Hey friends, and welcome back to another incredible episode of Add Up LND. I'm your host, Holly Owens, and today I'm beyond excited because we have a returning guest who is basically a legend in the LND world. Christy Tucker is back on the mic. If you're not already following her on LinkedIn or reading her blog, what are you doing? Christy brings deep insight, clarity, and a whole lot of real talk when it comes to instructional design, freelancing, and all things
scenario based learning. In this episode, we nerd out hard on what it makes what it makes good learning stick, especially branching scenarios, simulations, and how to actually apply these tools in the real world. Plus, we dive into how AI has evolved in our workflows over the last year, the ethical nuances around image generation, and where this technology might take our field next. So buckle up, this is one of those jam packed conversations that's going to get your wheels turned.
Let's dive in with Christy Tucker. Hi, we're ispring, an international team of e-learning enthusiasts who help more than 60,000 clients across the globe succeed with better online learning. Our two flagship solutions are ispring Suite and ispring Learn LMS. Ispring Suite is an intuitive, all in one authoring tool for creating engaging e-learning content, and ispringlearn is an innovative online training platform for onboarding, upskilling, and certifying your
teams. We also provide tons of free resources for aspiring and experienced e-learning professionals, conduct weekly webinars with top industry experts, and organize annual e-learning conferences, challenges, and championships. We'd be happy to get to know you and pick a solution that fits your needs best. Go to www.icepringsolutions.com to learn more about us, download our resources, and connect. Hello everyone, and welcome to another amazing episode of Add Up L&D.
I'm super pumped today because we have a returning guest and you're going to love her. If you don't already love her, follow around LinkedIn and all of her great resources and tips. Christy Tucker is here. Welcome to the show, Christy. Welcome back to the show, Christy. It's so good to have a chance to chat with you again, Holly.
We had so much fun last time. We did and I'm, I'm looking forward to asking that question we were talking about earlier cuz it's, we kind of had, it was a timely episode.
The last episode it was. But but before we dive into all that, for those who don't know you, and they should know you out on the LinkedIn space especially, tell us about your journey into L&D, what you do like, what's your area of expertise, all the different things you've been up to and how you've grown into this area that you're in now. Yeah, so my career has always been about helping people learn in one way or another. So I've been helping people
learn for over 20 years. I started as AK12 music band teacher. Like most of us, not a band. Teacher many of us started as AK12 teacher. That's that's where I started to. And then I switched to corporate software training back when lots of businesses had computer labs where you would go in person and sit in a computer room and have a person stand up in the front of the room and teach you how to use Microsoft Office.
Yeah, I did that job. It is why I know all sorts of obscure, you know, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Excel shortcuts and. Things we're gonna have to get like a random fact in the episode about Microsoft something. I know we, we, we did. So I did all of that, like the train people how to use train people how to use Office and Microsoft Project and Access and a little bit of relational relational database design.
And that was fun. But I missed the creating the curriculum side of things from teaching. I'd been like teaching out of books that other people were writing up and I that was fine, but, and I liked working with adult learners, but I missed the writing side of things. And so I did the research of like, well, what's, what's a job where I do that and found instructional design and then spent a long time applying for jobs before I got the first
instructional design job. But I have now been working in instructional design for over 20 years and so. It goes by fast, doesn't it? Yeah, I've done. I did started out as work for an online university initially, but I've done kind of both higher Ed and workplace training things. I've worked with nonprofits and government agencies, everything from cities up to federal government agencies.
I've done lots of things with associations and professional development for people through associations. And I started my own business in 2011. So I've been now working for myself for more than 10 years. I am a terrible yes man. And so I'm not actually very good working for a boss. It's much better when I'm the external consultant and then I get to tell people like, yeah, this is a dumb way to do things. I mean I'm I'm usually better, more diplomatic. But we have a, we have, we have
a much better way that you can. Right, right. It's always, it's always, it's always on the like, well, you know, I can see where you're going with this. But given the goal that you've said that you had, do you think that would you be open to considering another approach? Yeah, So like people. There you go. Like the way that you did it is dumb. Yeah. But it is sometimes it is like you have to be pretty blunt, like this is not going to work.
