10

Working With Subject Matter Experts

What’s Inside This Chapter

This chapter considers additional tactics for working with your SME to gather information, describing:

• developing content with a SME

• getting past tangents

• going through edits with your SME.

At the end of the chapter are three worksheets to further guide your course development and SME relationship.

10

Working With Subject Matter Experts

One of the most important and distinguishing aspects of technical training is dependence on SMEs. Because technical courses are designed based on the information given from a SME, developers are inherently dependent on the SME (and sometimes all of the SME’s idiosyncrasies) when designing a course. In fact, as the topics get more complicated, the “secret” to instructional design becomes more and more about productive work habits and communication with your SME.

You need to have ready a variety of tactics for gathering information, and you need to be able to review content effectively and efficiently with your SME. Each of these items will be discussed in this chapter.

Developing Content With SMEs

Keep in mind four things when developing content with SMEs:

• Visualize it.

• Provide templates.

• Show examples.

• Believe in it.

Visualize It

Help your SME visualize your training solution. Provide a visual timeline of the learner experiences planned (Figure 10-1). Use this as a quality check and a communication tool to ensure that you and your SME agree about the state of the training and any future tweaks that need to be made.

Provide Templates

If you are able to provide your SME an established template that they can use to provide content, this can be helpful. This works especially well if you are creating learning objects that are part of a series. Chapter 9 discussed using templates and worksheets to capture SME information.

Show Examples

Provide your SME specific, detailed examples of the type of content that you need from them. As mentioned previously, create a library of examples you can show your SME. (For example, “I need a case study filled out just like this one, but it needs to be about your topic.”)

Believe in It!

Finally, believe in your training solution. If you don’t appear confident in your proposed learning solution, why would you expect your SME to buy into it?

Finding Out “the Why” From Your SME

As you’ve gathered by now, technical training needs to include the “why” along with the “what.” Whether they realize it or not, SMEs use their knowledge of the “why” to come up with the “what.” Still, they often need to be reminded to include both concepts in the content they provide. As training practitioners, developers need to become accustomed to asking about the “why.”

It is taken for granted that this “why” information will be grasped intuitively by the learners. But this does not automatically happen. Build the “why” into your training materials, and teach your instructors how to consistently ask the learners, “Why do we care about this? What does this information have to do with your jobs?”

Getting Past Tangents

Sometimes, when communicating with your SME, you are bound to find yourself faced with an issue that can easily become the bane of a technical developer’s existence: the Dreaded SME Tangent.

Nearly everyone who has designed a technical course has been frustrated by the long-winded tangents on various technical topics that some SMEs have the tendency to make. Little will bring a productive meeting to a grinding halt faster than a SME pontificating on some bizarre kernel of information that is of limited relevance to your course but on which the SME is highly educated and excited to share. Tangents can bog down a meeting, frustrate you, confuse you, and possibly even bore you to tears.

Still, there is a positive side to tangents. As much as you may want to gather information in a linear fashion, there are instances when it is valuable to just let the information flow in naturally. Be on the lookout for spontaneous tidbits that you can catch as you go. SMEs are not necessarily thinking in the context of a class as they explain things to you. As the SME speaks, be mindful of information that might be related to a different part of the course, and document it. Don’t be afraid to switch gears temporarily if you suddenly realize you are listening to golden information for a different section of the course. You may never get back to this same conversation, and thus you may not have easy access again to the explanation being given. As long as you realize that you and your SME are on a tangent, and you make a mental (or physical) note of where the conversation branched off, you are still in good shape and can set yourself up to capture many valuable nuggets of information.

This is not to say, however, that you should be a slave to the aimlessly wandering minds of all SMEs or that you should always let them decide where the conversation goes. If a tangent gets out of control or a SME keeps returning to it unnecessarily, first look critically at the topic and make sure you’re not missing a connection. If there is no connection the SME can adequately explain and you are certain it is a “rogue” tangent, cut it off as best you can. Comments such as these may work: “I understand that may be part of the third chapter. We will get to that shortly. For now, I need information for chapter 2,” or “According to the objectives we came up with for this class, that information is not included. Either we have to rethink our objectives or that material likely has a spot in an entirely different class. I will make a note of it, and we can return to it later. For now, I am interested in these things listed for chapter 2.” These comments can help you recover from the tangent of a wayward SME.

Despite the risk of rogue tangents, digressions from the topic can, if managed and used correctly, provide unprecedented access to information. Recognizing the value of a tangent is a skill set that every technical developer needs to hone. If you choose not to engage in a tantalizing tangent because of time or other constraints, at the very least write down as many key phrases as you can that might help you to spur this conversation with the SME later. Even though you may not fully understand the thought process that spurred the SME to go off on a specific tangent (as far as the intricacies and relatedness of the technical topic), it is important to be able to recognize the signs of a valuable information drop and tap into these opportunities.

Not all tangents will lead you to a pot of gold. Still, recognizing when to let a tangent run wild can provide you with a valuable occasion for collecting missing information.

Going Through Edits With Your SME

After you have successfully collected information from your SME and put together a first draft of the training materials, you will need to schedule a review session with your SME. While there is likely to be relief on your side that you were able to get a first draft finished, your development work is not finished. It is necessary for the SME to review the content, edit it, and clearly communicate any changes necessary for the material.

Educate your SME on what is good and bad feedback. Be very clear about your expectations. Even show them examples if possible. For example, the feedback on Figure 10-2 is not effective. When “Sam” simply crosses out or circles information, there is not enough information to make the correct changes to the document.

