Your wisdom deserves more than a one-off workshop. In this conversation, I sit down with Christopher Dundy, CEO of Flagship LMS, to explore how coaches, entrepreneurs, and organizations can turn expertise into structured courses that deliver consistent results.
We talk about the power of systems, why standardizing training saves money (and protects you legally), the difference between pedagogy and andragogy, and how gamification and engagement strategies make learning stick.
If you’ve ever repeated the same lesson more than once, this episode will show you how to capture it, scale it, and create measurable transformation.
A Course Design Primer https://flagshiplms.com/
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Grab a free Client Acquisition Audit and I’ll show you exactly where your message, offer, and CTA are leaking conversions—and the 3 fixes to turn your podcast/Substack into a client pipeline.
👉 Book here: https://coachsalchemist.com
Transcript
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Your wisdom deserves more than a webinar. Imagine turning what you already teach into a structured course that delivers results
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Every single time, without adding more to your plate. Hi, and welcome to the UWorld Order Showcase Podcast, where we feature life, health, transformational coaches and spiritual entrepreneurs who are stepping up to be the change they want to see in the world.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I'm your host, Jill Hart, The Coach's Alchemist, on a mission to help coaches and entrepreneurs amplify their voice, monetize their mission, and get visible. If you're ready to start attracting premium clients without chasing algorithms or hunting people down like a banshee on a mission, head over to thecoachesalchemist.com and schedule your free client acquisition audit. It's the first step
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::ing and administration. Since:5
::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Reliable, and aligned with real organizational goals.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: A former Marine infantry officer, Christopher brings a systems-driven mindset to course design and delivery, helping coaches and entrepreneurs transform their expertise into scalable training that creates lasting impact. Welcome to the show, Christopher, it's great to have you with us.
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::Christopher Dundy: Thank you, Jill. It's nice to be here. I appreciate your time.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I'm really looking forward to… to chatting with you about
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: all of these things, because I think that they're very important aspects to any of the things that we're doing online and trying to affect change with people, because really, ultimately, education is all about affecting change in
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: human behavior. So, let me ask you the big question. What's the most significant thing, in your opinion, as individuals we can do to make an impact on how the world is going?
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::Christopher Dundy: Well, I think you said it best in your introduction, which is, that you need to amplify your voice.
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::Christopher Dundy: When I was in London, in Hyde Park, they've got an area called Speaker's Corner there, and anybody by law can go there and set up their little soapbox and stand up and talk about whatever they want to talk, free from, you know, any,
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::Christopher Dundy: any kind of censorship, any kind of prohibition. And, you know, that's a wonderful thing. I think every society should have that, but the person on that soapbox is only going to reach the people within the sound of his voice, and maybe it's effective, and maybe it's not. So, anything that we can do to take
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::Christopher Dundy: an individual's good ideas, or thoughts, or, you know, whatever it is that they have to contribute to the world, and then make that available to a larger audience is a good thing. And, you know, a learning management system is certainly one way of doing that.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, yeah, it's the way that helps, actually, once you get out there, and you're sharing your ideas, it's how to take the idea from
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: this is the general idea to… this is it in… this is how you implement it. So it…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I'm all about course creation.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I love it. A former homeschooling mom, and, you know, I'm just, like, all about systems and mechanisms for getting people from where they are to where they want to be, the result that they want to experience, whether it's, you know, more information or…
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::Christopher Dundy: just as a side note, I'm really impressed that you did the homeschooling thing, because I do… I spend a lot of time in the public school system in South Central Pennsylvania. From middle school, elementary school, high school, I go in lots of classrooms all the time, and
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::Christopher Dundy: You know, wonderful education, but nothing beats a solid homeschool curriculum for her.
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::Christopher Dundy: targeting the learning to your specific children or, you know, group of children. It's a great, great idea, and I'm glad you did it. That gives you a lot of… a lot of credit in my… in my book.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I… I learned so much. You'd be amazed how much your kids can teach you.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Just by being open and exploring the world with them, because that's really all homeschooling is, is exploring.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: We didn't grade.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: In my… in my home, because I look at… I look at education in terms of, you know.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Facilitating the ability for people to change.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: But…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It… it also… we learn so much in the mistakes that we make, the ways that it doesn't work, or reasoning out why that particular conclusion isn't necessarily the best conclusion to come to.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Rather than just rewarding rote answers. Like, what you get right is, like, well, that's great, but…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: what did you learn from what you got wrong? Because to me, that's far more important.
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::Christopher Dundy: Yeah, well, and you know, and I'm sure all of your listeners know, that the public school education in America, was brought here by Horace Mann, and he got his ideas from, visiting Prussian schools and the Prussian,
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::Christopher Dundy: society, and their public education system was essentially set up to create two things, factory workers and soldiers.
