type thing as a parlor game or as a team building retreat. I think it's when it gets out of hand, and again, you have people literally saying, oh, well, you're a judge or you wouldn't know how to do this, that kind of thing. The 3^rd thing that I see people getting categorized though is generations. I don't know how it's different in your country versus mine.

Sherna Varayath 18:46
It is evident, very.

Jane Bozarth 18:46
Is it? Well, when I here was the thing when I set out to research that I try, I really do. I I know I sound like I have too many opinions. But I really do try to have an open mind when I approach these things. And I almost always get surprised by some things that I find. We can talk about that too. But I thought I would find mountains of data because again, I'm connected to HR for so long, I thought there would be lots of data about lawsuits related to generational conflict, grievances in workplaces caused by problems across the generations. I found almost nothing. I think it's a very popular topic. People like to talk about it in the literature. Some people refer to it as a topic invented by consultants. It's not really. There's not really any there. So in the United States, a lot of it. For one thing, we have a very hard time defining the work generation. In the United States, they talk about these watershed moments, which for us were the space Shuttle Challenger explosion, 9/11, the Kennedy assassination. People sort of time-stamped themselves by some of those things. And I don't know what's different, where you are, but do they do that there too, they find these historical moments?

Sherna Varayath 20:15
Not historical, but the millennial boomer generation identification is always there.

Jane Bozarth 20:20
Well, how did they define it there though? How are they defining a boomer? Are they doing it by birth year?

Sherna Varayath 20:28
By birth year, yes.

Jane Bozarth 20:29
Yeah. So this is what's very funny. I have a brother who is nearly 20 years older than I am, and we are clearly different generations. I would say he is very much a baby boomer, and I am not. So it’s very funny. But let me say this, he remembers polio. He remembers a little bit about the post-World War 2. He remembers things that are in his consciousness, but in my view, what I remember best about my age and my age group, and this is an interesting conversation about how people define these cohorts because some people will use years, some people will use these watershed moments. I think about the music. When I think about my own who I would consider my peer group, we all have the same songs. My husband has a friend who married a woman who's 10 years younger and she's a lovely girl, she didn't see any TV that we saw. She didn't see any movies. We have to stop and explain. And she doesn't know the songs we know. And I would define a generation a little bit more that way, I think. But I think it's just very funny. We just seem so determined to put people in boxes. And very often, and I think it's especially true with generations. The boxes are negative. Oh, well, he's just a baby boomer, he can't learn to use technology. Oh well, you know, the millennials, they won't stay with anything. They use it very in a very dismissive way. You don't really hear that much about the personality stuff or the learning styles, but the generations, they often use it as a negative, as those people aren't as good as us people, that kind of thing.

But one of the things we do, when you're trying to read research and you're looking at all the things I've talked about so far have been literature reviews looking into what exists, you try to find what we call meta analysis, which is you need to find that there's 2 or 3 really important studies. But are there 7 others? Are there 20 others? Is there corroboration across a number of other researchers? And one of the problems you have with all of the things we're talking about generations is one in particular. It's very hard to find people who have studied the same thing, the same trait or the same characteristic. For instance, if you go look at the research on generations, there are studies on everything from the likelihood that they'll smoke to their likelihood of car crashes to whether they're going to stay with the job to whether they're going to retire from a job. There are all kinds of variables.

And I'm going to get this a little bit wrong. I'm not going to be very wrong, but I believe out of well over 350 articles, people trying to do meta analysis found 20 they could actually lay side by side and get any kind of comparison. So it's really hard when the studies are all over the place. Same for personality types. It's very hard to get consistent, reliable information. And with learning styles, they didn't do the experiments well, they weren't well designed. So it's really hard to get consistent. But again, it feels right and what I would say about the generations is that I don't think it is so much age by birth year, I think it is more social situation. Your life situations I don't have. I'm not going to have toddlers, right? I've got friends who are my age who are dealing with paying for college tuition on this side and senior care on that side. They are in a very different play. They're worried about retiring. I have a friend who is in a real precarious situation with a job. His goal is for his children to graduate from college without debt.

That is very different from a 28 year old trying to get to the kids’ T ball game, right? And they have very different life issues. I think when you're 30 and you've got small kids, you're pulled in many directions, and you're tired all the time, you want more time off, you need more flexibility with your schedule maybe. You need some help with childcare or some things like that. You want the daycare center at work. The 55 year old has other needs and other things. So I would say maybe there's some truth to generations in the sense of we're just in different places. I think new, younger people are likely to change jobs more often. That's not a bad thing. I work in a situation with government where people wouldn't change jobs, they wouldn't.

Sherna Varayath 25:52
So you have done many literature reviews over the years. Have you found many surprises?