It is really not going. To work and also sometimes it is the I've made my recommendation, but ultimately you're the customer and if you choose to go ahead with this, like understand that you know you're taking responsibility for the outcomes. That's going to be your the You're responsible for the consequences of what happens. And it is these Sometimes you let clients have the natural consequences of their decisions. Yeah. And sometimes that also is your
job as a consultant. So I've been doing that these days, I specialize particularly in scenario based learning and branching scenarios. I've been blogging. I'll hit, let's see. I'm, I'm, I'm not, I'm not at the 20 years on blogging, but it's been a long time and I do right in my blog about scenario based learning and a lot about AI images and, and using AI these days too. So those are sort of the things that I'm known for.
Yeah. So you know, for the audience that doesn't know, you're definitely an expert in the scenario based learning as you're saying. So tell them what that actually is. Now we have some, we definitely have a majority of our audiences transitioning teachers like ourselves. So they might not understand, you know the IDs and that are listening, they definitely have an idea. But what is scenario based learning?
And you know, I think I actually wouldn't necessarily seem that everybody who's an instruction designer does. Yeah, that's true. Because we are so terrible in this field about having consistent terminology, scenario based learning is not maybe quite as bad as like micro learning in terms of David Kelly once said that there are no definitions of micro learning, there are just opinions, some of which are labeled as definitions.
Is that the same for scenario? Based and scenario based learning has there is some of that too of the I will say I tend, I personally tend to be pretty broad in my definition of scenario based learning that I do tend to think that any sort of learning that is using scenarios as part of the training, as part of the learning experience can go under that broad umbrella of scenario based learning.
Branching scenarios are one form of that, and they tend to be the one that people think of, but I would actually put that as a smaller subset within a broader. That's the one, I think.
Of right So branching scenarios are essentially like the choose your own adventure story for training so it is that you have a situation you have a couple of choices you make a choice and then what happens next is different depending on what your choice is and so it branches out into multiple different paths and there are multiple different endings positive and negative and you get different results you see the consequences of your decisions and I love. Before you're actually doing it
in real life. Right before. You're which is important. Right, right. And so it's a key thing for when you've got things like the soft skills, when you've got communication skills, when you've got strategic skills, when you've got things where there's Gray area and where you're working on practicing decision making. Branching scenarios are one of the most effective ways to train that.
One thing that we fail a lot in, in workplace training in particular, and and also in education is giving people enough practice with feedback, doing the actual thing. And the closer you can get the practice to look like the real skill the people need to do, the better off it is. And so even though in a branching scenario you might have just text or maybe you have text and static images, you can still make it cognitively more similar to the kinds of skills
that people need to practice. You can have them practice decision making, which is key for a whole lot of different things. So you know, if it's something procedural where you just follow the same steps every time and it's exactly the same every time you do it. And if you give five different people the thing, you're going to get the same results all five times as long as they follow the procedure. Don't use a brand new scenario for that. It's overkill. It's dumb, you'll waste your time.
But well said. Right like now, maybe you need a little. Maybe you do need some sort of simulation of the process, like there's. Yeah, I was gonna ask cuz that's one of the things we use a lot at Amazon as simulations in. Privacy in a simulation that walks you through. But if it is, if it is just if it is something where there's a checklist and you really are doing it the same way every time. This is the difference between procedural skills and strategic
skills. Ruth Clark talks about this in her book on scenario based e-learning where she talks about like when do you use scenarios and when do you should you use? When is some other approach, probably better procedural is you give five people the task and you get and as long as everybody does it right, you get the same result five times.
Strategic tasks are the ones where if you give five people the brief and you're going to get 5 different results, all of which may be successful, although in different ways. So if it is building a website for your business, you give that brief to five different web developers, you are going to get very different results and they all could be successful depending on, but they're probably going to, you know, weigh certain factors higher or lower.
