162: Action First, Always: Karl Kapp’s Blueprint for Engaged Learning

Holly Owens (00:00.994)
 everyone and welcome to another fantastic episode of EdUp Learning and Development. You probably hear the excitement in my voice because I'm super excited to have this guest. He's famous. We were just talking about it. He's a big deal. He's a very humble person. You probably won't think that he's an influencer in L &D space and all kinds of different things. Karl Kapp is here. Karl, welcome to the show.

Karl Kapp (00:23.657)
Holly, thanks. It's fantastic to be here. And I always joke around, you know, it might be famous, but nobody buys a t-shirt. I don't know how famous.

Holly Owens (00:29.504)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I followed your work for a really long time, so I'm so excited to get into some questions and burning questions that I've had. But first, for people who don't know you, tell us a little bit about your journey, what you currently do, where you started and all the different things that you've just I mean, I'll stop. I'll stop fangirling. Just go ahead and tell us your story, please.

Karl Kapp (00:56.425)
So I got started way back like in around 1997. I got a job as an intern at this company that did this thing called instructional technology. And I'm like, what is instructional technology? And that started way before that. When I was young, did, I was in little theater and we were in a video, a safety video called Willy Whistle, like learning how to cross the street. And this company had produced that video.

for safety and so I got an internship there and like, what are you guys doing? They're like, oh, we do instructional technology. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so cool. It's a little bit of, I had an English background, teaching background. So was a little bit of that. I almost had a psych minor. So it was a little bit of that. I'm like, this is great. So I was already planning to go to the university of Pittsburgh for counseling. And I'm like, ah, this sounds so much more fun than counseling. And so I changed my major, my graduate program, which was a

Apparently a big deal, but I did it anyway. And then I got to University of Pittsburgh, taking classes. And then I also petitioned to take classes in the business school, which like, somebody's like, why is an HR person taking business classes? Like, well, if more business people took HR classes and more HR class people took business classes, we'd probably all be a little bit better off. So that was that start. then, then,

Holly Owens (02:07.723)
Yeah.

Karl Kapp (02:19.133)
I was working for a software company and I had one foot in academia, one foot in corporate. And so I wanted to switch feet. everybody was like, Hey, if you don't, if you get your doctorate degree and you don't go into teaching, like they're not going to let you in in two years because you'll be tainted by corporate. That's ridiculous. They didn't want like, you know, you'll be tainted by corporate. Like, I'm like, okay, well, right. Exactly. Yeah. I'm like, well, wouldn't it be the other way around? Wouldn't that mean.

Holly Owens (02:34.766)
Tainted.

Yeah, you don't be able to function in education anymore. Yeah.

Karl Kapp (02:46.269)
So anyway, it's starting to change in that direction. But so I looked for opportunities. I found one in Bloomsburg. I really liked what they did. They had this corporate advisory council where they brought corporate people in every semester and the students presented to them a mock or responsive mock RFP. And I thought, my gosh, this is a great cause. So I started working there and then I got interested in gamification. I started publishing books about gamification and

learning design and because I wanted to share the knowledge that I was able to work and research on. And so I started to do that and then started got an opportunity to be a lynda.com instructor.

now that they're LinkedIn learning. then, so it just kind of, you know, spiraled from there. I just was having so much fun doing stuff and, you know, I'm like, no one's going to ever hear me a little, little old Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. okay, well, maybe I should, you know, expand, break the four walls down. So that was kind of what I spent a lot of time doing.

Holly Owens (03:41.562)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (03:49.888)
my goodness, I love this journey and I love the fact that you were like put into an intern program that was instructional technology. And you know what, just for the listeners out there here a little bit younger, the 90s did exist. There was instructional technology. We were doing instructional design. We weren't just, you know, writing on with our pencils and paper and our chalkboards. So that's really an amazing journey for you, Karl. And I want to talk.

Karl Kapp (04:17.31)
Yeah, well...