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::Christopher Dundy: And, you know, we brought that over here, and then we adapted it to an agrarian timeline, and, you know, none of that is conducive to students being able to pick up the kinds of lessons that we need, particularly in the 21st century.
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::Christopher Dundy: And I think that that's… I think your idea was great. Grades are certainly not an important thing. Evaluations are important. Yeah. Feedback is important. A grade, not so much.
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::Christopher Dundy: And I love the idea that you can take a lesson for a child, and the idea, you know, you can incorporate mathematics into any kind of a lesson that is,
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::Christopher Dundy: something that the student is more interested in, an area where the student is interested. So, you know, if they want to explore science, or if they want to explore STEM, you know, anything
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::Christopher Dundy: Anything can be… you can incorporate math and science, and you can incorporate language arts, and you can incorporate, you know, visual media, all of those kinds of things, and if you're tailoring it to the student's interests.
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::Christopher Dundy: Man, there's just no stopping them.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: There really isn't. You just open doors into…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: The appreciation of learning, which is…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: To me, the most important thing we can pass on to our children is in the next generation, whether they're your children or other people's children, is a love of assimilating information and processing it in a way that is gonna
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: give society in general the best output. You know, whether it's, you know, how to make the better YouTube video.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You know.
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::Christopher Dundy: I need to know that! It's true, it's true.
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::Christopher Dundy: Have you ever… oh, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. Yeah, go ahead.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Have I ever.
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::Christopher Dundy: Have you… have you ever heard of an organization called, Junior Achievement?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: -
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::Christopher Dundy: So, Junior Achievement is a national organization that is, they bring curriculum into the public schools. They have courses everywhere from… for every level, from kindergarten to seniors in high school. They're primarily focused on entrepreneurship, on personal finance, they're starting to get into STEM,
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::Christopher Dundy: But if your listeners are… are interested in this, in most states, I think, they have a…
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::Christopher Dundy: a facility called BizTown, and I think, you know, this is… we were talking a little bit about,
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::Christopher Dundy: bringing the whole experience of society into the curriculum for particular students. The students… this is probably one of the best educational experiences I've ever seen. I've volunteered with them for 6 years, I've probably done 50 Biz Towns as a volunteer. The students take about 2 weeks to prepare for this in their schools. They have to put together a resume, they have to interview for a job.
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::Christopher Dundy: They have to, study, you know, what it is that a CEO does, a CFO, and all of these different positions. Then, on the day they go to BizTown, Biztown's a multi… each of the facilities is a multi-million dollar facility, and they have
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::Christopher Dundy: at least in South Central Pennsylvania, they've got 13 actual working businesses inside this area. It's a town square, so there's a working radio station, a working television station, and these are all free programs, by the way. Schools don't pay for these. They can just opt in to this experience. They've got a working bank.
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::Christopher Dundy: The students go there. Each business has a CFO with a working, accounting program.
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::Christopher Dundy: the CEO, they've got all the salespeople, there's a working restaurant, there's a mayor and a city hall, and they spend the day there. They earn two paychecks. When they get their paychecks, they take one of them as a hard check, they go to the bank, and they deposit it.
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::Christopher Dundy: The second one is a direct deposit. They've got an ATM card. They can check the balance on an ATM machine.
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::Christopher Dundy: they earn their money, they pay their taxes, they go and buy things from all the different vendors there. At the end of the day, they, you know, the video or the TV station is conducting interviews, and at the end of the day, they have a video of their whole experience with advertisements and the weather and
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::Christopher Dundy: you know, reporting and all of these different things. There's a working magazine, and so at the end of the day, they've got a magazine that they're taking home with them, and, you know, all of these things, they have
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::Christopher Dundy: as products of the hard work that they've done preparing for this particular day. It's absolutely phenomenal, totally free to the school districts. We have two in Pennsylvania, one in Pittsburgh, one here in the South Central part, and I'd encourage your learners to, or your, excuse me, your listeners to, look up Junior Achievement in their particular state and see if they've got one of these biz towns available, and if their school isn't going to it.
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::Christopher Dundy: you know, talk to the school administration and say, hey, look, let's just spend the day going down here and kind of getting a feel for this. Phenomenal program, really well done. Totally immersive simulation for these students about what it means to actually have a job and, you know, perform their tasks and get paid for it.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: My philosophy is, Oh, you're 13?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: There's a field over there, and that farmer needs his pipes moved.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Go get that job!
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::Christopher Dundy: Exactly, exactly.
