“Creating Leaders & Transforming Industries”

Dr. Michael W. Allen, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Allen Interactions, has been a pioneer in the e-learning industry since 1971. He has decades of professional, academic, and corporate experience in teaching, developing and marketing interactive learning, and creating performance support systems. Dr. Allen has led teams of doctorate-level specialists in learning research, instructional design, computer-assisted learning, and human engineering. He defined unique principles and methods for designing and developing high impact interactive e-learning experiences that invoke critical cognitive activity and practice.

"Dr. Allen’s CCAF Design Model is used to achieve performance improvement outcomes, often in game-like experiences."

According to Dr. Allen, while there were authoring tools to create e-learning programs, the industry was and continues to be plagued with learning solutions that focus too much on content and not nearly enough on the learner and learning experience. Dr. Allen has been passionate and driven to banish boring e-learning by educating learning and training professionals and demonstrating how great learning programs can be with reasonable effort through the methods he created.

The Successive Approximation Model (SAM), created by e-learning pioneer Dr. Allen, is an iterative development process designed to focus on learner experiences, engagement, and motivation instead of content organization, presentation of information, and assessment through post-tests. SAM provides the options, strategies, and tools for teams to be successful in producing the best possible training given whatever the time, budget, and resources available. SAM addresses project roadblocks and is an agile development process built specifically to create performance-driven learning solutions.

Dr. Allen defines instructional interactivity as “interactivity that engages the learner’s mind to do those things that improve ability and readiness to perform effectively.” The CCAF Design Model drives instructional purpose and interactivity for each learning project designed at Allen Interactions and is implemented through the agile SAM Process. It consists of four elements:

• Context—a meaningful, relatable situation

• Challenge—a stimulus, such a problem to solve, and an urgency to act

• Activity—a physical, observable response or gesture in response to the challenge

• Feedback—a reflection to the learner about the effectiveness of their actions, sometimes augmented with hints, additional information, or demonstrations of alternative actions to consider

Allen Interactions uses CCAF to design all custom learning solutions to be authentic representations of real-world settings, choices, skill applications, and consequences that result from the various actions people might take on the job or elsewhere. It allows learners to practice to competency and confidence. The company’s insistence on creating Meaningful, Memorable, and Motivational learning experiences has required more power and flexibility than the commercially available technologies offer today. So, Allen Interactions developed an adaptive and responsive HTML5 framework to rapidly create highly interactive activities for clients that are mobile ready and allow for editing of content and advanced logic in external documents with one button publishing. Additionally, In November 2019, Allen Interactions acquired Problem Solutions to provide clients the means to significantly improve human performance efficiency at measurable levels that prove meaningful to the organization’s success.

In an instance, Mary Kay Cosmetics—the sixth-largest network marketing company in the world—needed a way to onboard and train remote beauty consultants having highly varied skills, needs, and perceptions of success. With a sizeable, existing library of instructional and motivating video assets, Mary Kay desired a mobile, microlearning-focused solution that used cutting-edge technology, imagery, and engagement techniques to initiate and keep their team of consultants at the top levels of performance. Allen Interactions worked with the Mary Kay team to create an engaging, intuitive online university with a truly personalized, self-paced and self-directed learning environment. This increased the sense of community and collaboration, strengthening the bond between learning and managers, significantly decreasing training times, and increasing skill performance and retention.

It is pertinent to mention, Allen Interactions has educated the industry for years on effective e-learning instructional design and launched The Allen Academy which offers soup-to-nuts training and coaching for creating, supporting and evaluating Meaningful, Memorable, and Motivational learning experiences. the foundation of the Academy is the Allen Certified Instructional Professional (ACIP), a series of courses that lead to digital badges through Credly. For the needs and benefits of clients, Allen Interactions continues to develop more flexible and powerful tools, all focused on performance requirements and specific challenges for future-proofing organizations and their people through custom learning and technology experiences. IE