Your editing sessions with your SME can be quite extensive. You are basically asking them to consider whether course objectives will be met through the training content provided, whether there is a logical flow of material, whether technical explanations are complete and unnecessary information is removed, whether the learner activities are challenging and useful, and so forth. You should look positively on review sessions with your SME; you will have the opportunity to heighten the value of your training solution.

As you review material with a SME, you should ask pointed questions to facilitate a higher quality of content:

• What are your overall impressions of the material?

• Does this material meet our objectives?

• What are the weak points? What are the strong points?

• Does this activity make sense here?

• How is the flow of the content? Should any concepts be rearranged? Does it make sense to talk about Idea X before we begin talking about Idea Y?

• What do you think is the most important part? Are we covering it well enough?

• What do you think the learners will have the hardest time understanding? Is there anything we can do to help them understand it better?

• If you could talk about only one thing during this part of the training, what would it be?

• If you had to take one thing out (because of time constraints or some other circumstance), what would it be? Why?

• What do you think is the most controversial part of the material? Are we addressing it in the right way? In what other ways might we address it?

• If learners could take away only one thing, what would it be?

• Is there any material that is not absolute, that is, is there any content that does not specifically have a yes or no or right or wrong answer? Are we addressing it in the right way? (For example, should we ask an open-ended question about it? Should we have a planned activity in which learners debate both sides of the issue?

• Does this sentence make sense? How might I word it better?

• Are we missing anything?

Dealing With Items Removed From the Material

Material may come and go from the training. Don’t become so attached to the content that you are not able to take constructive criticism or say goodbye to something you created. You should be able to look at the content as an outsider.

It is still acceptable to question why something stays or why something is removed—especially if it is something that was identified during the analysis phase. As you are an outsider to the technical content, you need to keep a perspective of the eventual learners.

Ensuring That Explanations Make Sense

Another aspect to be aware of when going through edits with your SME is verifying that content (for example, a paragraph or section) still makes sense when the SME crosses out material. Sometimes, a SME will cross out something that is not true. This is good. However, sometimes taking out one sentence will change the meaning of the content. You need to look at the point of the deleted sentence and double-check that what remains still makes sense. To verify this, simply ask your SME: “If we take that sentence out, does the paragraph still make sense? Does it still flow with the rest of the content? Is there something we could add to make the sentence true?” Sometimes, your SME will then respond with something like “OK, I see what you mean. OK, instead of taking the entire thing out, let’s just change ‘actual depth’ to ‘calculated depth’ and then we can keep that sentence.”

Keeping Old Drafts

As you begin to compile different versions of material from your SME review sessions, it is important to keep old drafts of the material. Prior drafts can clarify the evolution of the course and the material if questions arise. In addition, you never know when the SME will change their mind about an activity or a chart that was removed, and you can save yourself time and hassle if you are able to quickly copy and paste something your SME wants included after all.

Treat the Topic Individually

Finally, remember that every technical subject needs to be treated individually. There are huge variations in technical subject matter, and the type of information provided for one topic may not be available for a second one. Accepting this helps you make the most out of the content you do have.

Remember Your Strengths

Don’t forget that one of your strengths is that you are not an expert on the information you are developing. Because of this, you don’t allow your SME to take anything for granted. Your questions force the SME to explain things in a more complete way. Even though SMEs may sound exasperated at times, and you may feel foolish when you realize that you are asking a very basic question that everyone already assumes you know the answer to, remember that to be successful as a developer, you sometimes just have to ask the question. Someday, with experience, you might get to a high level of understanding on your technical topic. Don’t be devastated or disheartened if it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years to become a SME. No one expects you to do it overnight.

Remind yourself that you bring a specific and important skillset to the process. All expertise is relative. The fact that you do not know about a certain technical process does not make you stupid. It just means you don’t know about that particular technical process—nothing more, and nothing less. Besides, you’ll probably find, just from the nature of learning, that you will know a whole lot more about that technical process than the average person by the time you have finished developing the training.

Getting It Done

It cannot be emphasized enough that being able to work effectively with a SME is a critical skill for a nontechnical designer who is designing a highly technical training course. In highly technical, highly specialized trades, you will not necessarily find a library of knowledge where you can go to find information or look up the answers to your questions. You are dependent on another person, an expert, to provide this information. Therefore, your relationship and communication with this person are very important. As such, when you are designing technical training, communication skills become just as important as knowing instructional design theory. To enhance communication, help your SME visualize your training solution. Provide templates, show examples, and believe in your solutions and recommendations.

You should also ask a lot of questions and be strategic about whether to let technical tangents run their course. You can also create to-do lists, distribute SME worksheets, review past jobs as a potential starting point, create skeleton PowerPoints, host a content development meeting, or hold a pilot course.

When reviewing material with your SME, you are asking them to consider whether course objectives will be met through the training content provided, whether there is a logical flow of material, whether technical explanations are complete and unnecessary information is removed, whether activities are challenging and useful, and so forth. You should look positively on review sessions with your SME, as these provide an opportunity to heighten the value of your class.

In addition, as a nontechnical developer, you bring a fresh perspective to the material. Your questions force the SME to consider important holes in the material that might otherwise have been overlooked.

Finally, you will find that what works for one project and one SME does not always work for your next project and your next SME. It is through constant and effective communication with your SME that you are likely to find the right fit for both of you each time. Use Worksheets 10-1, 10-2, and 10-3 as guides to get started with good SME collaboration and information-sharing.

Worksheet 10-1. The Course Development SME Handout

The following is a handout that you can copy for your SME to use as talking points at the beginning of a training project.

Worksheet 10-2. Creating a Case Study

Give this worksheet to your SME to help collect content for a technical case study.

Worksheet 10-3. SME Editing Criteria

Copy this handout for your SME as editing criteria for a project review.