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::Christopher Dundy: Yep, there's some snow that needs shoveling, go get it.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, well, I… I raised my… most of my kids on a… on a homestead, and we had animals, and there were fields, and they really did have to go move pipe, and…
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::Christopher Dundy: They had to get a job when they were, like.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: 15, and… They graduated when they were 16, so they were all working.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: By the time they were 16, and…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: it just gets them out, especially young men. Young men do not need to be hanging around in school when they're 17 or 18. They're in their prime shape. They should be out, like…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Maybe the military is the option for them, maybe not, but they need to be out doing something physical and
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And… and moving, and letting their minds continue to grow and expand, and…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I don't think… we're wasting a huge resource to me.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: In the world today, because…
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::Christopher Dundy: You're right about that, you're right. I grew up in Alaska, and my first job was in the 6th grade working for the Anchorage Daily News. I delivered newspapers in the morning. So in Alaska, in the wintertime, it's completely dark, you've got 2 or 3 feet of snow.
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::Christopher Dundy: And, you know, I'm out there, and this sounds like something that, you know, you would tell your kids, but I did deliver newspapers in the snow, in the dark.
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::Christopher Dundy: in the, you know, below zero temperatures, so… I get the… you're right, the hard work ethic is something that, every kid should experience.
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::Christopher Dundy: Because I do think it sticks with you. And if nothing else, you can tell good stories to your kids, so…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Right? Right? And working for a farmer is much better than working for mom and dad, because a farmer doesn't care what you were doing the night before. They just want those pipes moved
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: in the pre-dawn hours, and, you know, like, with you and your newspapers, I…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: the newspaper doesn't care. Those clients, they want those newspapers on their doorstep when they're getting up to have coffee, so…
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::Christopher Dundy: That's it.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You're either gonna do it, or you're not getting paid.
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::Christopher Dundy: That is it.
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::Christopher Dundy: Good point.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So, tell us… tell us how Moodle got to be named Moodle. I know you… you told me, but I don't know, I'm sure there are other people out there that are like, Moodle?
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::Christopher Dundy: What are they talking about? Yeah, it's, it's a crazy name. So, the creator… Moodle is a learning management system. Right now, there are
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::Christopher Dundy: dozens of learning management systems out there, but Moodle was one of the first, and it's an open source platform, which means that anybody has access to it. You can download it, set it up on your own computer at home for your kids, if you're doing homeschooling, you need to know a little bit about how to set it up on the server, but there are a lot of step-by-step instructions out there.
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::Christopher Dundy: It was invented by a gentleman named Martin Duguayamas, he's Australian, and he went to school in the outback. He was also a homeschool student, and his lessons were delivered by airplane at that time. And so, he kind of grew up saying, you know, there's got to be a better way to do this. And he went on to pursue,
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::Christopher Dundy: computer software design in college, and part of his PhD was these distributed learning environments. And, so he went ahead and named this… Moodle as actually an acronym. It stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment.
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::Christopher Dundy: Originally, just as a bit of trivia, the legend is that it was started out as Martin's object-oriented dynamic learning environment, but he thought that was a bit pretentious, so he changed the M2 modular instead. But that's how we got Moodle. It's…
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::Christopher Dundy: ubiquitous. The federal government, U.S. federal government uses it in multiple, federal agencies. I worked for the Peace Corps.
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::Christopher Dundy: as their LMS administrator, and Moodle was the learning management system that the Peace Corps volunteers all around the world, as well as the administration in Washington, D.C. used.
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::Christopher Dundy: Buckingham Palace uses it. There are numerous universities that use it, and that's around the world and in the United States as well. So it is… it is absolutely everywhere, and it is
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::Christopher Dundy: probably the most robust platform that I've ever used. It can do just about anything, and it's, in my opinion, superior to most of the different platforms that are out there. But, of course, since that's what I do for a living, I'm a little biased.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So how do you actually work with the whole Moodle system? What do you actually offer clients?
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::Christopher Dundy: So, for… for us.
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::Christopher Dundy: Because Moodle is an open source platform, and because it's free to anybody in the world,
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::Christopher Dundy: you can download it, you can set it up yourself, you can go ahead and create your own courses, etc, but the thing about that is that it is… it's a little complicated to do that, because if… you have to understand a little bit about servers and how the software gets set up on the server, you have to know a little bit about the installation of software, and then the configuration of Moodle itself, and Moodle is feature-rich.
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::Christopher Dundy: Which is a nice way of saying it can be complicated if you don't know all the settings. And then the last thing is you have to understand how online courses are built. It's not really the same thing as just taking your PowerPoints and putting them up online, although a lot of people do that.
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::Christopher Dundy: But there, you know, there's more to the construction of a course, and so our job is to take all of that off of your plate, you being, you know, a nonprofit organization like the Pennsylvania State Education Association.
