In this week’s episode of the Learning Matters podcast, Doug chatted with Nicole Papaioannou Lugara, PhD, from Your Instructional Designer. Nicole is a pro in corporate instructional design and social learning at scale. They talked about Nicole's unique path into the learning and development field, her approach to creating impactful learning experiences, and the innovative strategies her company uses to foster continuous learning within organizations.

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So thank you so much, Nicole, for joining the podcast today. I'd like to start just by hearing how you found yourself in the world of learning and development and how you came about founding your instructional designer. And did you ever see yourself going down this road of owning a business that was focusing on corporate instructional design?

You

I'll say that I like to joke that my life is just a series of me resisting and whatever I resisting is the thing that actually I wind up needing. And so I started my career as an adjunct professor, as a PhD in English and I thought that's what I was gonna do forever. And I was like, I'll never sell out and go to corporate training. And so naturally my next job is corporate.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Corporate training, I worked for a company that produced content for their adaptive learning platform. And then after that, I was like, I'd never go freelance. And of course, I found myself freelancing. And then never, I don't want an agency. I don't want to leave people. Yeah, so now I have an agency. So that's really the story of my life. I'm going to resist making $10 million a year next and see how that pans out for me. Yeah, yeah. It is funny.

Ha ha ha ha!

I think that's a brilliant idea. Funny how that goes though. You step into, you wake up in the morning, you're like, I'm going to do this thing today. And then all of a sudden you're doing another thing. And then that leads to where you are here with this awesome company. So we got a chance to speak for just a little bit a couple of weeks ago and something that you said stuck with me. You said something along the lines of

What does it take to make learning meaningful? People. So can you expand a little bit upon that and how that idea has kind of shaped the way that your company develops training?

Yeah, so my goal.

since day one has always been to make learning that matters. And I really do ask myself all the time, you know, what does it mean for learning to mean something? And at the end of the day, it is the relationships we make and the ways we use that learning to enhance those relationships, improve the world around us. It's rarely just to say we checked a box and added some knowledge to our brains or even just to improve a system for the sake of improving the system, right? There's a human reason that we do the things we do. And as I talk

Ha ha ha ha.

to people about their meaningful learning experiences, nine times out of ten it came down to something that was happening in and among other people. I learned this really great thing from this amazing facilitator. I had this awesome conversation with my colleague. I stumbled onto Reddit and they all told me, I'll keep that one safe for work, WTA and I learned a lesson about being a human that day. But so it really became about being human and at the time I was thinking really heavily about these things I was also kind of burning out on e -learning.

hahahaha

learning and that was a space I had been in since I started my career. I was like, even as a nerd who like loves learning, went to school for 14 years after high school for funsies, I'm not enjoying this experience nine times out of 10. So the average person who doesn't really love learning all that much or finds value in other things that they want to prioritize, you know, we've got to do better for them. And so that's sort of how we, we started diving into scalable social learning. And the other piece was of course that like teams are distributed now.

Ha ha ha

you know, so yeah, we can design a lot of in -person facilitator led social experiences, but the reality is that a lot of teams, even if they're not remote or hybrid, they're operating on different schedules or from different locations, and so you have to find a way to connect people through learning that isn't just in person in a classroom.

Mm -hmm.

And that leads me perfectly into the next question, which is one of your guys's service offerings that you have is a social learning network. So can you tell me a little bit about what a social learning network is and what kind of makes it different from that old school approach for adult learning?

Great.

Yes.

So the social learning network is the holistic strategy basically to, I would say, a learning organization. And so typically we're going in with a few high priority skills or trainings and they're sort of wrapped in this blanket of, okay, we want to be a culture of continuous learning. And so we're looking at your organization, your culture, the communities that exist within your organization, the things you want people to be learning, and we're strategizing how to use the tools in your organization, your class.

tools, your drives, all of that stuff, to really make it so people can share information and then to create learning pathways within that network that enable people to then learn specific skills and do all that. So it's a, it is an intensive process and it's probably, it's the one we build the least but the one we like the most because we know it has the greatest impact.

You

Yeah, sure.

But yeah, it's kind of like, well, we use Workplace by Meta as the engine behind our social learning network. And so it really is thinking about like, well, if Facebook was just about connecting people through work and making it about learning, what would that look like? And that's kind of where all those things start.

And how does a client successfully implement a social learning network? I imagine there's quite a bit of questions coming back from them where they're just like, okay, how can we do this? How can we make sure it's effective? How can we measure the effectiveness of this?

Yes, definitely. So it starts with a thorough needs analysis. And so we do a few different layers in our needs analysis, which includes the traditional discovery session. I'll sit there and ask you a bunch of questions about your business, about the environment, about what you want to accomplish, the current and future state, all of that good stuff. In the next phase, we're doing a lot of learner surveys, focus groups, that sort of thing.