Visual design is not, there's not one way to solve that. Writing things, writing, copywriting, learning, there's not one right answer that is automatically better than
everything else. Those are strategic skills and those in particular are really hard to practice in a lot of the traditional ways that we do assessment and practice where we have forced choice, branching scenarios do still have a forced choice in the typical way that we're doing things, but it is a forced choice within a realistic context. And you're choosing to do something not just to talk about, you know, categorizing. Well, what type of question
would you do? It's the difference between you're a manager and you're trying to resolve a conflict between two of your employees asking the question, what type of de escalation strategy should you use in order to make sure that both participants, both employees feel heard, right? That's categorization question and it's abstracted, but it's not the same as deciding, you know, Rita and Oliver are arguing. Here's what they said.
What do you do next? If you immediately take one employee's side and say, OK, Oliver, I think you've got a good point here, Rita, I think we should just go with Oliver's plan. And you cut that off without listening, you're going to get a different result than if you say, OK, let's sit down and have a conversation about this.
Or if you go talk to each one of them privately first and then you try to get them together, maybe you get some other background information so you come in more prepared for that conversation with the two of them. For sure. Yeah, that's, that's common. That happens across industries. Those sorts of conversations are the sorts of conflicts that you have to resolve. It's not just strictly related to like anything that we're in.
You're kind of, you're already mentioning this, but you know, what are some of the most common mistakes instructional designers make when they create these branching scenarios you're talking about? Like they don't like if it's just one workflow, you don't need a branching scenario or a simulation necessary for that. And like, how can, how can we
fix them? So if they've, I know one of the things when I worked at pharmacy, we have had so many E learnings that we had from one boarding till, you know, retraining them, but we had to go back and redo everything. So how when they get to this point where they're taking a different approach, maybe they're updating, How do you, how can they fix that stuff? What can they do? So I think there's there's two things in terms of like getting
started. One option is, you know, I talked about how I do tend to take the broader view on scenario based learning. Besides the branching scenarios. I also use a lot of one question mini scenarios, set it up, ask one question and then give some feedback because even if I cannot convince an organization that they want to invest in a branching scenario, the one question scenario does not take too much longer to write than a traditional multiple choice
question. But it's more application, it's higher level thinking, it's a better practice activity. It's a really good way to get started and to start building your skills writing these little scenarios and writing tight and writing choices that are actions rather than the abstract or categorization kinds of questions that we tend to do.
So the recall stuff, yeah. Yeah, the recall because so much of the time, right, we, we do an e-learning, we give them content and then we say so, you know, can you remember the thing we told you 5 minutes ago? Like the definition of something. Right, the death, yeah, which is the definition of these things. Which order do these steps go
in? OK, like that is important, but also is it a more effective practice to have them recognize the order in a multiple choice question where you've just shuffled the things around for three or four choices or is it a more? And then when they retake it, it's reshuffled again. Right, then it's reshuffled. Or is it more effective to give them a scenario in which case they have to do the steps in order?
And I love as a plausible distractor for scenarios to have the right decision at the wrong time in the process because that's a really easy mistake. Anytime you have something where there's a step of thing, it's the, Oh yeah, I need to use, you know, thinking about motivational interviewing, which is a technique in, in healthcare and other things. It's it's having conversations with people to encourage
behavior change. But you don't want to do the summary too early in the process because it's the thing that you do at the closing. Right. But if you jump into it too fast, or if you should ask a question about you, you should be making a suggestion to have a small behavior change, just some small measurable behavior change. But you can make that suggestion too early in the process, before you've done enough of the sort of behavior change work before. Yes, I understand what you're.
Saying right. And so it's. Yeah. It's the wrong process. You're kind of giving them the answer without making them go through. I kind of related to like long division and short division. Like you have learned the full process 1st and then you can learn those shorter ways, yeah. If that's the if the skill you need to train has that kind of complexity in it, then it's really hard to train it if all you're doing is single multiple choice questions. Exactly. Say it louder for the people in
the back. There was just a conversation on the instruction design subreddit about when do you use branching scenarios and how do you get the ideas for when you should do it or not. And somebody said in the real world, if I can get 80% there with the one question mini scenario, should I be doing this Well? If it only meets one of these and I can kind of do it with a one question mini scenario, should you?