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::Christopher Dundy: the Pennsylvania Teachers Union is one of our clients. Maryland Teachers Union is one of our clients. Large organizations, kind of who we specialize in, but, you know, this is… our job is to take all of the things that are not your core competencies.
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::Christopher Dundy: As an organization, off of your plate, so that all you have to do is say.
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::Christopher Dundy: kind of wave your magic wand. We would like to have a course on, and then you provide access to your experts. Our job, then, is to
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::Christopher Dundy: tap their experience, their knowledge, and put that into a course on a good-looking learning management system that works smoothly for your clients. So, we're kind of the magic wand, if you will, for your training team.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So, you work more with,
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: With organizations that are… are trying to disseminate education among their employees or their… their teams in order to…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: To meet certain goals or… or strategy… or criterias?
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::Christopher Dundy: Yeah, that's a great question. So, essentially, the people that… or the organizations that we… we deal with every vertical. We have organizations in the manufacturing space, in the healthcare space, in the education space. We do…
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::Christopher Dundy: Large, large, companies, but, the…
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::Christopher Dundy: the learning management system in general, learning management system software, is good for any size company that has a distributed workforce. So, in the old days, you had to send a trainer to some branch to give some updated information. Now what you would do is you would put that information online and bring those people in on, you know, company time or their own time.
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::Christopher Dundy: to that training so they can access that information. It saves you time and energy, you know, you don't have to have people traveling all over the place and all the ancillary costs associated.
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::Christopher Dundy: So it's really, it's a wonderful way to capture your training when it's delivered one time perfectly, and then you can have that perfect delivery
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::Christopher Dundy: on demand, anytime you want, to as many different people as you want. And to answer your question, it could be your own employees. We also have clients, for example, we have a manufacturing client who has
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::Christopher Dundy: Vendors that need to, or their own clients that need to understand how their products work and how they get serviced.
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::Christopher Dundy: and what to do in, you know, in case of problems, and so they bring those people onto the platform and make that training available to them. So it's not just their own company employees, but also people that they service. And so, really.
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::Christopher Dundy: your imagination is the limit to who can access that song. The nugget that I like to leave with all of my clients is, if you have to say something more than one time.
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::Christopher Dundy: recorded and captured so that you can put it online. You should never have, as an example, we have a healthcare client who has a single employee whose job it is to deliver employee onboarding training every Monday morning to all the people they hired in the last week. And
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::Christopher Dundy: Their whole job, Tuesday through Friday, is to prep for that meeting, and then they'll deliver the training. I just… I…
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::Christopher Dundy: shaking my head whenever they do that. Why don't you record that one time, put it online? Maybe you've got to have a little couple of touchpoints here or there, but generally speaking, you don't need to have an entire employee dedicated to onboarding.
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::Christopher Dundy: Seems like a waste.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, the…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: The main problem that I see with doing that scenario is that, in terms of every week you're preparing for it, and then you're delivering this.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's never the same.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So lack consistency, and there's gonna be times you miss stuff that you really need to tell everybody, whereas if you record it, you can make sure that you hit every important
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I that needs dotting, and T that needs crossed. And it may sound like…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Overkill, but in this world that we live in that's so litigious.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: if you miss something when you're onboarding somebody, the end result could be really catastrophic for your company. If… if something happens to that employee, and they go back, and they say, but you told me X, Y, and Z, and it's not recorded.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: So, there's not… nothing, you know…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Maybe mostly she says that, but did she really say that?
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::Christopher Dundy: Well, and you're exactly right. I'll give you another example where that is prevalent. We… one of our clients is the California Grocers Association Educational Foundation, and that is the umbrella group for all, grocery chains within the state of California. And the state of California has mandated that
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::Christopher Dundy: Every employee must receive, you know, it's an hour and a couple of minutes worth of sexual harassment training.
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::Christopher Dundy: And it has to be specific training for supervisors, and there's separate training for employees, but you, as an organization, to prevent the, you know, the… or to mitigate the dangers from our litigious society, you have to have
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::Christopher Dundy: record that the employees have taken that training annually, and you need to be able to point to that. And the learning management system is really the only good way to do that, because, as you mentioned, the training is standardized, so you know for a fact that every little point that was required by the state
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::Christopher Dundy: has been, touched on, and you have a record of when the individual logged in, and when they, you know, how much they watched, and what they got on the assessments, and all of those things. And so the learning management system in that case is absolutely your first line of defense against, you know, potential legal liability for your organization.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, and it's really sad that you have to say that, but it's just the way the world is right now, and you can either move with the times, and it's a money saver in the long run, because you're not paying this person to prep and stand up there and…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You know, they're having a bad Monday.