We move into observations, report reviews, research, all of that sort of happens. And then as we're going through, we're saying, okay, well, here's our findings and recommendations. This is how we would structure it. We're identifying the critical learning needs. We're identifying what just kind of needs to be resource spaces or resource groups. We're identifying where communities of practice need to exist. And then we're starting to really structure all of that. So it's a lot of collaboration with our clients in all honesty, you know, there is a

lot of information they need to give us for us to be able to strategize appropriately, but it does start with a lot of really good question asking and sort of the 360 view. You know, you're not just sitting with the learners. You're really saying, okay, what's the organizational goals? What are the performance goals? What's the environment like? What are the constraints here? Really thinking about, you know, everything in their learning ecosystem.

Mm -hmm.

Well, it allows you to totally customize it towards the client because every single corporation does things differently. And while culture is always an important thing, every culture is different. So I think that's really awesome. And and are there any tools or like a methodology that you use to actually measure the effectiveness of this? How how are you able to to

Yes.

develop the program and then, you know, six months down the line, take a look back and be like, okay, where can we tweak things? How is this working? Those types of things.

you

Yeah, that's a great question because it is important to be able to, I would say, not just look back at the end, but while you're kind of in the middle and look at things too. So we use Will Tallimer's learning transfer evaluation model, LTEM, and so part of our process when we're working with clients is to go through and see one through eight of the steps. You know, you don't always need all eight, but one through eight kind of what are the goals we have for each of these sections and to fill out specifically what will work in there.

Definitely.

environment with their systems. The one caveat I'll have is that as a consultant, we are at the mercy of our clients following our directions and sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, but we do create the plan for them and we do tell them what tools and systems that they've told us they have can be used to get that data. Whether they set it up or not is kind of up to them at that point. But we also have some, so aside from the L10, we also have some metrics just around social learning that we advocate, that we go through the list and we pick some

hahahahah

and that makes sense, and that could be stuff like how many innovations are coming out of these conversations, who feels like they've got a friend at work now because we're learning from Gartner studies and things like that, that people who feel like they have someone at work will go the extra mile. And so those are the sort of things we're trying to help our clients successfully plan for as they put those social learning networks into practice.

Yeah.

I think that's incredible because learning can be so isolating at times. Oftentimes you're just in it on yourself. You even have like earbuds in or whatever and you're not really focusing on the actual environment around you while you're learning. You're really just trying to go through the modules, go through the steps and make sure that you pass that learning assessment at the end of the module. And so

Yeah.

Yeah, and that's part of it. That's not all of it.

I think, yeah, I think it's so cool to be able to bring people into a learning environment where they're actually interacting with folks. And I wonder if that is really just changing the entire landscape of the adult learning world. Do you think that we're at an age of where the job aids, the facilitator guides may be?

in the past and maybe we're focusing more on these micro learnings, just in time learnings and actual bringing together of your learning community and your in your organization.

It's like a question. I don't. So you would think I do, right? You think I'm like everything micro learning everything and but no, that's not what I really strongly believe. And I'm super nerdy. So if you go back to my dissertation, I wrote a million years ago, you'll see it there too. But like I really believe in this idea of ecosystems and not ecosystems like just plug in a bunch of technology. But it really is about okay, there's this environment and everything kind of affects everything. So there's people and they're playing with systems and there's relationships between

Yeah.

Ha ha ha ha.

Mm -hmm.

things and there's events that happen. And so I think it's important to think about your whole learning ecosystem in that way. And that means, you know, micro learning isn't the solution for everything. A community of practice isn't the learning solution for everything. But what a social learning network will do is it'll take the pieces you can kind of scale and put them together. It'll give you that plan of action for the things that maybe do need to be in person or hybrid and things like that.

other piece of the puzzle is that it gives a space for those conversations to happen so you know where you need to go next. I don't think it's necessarily like one or the other. I mean all that stuff can even be within your social learning network theoretically like you could live stream your live, you know your events it just depends on what tools you have kind of in your kit. Yeah so that's a little bit of a long -winded answer but there you go.

Definitely. Yeah.

No, I love it. Just getting into the philosophy of what makes training effective is fascinating to me. And how do you kind of distill that idea down to clients who oftentimes just are looking for like a one size fits all type of an approach? How do you talk with them and explain the benefits of different types of learning, different types of structures for learning?

So.