Well, part of the answer is you do branching scenarios when the problem you're trying to solve is worth the cost and effort of building a branching scenario. Right. How painful is the problem that you're trying to solve? How complex is the skill that you're trying to train? Right. And of course, data will influence some of that conversation as well, bringing
some of the data. Yep. And so if you've got data and some of the how painful it is, is also the if you're training 50 people in a small organization, the solution has to be faster to build than if you are training 10,000 people. Because something that is a small problem but magnified by 10,000 people is much more likely to be expensive enough to be worth building a more complex scenario. And that's part of the real world of figuring out what approaches you use.
As much as I'd love to say every project I do is a like cool branching scenario and. Like it's changed in the world. It's not and I do lots of one question mini scenarios because sometimes that's what it is. I I've done interactive video scenarios. Actually higher actors have 1/2 day shoot. It's, it's totally overkill for this. And I, I've worked with this great Snee who has this vast collection of photos of real
problems in the environment. And so I love her so much because she's gone through and like labeled them. She'll sort them into folders of like which problem it is, and then she'll have bad and good and has them labeled in the photos. This is great. And so we did a lot of things. So frankly, for that one, the scenarios were here's a photo you're inspecting this site, here's what you see. Here's the checklist that you're
using for your inspection. What problems do you check off which, which things meet it, which things don't? Based on the photos, those are much smaller, lightweight scenarios. But the skill I need people to do in that case is to visually look at something and recognize whether it's a problem that needs to be addressed or not. And so I'm getting the practice exercise to look as much like the real skill that they need to do as I can do in a self-paced
e-learning. My gosh, I love this episode. And now I'm going to shift the conversation because last time that we talked, AI was coming out like ChatGPT, that first segment of this episode. That is so much valuable information for instructional designers. So they need to go re listen to that part. But let's shift into AI. We were nervous about what was AI gonna do to the industry, instructional designers, L&D as a whole. My perspective has definitely changed. How's your perspective?
What do you think about AI and how it fits in the workflows and things today for us? We were at that point where there was a lot of people talking about is AI going to take, you know, like is the instructional design field going to exist five years from now? I will say that I think overall, I don't think that the field of instructional design is going to disappear. I do think that roles are going to change, and I think we don't know what all of those changes will be. Yes.
There's this idea that we tend to overestimate the impact of new technology in the short term and underestimate the impact of it in the long term. That is very true. So when we see the, the, the arguments of like, oh, your whole job is going to change in the next two to three years. And if you aren't on board with AI right now doing using it every single day, somebody else is going to take your job. I get really uncomfortable with that level of hype and fear
mongering. The reality is big organizations do not move that fast. No, especially higher education rate in academia. On the other hand, I don't think you should put your head in sand and ignore it. It's not going away. No. And you do need to be paying attention. One of the assets that we have in the L&D field is that we do tend to be curious people. We like learning new stuff. We're. Super nerdy Christy, we establish this. We will go explore super nerdy
things. As as established, we're super nerdy and enjoy learning for the sake of learning in ways that, like other people, maybe don't enjoy learning for the sake of learning quite as much as we all do. You should be getting some of that hands on practice. You should be trying and experimenting with it. You should be figuring out where it's helpful to you and where the limits are, the tools are. And sometimes it is also that you try the tools for something and say, I don't think this is
quite working yet. But as fast as the technology is changing, in six months or a year it may be able to do the thing that you want to do. For my own work, I do use ChatGPT and Claude for writing and I definitely do use to help me get unstuck. And I suck at writing titles for presentations. We're twinning there because I used to spend hours trying to think of creative titles.
Oh my gosh, it's torture. Yes, or, or the the other thing that it's really good at of the like, oh, I have an acronym. We've actually kind of decided on an acronym for this thing and we've got these concepts. Help me come up with things that will go for each letter in this, like give me three options for each letter in this acronym. Or here's the topic. And like help me come up with mnemonics to come up with to do
this. Cuz like how long does it take to come up with a really good mnemonic? But brainstorming that with AI is great. Yeah, 100%. I use it a lot for image generation, again because my work does tend to be a lot of scenarios. With AII can I can go in with mid journey and I can generate unique characters for every single project. I can do different poses for them, I can change their outfit and their setting. I love that. A journey is my primary tool for
images. You spend $10 to get it for one month. You can try it out and then you can actually cancel it. And there are some specific things that ChatGPT can do, like giving it one image and then saying, OK, now rotate this 90° so you can have the background behind another character. Now show the view of the lobby of what they would see from that desk. ChatGPT does those things where most of the other image tools don't. Don't understand language enough to do that. Right, right.