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::Christopher Dundy: Well, and that's, you know, I'm glad that you've mentioned… you brought up the money aspect of it, because a lot of my clients, this is…
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::Christopher Dundy: kind of a secondary consideration for them, and I try to preach this, the learning management system is not a cost center. It's not something that's just sucking revenue away from your other initiatives. It is an absolute revenue driver, and the reason it is, is because the only thing that is going to make your company successful is a well-trained and well-motivated workforce, and
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::Christopher Dundy: The way to do that is to provide them with the training that they need in a standardized format such that your product or service is delivered
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::Christopher Dundy: in the same way every single time. It's the same way, you know, McDonald's french fries taste the same around the world. Your employee experience, or your customer's experience, should be the same everywhere as well, and it's only by standardizing the training that that can happen.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, and even smaller companies, you know, I'm talking 50 or 100 employees, maybe even 25 employees.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: you start there, because you develop systems that can grow with you. Doing these one-offs with a human being, and, you know, I'm very pro-human, but there's just, like, there's times when a mechanized system will help everyone.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: on a larger scale than just trying to do it onesie-twosies. You can grow.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: if you've got systems started when you're smaller, whereas you run into bottlenecks. I mean, this… this gal doing this…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: seminar. I know trucking companies, they still do orientation with a human being standing in the front. That's the dumbest thing ever!
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::Christopher Dundy: It is.
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::Christopher Dundy: There is a great book for your listeners, and I really recommend that every business owner, for sure, read it, and it is called The Checklist Manifesto. And the Checklist Manifesto is… it was written by a doctor who
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::Christopher Dundy: Identified a whole series of problems that occurred in surgical operating rooms
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::Christopher Dundy: Because there were no systems or procedures in place. And we're talking little things, things you would think would be common sense. For example, count the number of sponges before you begin the operation, and then count the number of sponges at the end of the operation. If the numbers don't match.
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::Christopher Dundy: there's a problem. Let's go back and investigate. Little things like that, but because they didn't have those in place.
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::Christopher Dundy: post-surgical complications were a huge problem for a lot of hospitals, not only from patient care standpoint, but also from potential litigation later on. And so, the implementation of just a simple checklist
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::Christopher Dundy: Allowed the doctors to be able to cut down drastically on those kinds of complications and potential, you know, legal problems.
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::Christopher Dundy: Same thing… same principle as working with an airline pilot. You know, a pilot will never leave the ground without going through a pre-flight checklist, an in-flight checklist, a post-flight checklist, all of those kinds of things, and so…
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::Christopher Dundy: Applying that to your business is, in my opinion, an amazing thing because, you don't have… you don't miss steps, and everybody's tired, everybody's overworked, everybody has things going on in their personal lives that are distracting them, taking their attention away from… from whatever that task is.
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::Christopher Dundy: But that checklist ensures that
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::Christopher Dundy: The service or product is the same every single time. The experience is the same every single time, and as you brought up.
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::Christopher Dundy: For a small company, that could be life or death.
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::Christopher Dundy: for, you know, if you've got 20, 25 employees, you don't have the space to lose a customer or two, because, you know, that's a significant revenue drop for you. So, I agree with you 100% that it could be… should be something that everybody embraces.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Even employees. Employees appreciate consistency.
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::Christopher Dundy: When they can go in and…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: you know, watch whatever they have to watch, and be tested along the way, because testing is a way of saying, did you get the point that I'm trying to get across to you? It's feedback.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: for both of you, and it, you know, obviously you didn't get it. If you got the answer wrong, you can go back and watch it again until you… it's like, oh, yeah, okay, so I see where that was. It's not like you're bad or good, it's just feedback.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: back to the grading thing again. But if you can help your employees with that, rather than having them sit in a room where somebody's droning on at them and expecting them to take notes, and then remember what the important point was, where they can't, you know, rewind and rewatch.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Something that they might have, like.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: we all drift off. I mean, it's just, like, part of who we are, and we can only…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: focus for so long, and usually those orientations that are human-led are gonna be… there's gonna be somebody up there talking for a really long time, and you can't get up and move away, and let your brain, like.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Let it filter in, which…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: it's just how we are. We need to, like, have a moment and think about what we're learning, and, like, I equate learning to, like, hanging stuff on hangers in your closet.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: If you don't have the hangers, which is… most little kids don't… they don't have the hangers, so you can give them a bunch of information, and all that stuff's just gonna be laying on the floor.
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::Christopher Dundy: So…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: part of the beginning part of education is building the hangars for them. And then you give them information, and you tell them which hangar to hang that information on.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And then they can hang it up in their closet, and then when they want it, they know where to go to look for the hanger. And if you do that with your employees, it allows them to have some frame of reference. We call it a frame of reference, because
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: They know where to go to access that information that they're gonna need to do the job that you want them to do. So you just set everybody up for success.
