A Learning Thanksgiving 2015

As the year comes to a close, our teams and clients are usually focused on finishing projects, taking care of end of year budgets and hopefully planning some well-earned vacation time. So it’s nice that in the flurry of year-end preparations that we have Thanksgiving to remind us that not everything is built around one more project and one more business milestone.

So I’m not going to write about trends or the wonders of instructional design, instead I want to talk about how thankful I am for the muse of creativity and perseverance. We are grateful for this particular muse, which has enabled more than 50% growth in the past three years, and challenged us to look for ways to intrigue learners by building engaging and challenging training with the relevance and vibrancy that every one of us deserves.

I want to thank managers and executives in some of the country’s leading brands for looking at solutions that disrupt the mundane, trusting Allen to create the portals that gamify and enhance their content, and pushing our teams to new heights of visual creativity.

This very muse of creativity and perseverance is often challenged by time and habit. I am grateful for the abilities of our team to mesh science and art. To paraphrase the philosopher Karl Popper our designers are often challenged by “clock questions” or “cloud questions.” In some cases, we apply the science of learning and can understand the cause and effect of our efforts much like the precise workings of a clock, but that precision makes a bigger impact on behavior when we combine art, talent and creativity with the human experience.

My biggest thanks goes to our teams—student of design and education; former teachers and professors; artists with words, graphics and video; and programmers for our portals and courses. For those not familiar with our process, our goal is to pinpoint the goals and create the best program to achieve those goals; we look for those clocks and clouds that are part of how we experience and learn.

We thank the muses for the gifts they bestow, clients who challenge us, and teams that bring passion and creativity to our courses and portals.

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at AllenComm!