Jane Bozarth 26:10
I have. I’ve referenced some of these before now. I have been very surprised at the extent to which learning styles has permeated public education here. I don't know what it is where you are. It is ingrained in the furniture, in the pencils, in the chalk. You see people, new college graduates, they come out talking about learning styles. It is like a friend of mine says, we're going to like killing a vampire, we're going to have to put a stake through its heart. It seems very intuitive. It seems like it makes sense. We have seen research time and time again tell us it does not matter to outcomes. It is very, very hard to overcome the depth to which it is permeated in public education. And to be fair about this, back to my point about how much money some of these industries have invested in them, when you are a 3rd grade teacher, you're teaching 8 year olds and you're busy all day. You get 2 days of professional development a year and what they offer you is learning styles one day and how to do PowerPoint on the other.

You're inundated with offers for free learning styles, quizzes, free learning style certification, free experimentation, free materials based on learning styles. I can't blame a busy teacher for not keeping up with what they're hit with. That's my job, to help translate this stuff, But one of the things that I found that I think is encouraging in terms of the surprise is that many, many teachers will tell you that yes, they believe in learning styles. Yes, they believe teaching to learning styles works, but then they admit they don't do it.

They will admit they're like, oh, well, I don't really tailor everything to everything. I don't really stop and make this OK for the auditory. So they believe it, but then they're not practicing it. So that's a good thing. The same thing is true for the personality type thing. It's the money. Some of these organizations make millions and millions dollars a year selling these instruments. Many of them are set up. We used to call this a pyramid scheme. Now we call it multi-level marketing where you've got somebody, a facilitator who can deliver it and then they have to go to a certification. And then there's a master certification and all of that costs somebody money. some of it is a little bit cult like, in the sense that people are very devoted to their particular instrument, and there's a bunch of them. There's 2 or 3 that are well known, but there's a bunch of them. They're very devoted to it, they won't listen to any pushback on it. They will argue it till the cows come home. It's fine to believe in the thing you have, but not when the research is saying it's not really very valid and there's no predictive value, and there's not any construct validity, and that you could take that instrument every Tuesday for a year and come out with a different result every time.

The other thing about some of them, I guess I didn't realize until I looked at so many. Most of them have a forced choice like you were either merciful or kind, or you are either judgmental or emotional. You know there's either or and very few of us are really either or. It depends. And that's another reason I like the 5 factor model because you're scored on a continuum, across like a Likert scale and not just either or.

I've been a little surprised at how consistently bad some of the instruments are, the amount of money invested in them. I was very surprised when I started digging into generations that really there is no consensus as to what a generation is. There are some people who will argue that if you're born in 1946, you were this thing and if you're born in 1947 and 3 months, this other thing, that’s so situational. I have a brother who was much older. My parents were also much older. I would argue that we had different parents because of the difference in our ages. He had a father who was a workaholic military officer, and I had the same man who was a father who retired when I was 12 or something and drove me to school everyday. We had very different experiences just based on our lives, not so much on what year we were born. Let's see what some other surprises that we've had. I am always, always surprised in our research at the number of times we survey our people. This is leaving some of the stuff we've talked about already, and they tell me they don't know.

How are you tying outcomes to your training? I don't know.

Are you gathering data to show that the training you're doing with the VR headsets is having an outcome on performance at work? I don't know.

How are you using the data from your LMS? I don't know.

I'm always a little surprised. I remember one time at my own office and I'm not all that great, I was just working. We had a governor who suddenly was very hot for safety stuff, and I called our safety office and asked about some correlation between some training and whether we had reduced accidents, and somebody in the office said nobody had ever asked them that. And I thought that was interesting.

We surveyed some years back, we haven't done it recently, on employees using social media at work, and trying to use social media for training. People would tell us our employees don't like social media, they don't want to use social media, they aren't interested in that. And we would say well, what tools do they use, and they would say we don't know.

I'm like, how can you tell me you don't know what they use, and they hate them at the same time? Because we would find that half the people at work use Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever. So I'm always a little surprised. That's one of the reasons I do truly try to keep an open mind because I just never know what I'm going to find. And like I say, we may find out tomorrow there is something new out there. We have to be available for that. AI may teach us something we don't know about.

Sherna Varayath 32:10.
Right, absolutely. AI may teach us a lot of things, yes.
So you offered several examples of myths that remain popular despite what the research says. What suggestions do you have for designers wanting to avoid traps and have better conversations with their stakeholders, who often subscribe to these ideas?