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::Christopher Dundy: Well, and you've… and you… I couldn't have given a better analogy. The hangar analogy is wonderful. We do the same thing with all of our courses. The idea is that you first give the
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::Christopher Dundy: the pre-knowledge, the idea that this particular task relates to something you've already done because. And then once they've got that, which is the hanger that you've described, then you can begin to introduce, you know, something new. They've already got that architecture, they've got that thing that they can connect it to.
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::Christopher Dundy: So you're… that's huge.
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::Christopher Dundy: The other thing I think that you brought up, which is a big issue in
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::Christopher Dundy: The online learning space is the idea that
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::Christopher Dundy: A talking head is the best way to convey information to people, or to get them to learn something, and it's not, absolutely.
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::Christopher Dundy: There are two terms when we talk about online education. We're talking about education in general. We have pedagogy and andragogy. Most people are familiar with pedagogy, and they use that as the umbrella for everything associated with learning. Pedagogy specifically means teaching children.
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::Christopher Dundy: Andragaji is specifically teaching adults, and the idea is that adults actually learn differently from students.
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::Christopher Dundy: One of the things that adults really need in order to be engaged in their, their learning is they need to know what it is that they're going to be learning right up front. What is that thing that we are expected to accomplish? And then.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Where's the hangar?
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::Christopher Dundy: What's the hanger? And then why does that relate to what I'm doing? How is it going to improve my life right now? It can't be ambiguous. It's got to be very crystal clear. Why do I need to know this? Why do I need to know it right now? How's it going to affect me?
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::Christopher Dundy: But…
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::Christopher Dundy: But human beings in general, and adults in particular, don't learn as effectively when you're just talking at them, and maybe they're sort of sitting and passively taking notes. The idea is that they need to be engaged in some kind of problem solving.
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::Christopher Dundy: Because this also allows them to be able to connect this knowledge to previous experiences or previous knowledge.
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::Christopher Dundy: And, that is something that the clients that we deal with.
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::Christopher Dundy: don't often embrace. For them, because they've got so much going on with their core competencies, it's very difficult for them to sort of
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::Christopher Dundy: separate the… shift… change hats, if you will, to the training area, and then be, you know, figure out how we can best give this information, particularly subject matter experts who've got 30 years of experience, are not great, often, at explaining
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::Christopher Dundy: to a novice.
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::Christopher Dundy: how or why they need to know this. And so our job is to help you create scenarios in which your users can now
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::Christopher Dundy: this information and apply it somehow to solve a problem. And when they do that, we find that the learning outcomes are remembered substantially longer. It's that whole Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, if your learners or your listeners are familiar with that. If you don't.
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::Christopher Dundy: Give the information in a particular format, and then
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::Christopher Dundy: I call it a recursive training, they revisit that periodically at intervals, then the learners, after a month.
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::Christopher Dundy: they lose 80% of it. They lose 80% of what you just spent an hour trying to teach them, and so it's a waste of their time, it's a waste of your money.
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::Christopher Dundy: And it's just not really good education. So, that's one of the things that we also like to help our clients with. How can you maximize the, knowledge absorption and retention
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::Christopher Dundy: Because, it's just not enough to put up a video and let your users watch it.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: What you said is priceless.
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::Christopher Dundy: Thank you.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I just had, like, a light bulb moment in my life.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: In… in terms of… Well, I'll just tell you, I'm getting ready to… to…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: create a video channel, and I… my mind has been, like, all over the place on how I want to do it. I know what the end result is, but
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: In terms of… it's gonna be a channel about educating people on how to do stuff, but
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I think what you said was that you need to give them a puzzle.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And make them feel like they're collaborating in finding the answer, and you're going to seed along the way, in the training, how to get the right answer
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: to fix this puzzle, but you tell them what the… what the problem is up front. This is… this is the problem. Come along with me and see if you can figure it out before we get there. So, that makes the person like, okay, was… was that a clue?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It's kind of like writing a book, you know? You need to, like, seed stuff in there to hook them… to continue hooking them along to get to the end so that they can get the result that they need to get in order to
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You know, meet whatever criteria the company might have for them, but for personal
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: for their own personal satisfaction. They want to get to the end and find out what the answer really is. Did I get it right?
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::Christopher Dundy: That's exactly right. And Jill, the buzzword for this is gamification. And the problem that we've got for all of the trainers that are out there is, gamification in most people's minds, and particularly in corporate trainers, it equates to PBL, points, badges, and leaderboards.
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::Christopher Dundy: PBL is the very tip of the gamification iceberg, and there's so much below the waterline, and most of it… PBL really, we know from a lot of experimentation, is not very effective with adults. Kids tend to like it, they like to, you know, the competition, and then that's, you know… but for adults.