But Mid Journey does stylistic, does consistent characters. You can do consistent styles. So if you give it one reference image of an illustration, I can come up with 20 images that all have the same visual style and colors that look like a whole set for a training. I think long term we're gonna see bigger changes, but if you're looking for the ways to get started right now, I think image generation is one of the places that you can go and do things right now.
Yeah, and learn how to like, talk and learn. How to do it? Props. Yep. And do and solve actual problems for yourself. I also don't like using these to replicate the styles of living artists. That's one of my other ethical lines with AI image Gen. Yeah, we could definitely have a whole conversation about that for sure, yes. The ethics, the ethics of this I I personally you want to make a parody Starry night great. No living artist is getting harmed by your training.
Customized starry night painting. But I don't use it to recreate things of living artists. That, for me, is the ethical line. We'll definitely see what happens in the future with all those different things as we're coming up on the end of the episode, like where can people find you? What are some of your final thoughts? This has been jam packed with tips, AI, you know, things to do, you freelancing, all those different things. So where, where can people find you?
Where can they follow you? Of course, we're gonna include everything in the show notes, but I want you to tell them where to find you and yes, and connect. Yes, absolutely. And so you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. My blog is Christy Tucker Learning. If you can't remember how to spell Christie, it's You can also do C Tucker learning.com, which is fewer letters. Yeah, everybody spells it differently. Right, exactly.
Hopefully you're watching the episode so you can see how to spell it. Right, if you're watching, it'll be it'll be clear. But if you are listening to this sign is the podcast in the car, then C Tucker learning is a lot easier to remember. And I'm on blue sky Christy Tucker there as well. And so those are the a big place to find me. Fantastic. I have a YouTube channel, I'm just not really doing anything with it. You can. Go yeah, YouTube is a challenge for me.
I'm trying to maybe we can motivate each other to get the YouTube going. I know it's, it's just it's one more channel channel and it's. One more thing. Yeah, it's like you have the podcast and so that's your regular thing. I have, I have my blog and that's my regular thing, right? So. Yeah, well, Christy, you're amazing and I love talking to you and you give so much great advice. Just want to say thanks again for all you do for people in the
L&D space. I can't wait for people to hear this episode. Everything's going to be in the show notes that Christy mentioned, where to find her, where to connect, go to her blog, follow her out on LinkedIn. She's an influencer. So thank you so much for coming back on the show. We appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much for giving me another opportunity to to nerd out with you.
Anytime. Go like deep into well, there are specific tools for Here's my nuanced views on these little Berry. I love the insider perspective in that we can dive deeper into that, and of course that leaves it open for future episodes of different topics we can just talk about or LinkedIn live. So we'll probably do that one day. All right.
Hi, we're ispring, an international team of e-learning enthusiasts who help more than 60,000 clients across the globe succeed with better online learning. Our two flagship solutions are ispring Suite and ispring Learn LMS. Ispring Suite is an intuitive, all in one authoring tool for creating engaging e-learning content, while ispringlearn is an innovative online training platform for onboarding, upskilling and certifying your
teams. We'd be happy to get to know you and pick a solution that fits your needs best. Go to www.ispringsolutions.com to learn more about us and connect. Thanks for spending a few minutes with Holly. She knows your podcast queue is packed. If today's episode sparked an idea or gave you that extra nudge of confidence, tap, follow or subscribe in your favorite app so you never miss an episode
of Ed Up L&D. Dropping a quick rating or review helps more educators and learning pros discover the show, too. Want to keep the conversation going? Connect with Holly on LinkedIn and share your biggest take away. She reads every message. Until next time, keep learning, keep leading, and keep believing in your own story. Talk soon.