I think part of it is asking really good questions. The one thing I've definitely picked up over the last decade or so is that consultative approach. And it means that I'm never trying to be like, no, you don't know what you're talking about. But I do like to sometimes say I overwhelm people into compliance. Because if you're asking the right questions, the meaningful questions, and they genuinely are not prepared, what they're going to realize is, I didn't realize to even ask that question. Maybe I don't know enough to make this decision. And that's where then you can enter and kind of provide guidance because they want it and not you.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

because you're telling them you know it all. So that's definitely a piece of the puzzle. I think the other part is really focusing on some key questions like, you know, where are you now and where would you like to be? Asking them what their culture is and then asking them again, okay, but what is it really? Because they'll give you, you know, their slogan and their ideal and just be like, okay, but if you didn't tell me the ideal, what does it look like now? So you know how to close that gap. I think it's emphasizing about meeting people where they are. Like, it's nice you think,

Ha ha ha.

Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

that's where people should be, but they're not. And so wouldn't it be better to be realistic and get them there than kind of just throughout your training? And you know, just asking them what's at risk is another really important question because sometimes they will forget. You know, you just told me this AI team's training was really important and now you're telling me you're going to run three other types of training at the same time. That's fine, but just know nobody's going to retain all that. So how important is to you really what's at risk if it doesn't fail? they're going to let all of your

Ha ha ha.

patented information leak onto chat GPT or an even less secure source, like yeah, that's a problem. Whoopsies, so maybe if you think that's the problem, we should prioritize this and let's see what we can do here. So yeah.

Ha ha ha ha.

Whoopsies.

Yeah, so the big thing being truthful to your own company and its strengths, its weaknesses, risks, potential lifts that can happen and going into the conversation. Maybe not necessarily utilizing the marketing team's verbiage for how your culture is, but really just getting down to there's a training need here. How can we achieve?

that goal and find success. Can you tell me a little bit about the difference between the digital cohort side of things and then the social learning network or do they kind of like combine together?

Yeah.

Yeah, so I like to look at our services like a funnel in some ways, not like a marketing funnel, but just, you know, so I think, you know, we do a lot of micro learning still. And so those pathways end up being kind of the bottom, you know, that's one piece. Then you move up a little bit more and you've got sort of these blended learning experiences. And that might be again, more of a pathway with a lot of things embedded. The digital cohort is really just.

No.

Nice. Yeah, yeah.

that plus community and so you're adding community, curation, all of that. And then a social learning network could just be the thing that is then wrapping all of that plus kind of your holistic learning development strategy. You know, it might be the place you're communicating things in addition to the training. And so they can all play together. You might decide within your social learning network, you need to be running a cohort and the community for that cohort and the resources need to live in your social learning network. And so they're kind of just, I would say, layered.

or levels of L &D at that point. Like one is a big solution, holistic solution, one is a programmatic solution, and then the micro learning could be a number of things, but it's usually like a really targeted training need.

Hehehe

Yeah, I think it's brilliant. I think having that structure makes it much easier for folks that are coming to be like, I don't, I don't exactly know what I want, but I know where we need to start here. And then we can just kind of grow from there and having those growth opportunities for them seems to be incredible. So tell me a little bit about your team. How did you come together and kind of

work together to form these methodologies, these ideas on how you wanted to bring successful training to your clients.

So I...

I brought up my first team member, it wasn't very long ago, maybe three years ago, and it was a virtual assistant, right? Because I needed help, and the team, I guess I kind of realized, I still need more help, but also I can, because remember, I was resisting very much moving from freelancing to being an agency, which was ironic because I already probably worked with about 20 people in a year that I was subcontracting different things to. But I came to really be like, okay, well, where are my shortcomings as a

Yeah

Yes.

professional or where the things were if I had someone doing this it would strengthen our ability to then provide these services to other people and so the first hire was actually my intern. I would say my first full -time on staff hire was my intern Rocio Granella who's now a project manager and her skills were so complimentary she was pursuing an MBA she was really a numbers person but she also had a teaching background and a learning design background so she's like

I kind of came into this internship to learn that stuff, but I don't want to do that. That's what I learned from my internship. I want to do like numbers and you know, operations and things like that. I was like, that's perfect because that's what I've been thinking I need for the last, yeah. So it was, it was serendipitous. And then, you know, we started to see that we were getting a lot of projects. And so the next year when we had our next intern,

Yeah.

That's what I need. Yeah.

The person, Katie Hines, who's a fantastic ID, was like, I really want to leave my editing job. I don't know. Hopefully I'm not calling anything out that nobody knows. But I'm thinking about leaving my editing job because I really want to pursue learning design. And I was like, you know what? Let's just cut the internship short. You're hired. And so she became part of the team and she's just incredible. Same thing to Diego. Same thing. He ended up being an intern. And then I was like, we actually really need someone who knows marketing, community building, and you know, graphic design, all of that stuff. And so it just rolled right in.