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::Christopher Dundy: We don't really embrace that as much as people would like to think we do, but what we do embrace, which falls under that below-the-waterline part of the iceberg, is exactly as you mentioned, the puzzle, the adventure, the journey, the
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::Christopher Dundy: Things that we've got to do to get to that final, answer, and it's…
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::Christopher Dundy: All it is, at the very… the very bottom line, gamification is just about generating dopamine hits in your users on a consistent basis, whatever that happens to be. And surprises do that. We… the minimum that I tell my clients is.
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::Christopher Dundy: We've got a series of, you know.
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::Christopher Dundy: PDFs or something that they've got to go through, this stultifying, soul-crushing kind of training that you've… you're just taking from the offline world and you're putting online. Intersperse that with a video of a cat doing something cute. Have that video hidden.
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::Christopher Dundy: it only… it's like a little Easter egg, it only pops up and opens once they've completed the first PDF or something. It stays for a period of time, and then when they start the next PDF, it disappears, never to be seen again. But…
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::Christopher Dundy: what that does is, because it's unexpected, it generates that dopamine hit in your user, and they start now going through the rest of the training, wondering what other little surprises are going to pop up when that happens. That's just one quick and easy way that you can do that, but the… if you have the time.
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::Christopher Dundy: If you are willing to create that sustained consecutive thought.
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::Christopher Dundy: then you can come up with the ideas that you just articulated, which are, you know, those puzzles, those journeys, those adventures that you can kind of send your users on. It takes time and energy to put that together, but the results are substantially more,
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::Christopher Dundy: Long-term than… than you would just, you know, having
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::Christopher Dundy: having them kind of go through the video, or a PDF, or whatever it is.
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::Christopher Dundy: It's really, they're gonna appreciate that.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And people learn in different ways. You know, we have the visual learners, but we have the tactile learners, and it's hard, in some ways, to do tactile online.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: With online learning, that you can tell people to write stuff down.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: People still have pens and paper.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Or, open your notebook and type.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: then you're doing something with your body. And, you know, when you can incorporate more than one learning modality into what you're trying to get somebody to cement in their being.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: you need to come at it from a couple of different angles. You know, you may be primarily a visual learner, or an auditory learner, but if you're just watching videos.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And you don't think to write stuff down, then… You know.
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::Christopher Dundy: Well, you're right, Jill, and I don't want to come across to the listeners as if a learning management system is the panacea for all of your training ills. It isn't. There are certain circumstances in which in-person training is appropriate and necessary, but as you mentioned.
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::Christopher Dundy: One of the things that a learning management system can do for you, a good platform, is provide flexibility for different types of learners. For example, once they watch a video, you can have an activity, such as a forum or a journal, where they then have to, you know, reflect on what it was that they learned and how that might be applicable to their particular job, and they can receive comments from their peers who are going through the course with them, or
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::Christopher Dundy: If that's not appropriate, they can receive comments from an instructor or a moderator who's, you know, taking a look at those kinds of things. But you're absolutely right, there are ways that you can engage that user,
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::Christopher Dundy: beyond just the multiple-choice question quiz at the end, which I, quite frankly, I abhor, but…
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::Christopher Dundy: But yes, reflective journals are a wonderful way to do it, or if there's something that they now have to create and put online, for example, maybe I have to do a, I have to demonstrate my particular product or something else by making a short iPhone video.
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::Christopher Dundy: 10 seconds or something, whatever, of me doing something, and then I can post that to the… to the course, whatever. The creative aspect of it is what I think makes learning management system administration fun, because you're looking for these different solutions to engage, you know, a disparate audience, and it's…
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::Christopher Dundy: It's a lot of… it's interesting stuff, frankly.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: It sounds really fascinating, and I know that you've created a course designer primer, course design primer, and I actually looked at it, it's fascinating. Not… not super complicated, it's very straightforward, and I appreciate that. But…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: You want to talk about it a little bit?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Sure.
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::Christopher Dundy: Yeah, I'd love to talk about it. No, so the course design primer, we give this away. It's something that I think every trainer should have, and what we do with it is whenever a client requires that we build a course for them, we ask for access to their subject matter experts. We don't… we…
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::Christopher Dundy: as a company, like to say that we are a member of your training team. And in my mind, what we should be doing is supplanting
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::Christopher Dundy: those… that training team. We should be the group that is responsible for that, because your job as an organization is to do whatever it is that you do well.
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::Christopher Dundy: training is typically not in that, and so it's easier and cheaper to outsource all of that to us, and you provide us with a project manager who kind of keeps things in check, but we bring your subject matter experts on board, they read the primer, but that acts as… it's a norming exercise. It allows us to
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::Christopher Dundy: be on the same
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::Christopher Dundy: page with vocabulary, so that when we say, what's your terminal learning objective? What are your enabling learning objectives? The subject matter expert understands what it is that we're looking for. And so, there are a handful of things that every course should be required to have.