Jane Bozarth 33:01
I think in particular, learning styles is the one that we have to deal with the most at work. Again, we have a lot of people that we interact with, the stakeholders and the managers, and the HR type folks who are all blue, white collar college graduates, fairly well educated who do believe that learning should look like school, that you sit there and read something and take a test and then you can do it. When we know that's not really true for skills generally, maybe knowledge, but maybe not so much, skills.

So I think the first thing is despite how I may have sounded today, there is no point in arm-wrestling with people. Kathy Moore is one of my favorite people in our business. She's retired recently. I don't know if you know Kathy, she developed the action mapping learning and she wrote a lot about this back in the day. And she said you can't argue with somebody who believes they're operating from a position of moral superiority. If they believe I am helping this child, this child will learn better, I have to do this visually for this child, you can't just fight about that. And I think a lot of times we are in conversations with our stakeholders where it does turn into just arm wrestling, she said. Look again at What it is you're trying to teach? Try to refocus people back on the actual skill, not just argue we should or shouldn't have video for this, or that the universal design principles which I've written a lot about the last year or 2, tells you really should probably have multiple representations of things.

That maybe people don't always choose a thing that's best for them, but that different people do respond better to different things. I don't know what the correlation is to learning right now, but there is that. But I also think you have to be very careful as a designer not to fall into the trap about just doing things because they're fun for you or entertaining for you, or you find your content is boring and you're just trying to dress it up somehow. I think that's what gets us in trouble. But one of the things Kathy recommends is looking at where you can make compromises. For instance, you may have someone who says, well, we need to narrate every word, which you know is problematic for a lot of us. You've got people reading and listening at different speeds. You've got competing channels. And Kathy said the response there is not to argue about narration and not to argue about what the research says and not to do what I just did, but to say, well, how about we have it so they could turn that off and that way we can accommodate all our learners? So, figuring out a way you can meet them a little bit where they are is a really great strategy. It tests you in the face of these conversations but it’s easier than just arguing all the time. I do like to ask people for data although that can become contentious when they start saying Oh well, the 20 year olds don't like this or they don't use that social media. I have to be careful not to get in trouble with that. But asking them for data, like I said, I went into the generations report expecting to find lots and lots of information about grievances and lawsuits and workplace troubles and turnover. And it wasn't there. The headlines would have you believe it happens all the time, but I couldn't find very much. So, looking for what the literature really says, I almost always, when I'm writing about these things, include something about how to have better conversations about it, what to do when you take this down the hall, what data you need available for your boss?

The other day somebody asked me about a particular authoring tool that I hadn't even heard of in years. I don't know if their brother in law owns the company. But the boss clearly wanted them to buy a tool nobody else in the world uses. That's not going to run on some of the systems. That is not going to serve their designers well to learn. We all know what 2 or 3 tools designers do need to learn now, and this was not one of them. And I happen to have the data that said, even 5 years ago, fewer than 5% of our respondents were using that tool. So giving them something in hand that wasn't generated by the vendor of the tool can be very helpful in showing where there's evidence or not. I will say because this is on my mind, I'm doing a presentation about this tomorrow.

When we've asked people about how they select learning management systems, which generally cost a lot of money for a big organization, we can be talking about millions of dollars sometimes.

The data we got on that last time is that 80 or 81% of people buy those systems just to measure completion, which is crazy. When we ask them how they're using the data, 60% of them say they're confirming that people are using the LMS. And then it descends into maybe 30% are trying to tie anything to outcomes.

Again, maybe AI is going to help us with that a little bit. I find it really interesting that we talk and talk and talk about some of these systems and the data we want and how we want to tie performance to outcomes, and we how to tie training to performance. And then when we ask about it, they're doing very, very little in that regard. I don't mean to insult them, that's not their job. Their job is to build courses and they should have somebody helping them with the data. But then one of the most interesting things somebody said one day, she said management doesn't seem to know what to do with that data when we give it to them. So she'll say, we have it all, then we show it to them. And they wanted the system, they approved it, they paid for it, and then they don't seem to want the data we get. So we could go on all day about disregarding evidence and information.

This is a dirty little secret in our business. And because I don't really do design work anymore, I'm not too worried I'll be in trouble for what I'm about to say. But the truth is, sometimes we know that what we're being asked to do is not going to solve a problem. You can't get fired if they insist that you're going to do this really standard boilerplate how to evacuate the building in safety training. You can't lose your job over everything you're asked to do. And sometimes we just make it, and we know it maybe won't work. Or we know it's going to be boring or that people are going to say this isn't realistic and you got to keep a job, right?

Sherna Varayath 40:15
So what are you working on now? Are there any new areas that you are exploring?