Hahaha

Mm -hmm.

and is our junior digital designer. Rocio told me I've set a dangerous precedent of hiring my interns. And so we'll see who's on the team next. But I do think even so, even the freelancers we hire, everyone, we're really collaborative spirited. We're candid, but kind. Everyone will call everybody on.

gosh.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

I don't want to say call, because that's not even the right terminology. But we're willing to point out mistakes or work with each other or say, like, I can't do that. And that's really important. The people who haven't worked well with us are basically the people who kind of, I would say,

Mm -hmm.

like phone it in, you know, like don't really want to be a team player, but also like just give me the bare minimum of work. And so my team is, that's not their spirit. Like they will go above and beyond even when maybe they shouldn't for the people we serve.

Well, this is such a collaborative industry and to make good training, you need a group of people that are going to work well together. Not just to keep, you know, the deadlines, budget, all that good thing in check, but to really work together to find those solutions and turn them into solid training modules for, you know, whatever the needs are, whether it's on that lower end of the funnel with the micro learning and stuff, or whether it's building an entire network.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

free for your company.

And they're a big part of deciding all that. Like he said, you know, we have those conversations monthly. We have a year ID day where we can either do trainings or just kind of sit and talk about things or have a social hour. But every time I'm trying to make a big strategy decision as a leader, I try to kind of bake my ideas a little bit, but it always comes to them. And so when I told them social learning networks, they were like, it's going to be hard because no one knows what the heck that is, but we're in, you know, and they help, they help kind of guide the way.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

I think that's important.

I mean, just from how you've described it, it sounds like a very exciting approach. And I think it's something that once a company buys into it and they start seeing that not only are they going to have better retention for the actual knowledge that they're putting into their brains, they're also just going to keep the community alive longer. You're not going to have big turnovers in departments year over year. You're not going to have to spend, you know, an extra

4 to 8K to replace and train a new person. So I think that's incredible. What would you say your goals are for the future? Maybe on a personal level and also on a business level.

Yeah.

So I can start with the easy one, which is always the business, because we kind of know where we're going. So we just want to bring scalable social learning everywhere we can. We want to do that. We love building cohorts. I think that's our favorite thing. We love social learning networks. They're wonderful, but we recognize they're not for everyone. And they take a really heavy lift. But the thing we can do tomorrow, literally within six weeks, we can deliver you a cohort blueprint for a 90 -day program. So yes, that's our favorite thing, blended learning cohorts. I think that my group just loves doing that.

Really? Awesome.

so more of that, we are also going, we are partnered with Myra Rolldown, who is a AI technologist and speaker, futurist. She's incredible. We've partnered with her to develop a program for teens on AI. And so it walks you from everything, you know, AI literacy through inclusion, doing some really neat hands -on stuff. It walks through tools and task analysis, prompt engineering,

Very cool.

serial attacks and cyber security and all of that and so we've just launched that and it'll probably go out to the general public somewhere by the end of the year. Pretty excited. So that'll be a big goal for us to really roll that out because I think it's very much needed and then we're hoping to roll out our social learning program for...

Mm -hmm.

Ooh, very exciting.

L &D professionals this year as well. So those are the big goals. Personally, I have no idea. Just maintain sanity.

Ha ha ha.

Yeah, it's been like a crazy year. I won't trauma dump on people, but it's been a crazy year in my personal life. And so I think it's been a good lesson for me and just like not controlling things or also I had to learn, you know, I didn't apply for some things thinking something was going to happen in terms of like conferences and stuff. And then it didn't. And now like, I should have just, I should have just put my proposal in and you know, if I got in, I could have just arranged something later. But so I've learned some good lessons, I think that I

Yeah.

Yeah.

going to work on continuing to adopt about going with the flow and not saying no to things preemptively.

I like that. You seem like a very much go with the flow type of person. And I think that is a breath of fresh air in this industry because everything is changing so quickly. You think you got a plan of action, then all of a sudden, you know, three months later, you're like, well, things change, but we're going to move with it. So I love that. Thank you so much, Nicole, for joining us. And I wish you guys the best of luck. I can't wait to keep tabs on you and really

That is so fast.

Yeah.

see what you're all coming out with. It's very exciting. I think it's incredibly innovative. I think really the beauty is that you're taking learning away from the individual and bringing it to the community. And I think that that is incredibly important. You know, there's a lot of folks right now that are getting into that like

TikTokification of micro learning and stuff, which is nice. It does add a little bit of the social side of it, but I think truly making it a community and you know, working with an entire team as opposed to just focusing down on the individual. I think that's incredible. I think it's a very exciting approach to adult learning. So thank you for sharing that with us and yeah, anytime you guys got anything exciting come up.

Please jump on the podcast. We'd love to have you again.

Thanks, Doug. This was a great conversation and I'm really glad we could chat.

You