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::Christopher Dundy: And at the risk of being pedantic, the terminal learning objective is the first thing. You…
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::Christopher Dundy: have to have what it is that your user should be able to do at the end of the course that they could not do at the beginning of the course. And we… our analogy for this is crossing a river, and so the terminal learning objective is the far bank of that river, and then there are a series of stepping stones across the way. Those are the enabling learning objectives. And so, maybe it is, the example we use is washing dishes.
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::Christopher Dundy: If you want to have clean dishes, then you need to be able to adjust the temperature of the water, determine how much soap is going to be necessary, you need to be able to use the sponge correctly, and you need to be able to stack the things in the, effectively into the drain board. All these different pieces
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::Christopher Dundy: would be your enabling learning objectives, and for each enabling learning objective, there's an assessment to include a final assessment, so that you know that the user has, in fact, incorporated that knowledge into the architecture of their personality.
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::Christopher Dundy: And that learning, that assessment, that final assessment, doesn't have to be, and probably should not be in most cases, a standard multiple-choice question.
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::Christopher Dundy: there should be a variety of different ways that you can, as a moderator, or as a course designer, or as a teacher, that you can observe that your students can do something. And
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::Christopher Dundy: this is the… and I'm sorry, I'm running on here, but this is one of my.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: They're good.
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::Christopher Dundy: real passionate thing for me.
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::Christopher Dundy: We cannot. You are totally unable to open somebody's head and see what's inside, see what they've learned. You don't know what they understand or do not understand. All we can do as course designers is
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::Christopher Dundy: ask them to do something which shows us that knowledge, and that demonstration could be a variety of things. It could be, you know, writing those forum posts or journal reflections. It could be creating some kind of an artifact that they can then post so we can see their understanding, but we have to make that comprehension visible.
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::Christopher Dundy: And…
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::Christopher Dundy: So allowing the course design primer and the things that you have to do in order to check all those boxes allows a person from your organization to be able to see, yes.
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::Christopher Dundy: Sally Smith does, in fact, understand the information because she has demonstrated it this way.
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::Christopher Dundy: And that's what the design primer at its core should do. It is…
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::Christopher Dundy: It's a checklist to ensure that your training is as effective as it could possibly be.
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::Christopher Dundy: We want to give it to you.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I love that you're giving it to us, and
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: For… for those of us who are coaches, and maybe we don't have huge teams, and we're…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: This is… this might not seem like it's appropriate, but it is so appropriate, because we all teach something. And if you understand what the end goal is.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I can't tell you how many people tell me
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: you know, I just want to help people live better, or, find their passion.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: that end result needs to be measurable and quantifiable. You need to have some way for them to say, yep.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Did it.
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::Christopher Dundy: I succeeded at the end of whatever it is that you're trying to teach someone.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And… and then there's… there's the steps to get there. This helps… coaches, no matter what you're…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: you're sharing, or you're selling, or you're offering to anybody, it involves a transformation, and that transformation is…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: teaching along the line. They may be, you know, you may be pulling it out of them, getting them to tell themselves, but at the end, they have to have some… some way of saying, yeah, I…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I got my money's worth. You did what you said you were gonna do. So, this is… this has been priceless, Christopher. Thank you so much for coming on the show and talking with me about this.
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::Christopher Dundy: Well, it's been an absolute pleasure, and I really appreciate you allowing me to come here. This has been a great forum for something that I'm really passionate about, so…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Yeah, I… keep going. You're doing amazing work.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: And if you are out there, or if you know of companies, or you are a company who has, you know…
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: A situation where you need to disseminate information and training to your
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Your customers, your employees, your team.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Any… any situation where you're repeating something, often. It… it could be… corsetized?
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Modulized!
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::Christopher Dundy: I haven't heard it before, but I like it. Take it.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Here, I'm just gonna make up words now. Visit… visit Christopher's website, flagshiplms.com.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Thanks again for joining me today, Christopher.
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::Christopher Dundy: I really appreciate Jill. Thank you for your time.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: To learn more about Christopher and to find the course design primer, please visit flagshiplms.com and
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: I will be sure to put that link in the show notes below. Thanks for tuning in with us today to the UWorld Order Showcase Podcast. If you're ready to amplify your voice, monetize your mission, and start attracting premium clients, your next step is to head to thecoachesalchemist.com and schedule your free client acquisition audit. Be sure to join us for our next episode as we share what others are doing to raise the global frequency, and remember.
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::Jill Hart-The Coach's Alchemist: Change begins with you. You have all the power to change the world. Start today and get visible.