Jane Bozarth 40:29
We have several interesting things that have just come out in the last few months. I did a quick review of emerging technologies for inclusive learning and I tried to look at some things that were beyond the obvious. I think we all know about assistive technologies and screen readers and those kind of things, but I don't know that we're paying much attention to 3D printing, to blockchain credentialing, which I think is going to be enormous for people who are dealing with disabilities and trying to get employed.

So some things like that we have. I worked for the Learning Guild in our fall conference as Dev learn every year and this year I believe it's November and I met someone who was working with AI generated video. One of our frustrations in this business is the demand that we build these one size fits all things, and video is expensive and it's time consuming. They want us to build one thing. I did a lot of work with hospitals, and they'd want one video that was for doctors and housekeepers and the food service people. And then, hand washing is in fact just hand washing, but what the janitor does with disposing of stuff is not the same as what the doctor.

AI Gen video? I watched her take a template and make a video just of you saying hi. Hello. I'm Jane and welcome to our company, and you're going to enjoy working in the Richmond office and your boss is going to be -- and then she took a template and slapped it on. And the thing generated for all the other offices. It changed the name of the recipient. It changed the name of the supervisor. It changed the location. It was amazing to watch how easily you could personalize and adapt, which again is part of inclusion. So I caught her afterward. I said, this may change what we know about video because the video we've done the research on was all this one shot single, gorgeous, perfectly produced example. And so she has written a nice piece for us that'll be out middle of May on using AI generated video and she went way beyond what I asked her to do. She's got everything from writing a script which many times people don't get training in and it's different. Yeah, choosing an avatar, choosing a narrator, making decisions about how you want to do things. It's very good. I think it's about 50 pages long. Actually, it's much more than I asked her to do, but there it is. So that'll be out soon. We recently just did a report on free tools, which is where my career with eLearning got started. You read that in my bio that I was working for government. I never had a budget.

And back then my issue was hardware. We were trying to get microphones and printers and CD burners and those kind of things. And so this time around, I could have surveyed and would have found out there are 17 dozen image tools. I mean you can Google and see what image tools are there. I asked people what they were really using and if they wanted to talk to me about that. I had an overwhelming response. People couldn't wait to talk to me about this. And so I heard from teachers, I heard from people in government, I heard from people at nonprofits, and I heard from some people who have money and were still choosing to use free stuff. And we talked about the benefits of that, the problems with that, because often a free tool will suddenly stop being free or it gets bought. You have to be mindful of that. So that came out last month. I guess it's been out a few weeks. So we have lots of stuff going on. I think for later this year, Megan Torrance will often do a survey, a report on a survey, and she's done a sort of soup to nuts, all the educational technologies people are using right now. And I believe we plan to have that out in August, so we have a lot going on. We're always interested to hear what people want to know about.

Sherna Varayath 44:24
Absolutely very, very interesting. And that brings us to the end of this insightful episode of the Elearning Champion Podcast. I hope you are walking away with some fresh ideas breaking common L&D myths. Thank you so much, Jane, for sharing your thoughts, ideas, stories, and insights.

Jane Bozarth 44:53
Yeah. Let me add all of the things we talked about today are available @learningguild.com for free under the research tab, learning guild.com, everything I've mentioned today, I do encourage you to take a look. I try to make it not too onerous to read the research. And I think you will find interesting things and you can track some of my sources back there if you need to quote anything, it'll be in there. So please do take a look and please get in touch if there's something you want to hear more about sometime, because we're always looking for topics.

Sherna Varayath 45:23
Absolutely. And there was so much I took up from this session, from personality type instruments and learning style myths and evidence-based learning and all the stories were really, really helpful.

Jane Bozarth 45:41
Someday we'll find something I want to talk about, but we got through it today, right? Something I'm excited about. Thank you. I always appreciate the chance to talk about my work. So thank you very much. I hope it was helpful.

Sherna Varayath 45:55
Yes, it was very helpful. And dear listeners, if you found value in today's conversation, please do spread the knowledge and empower more champions in our field. And of course, if you haven't already followed us, make sure you are following the Elearning Champion podcast. We have got more fantastic episodes lined up featuring incredible guests like Jane, tackling topics that matter the most to you. We always love to hear from you, so connect with us on your favorite social media channels. We would love to keep the conversation going. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Elearning Champion podcast. Until next time, take care and happy learning.

Jane Bozarth 46:36
Okay, thanks very much. That was great. I hope I gave you what you needed.

Sherna Varayath 46:40
Yes, thank you so much, Jane. I hope you have a lovely day ahead.

Jane Bozarth 46:47
Well, I do. We're traveling starting this week and I've got a little iPhone problem, but the good thing about having an iPhone is I woke up at 5:30 and I checked the Apple Store, and I have appointment to take the phone in, like in an hour. So that's great.

Sherna Varayath 47:03
Yes, that is great.