Holly Owens (04:18.286)
I want to talk a little bit because I'm a higher education instructor too and I teach instructional design courses. So tell us a little bit about that journey for you and how that has influenced and impacted the things that you've done for the L &D space because you you've spoken different places, you're a consultant, you do all these different things. So how has teaching kind of maybe grounded you in, I always say I have to practice what I preach. So tell us a little bit about that experience.

Karl Kapp (04:36.68)
Yeah.

Karl Kapp (04:45.959)
Right. Practice and defend, right. Because no, right. No, no critic that students who are like, yeah, Dr. Guy, is that even real? Like, how does that even work? Come on. So it's great in terms of like always having to defend and think about it and research it. And, but just to get back real, real quick, I was doing instructional design. We literally had a green screen and one word and one question in the middle of the screen. was so fun. was like, we've come so far.

Holly Owens (04:47.552)
Yes, yes, yes 100 percent.

Holly Owens (05:09.998)
We have, we have. I'm so proud of us.

Karl Kapp (05:15.315)
So, yeah, so the interesting thing about teaching and that is exactly, is you have the opportunity to do the research, to apply the research and then see the results. So I think that's kind of fun and interesting, but one of the things that, as you know in the field is sometimes the academic research doesn't always translate into practice.

And so a lot of what I've been trying to do is like, okay, well, this is what it really means for somebody who's in the field practicing. Because our students in our program, when we first started, it was very unique in that we had a corporate track as well as an education track. So a lot of academic tracks are focused on, or were focused on academics. And ours was a little bit different at the time, it was focused on corporate.

Holly Owens (05:40.355)
Right.

Karl Kapp (06:07.753)
the corporate people were very demanding. Like I want these students to be able to come out here and create stuff right away. They have to use the software. They can't, you know, know about the software. So we had, we spent our, my predecessor, Dr. Hank Bailey had built up relationships with all these corporate people and stuff, which was hard for me. Cause when I first came in 1997, like he, not purposefully, but you know, all his corporate connections left with him. So I just spent a lot of time trying to build that. Yeah. So that was.

Holly Owens (06:13.464)
Right.

Holly Owens (06:33.304)
Wow. The network totally went away.

Karl Kapp (06:36.265)
a couple of stuff around. Exactly. I'm like, what am going to do? So I started, you know, that's why I started going to conferences and speaking to get, you know, corporate people to come back to Bloomsburg and, you know, talk to the students and give the students opportunities. So, so, so it was kind of born a little bit of necessity to get out there and get people involved with our program or what we were doing.

Holly Owens (06:41.366)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (07:01.23)
That's amazing. And I love the fact that you did have that predecessor that kind of set things up, but I'm sorry that they took your network. I think one of the most challenging things about teaching, especially instructional design courses, you have to, like what you're saying about the real world, they have to be able to apply it right away. And the theories and the knowledge and the frameworks are all part of that conversation, but putting that into practice, into like,

you know, putting my students into real world situations like my students design an entire online training course. And they are so like, they're super intimidated by the fact that they have to design this thing from start to finish. And they're like, we have to use an LMS with an LMS, you know, they've taken the intro course and it's just, but by the end of the semester, they really feel like proud of themselves. Like they've done all these things. And I could say that they've experienced something like project management in the real world.

Karl Kapp (08:00.283)
And that's fantastic. I mean, that's the best way to do it. Early in my career, wrote a, I think one of my first academic publications ever was I did some work on using a problem-based learning approach to teach instructional design. And was really, that really helped to me bring like kind of what I was doing academically grounded kind of what.

Holly Owens (08:15.512)
Yeah.

Karl Kapp (08:24.073)
One of the things, so I don't want to give Hank a bad, Hank was awesome. Like he gave me all his, my predecessor gave me all his materials and everything. It's just that when he left, like his corporate people were like, yeah, you know, used to do that. don't, they use that as an opportunity to, leave as well. But he gave me a lot of great stuff, but he had founded this class where, where you form students into teams, where you give them, you know, a mock request for proposal where they have to respond and they have to, so all that was his problem-based learning approach. I'm like, oh my gosh, this

Holly Owens (08:28.28)
Yeah.

Karl Kapp (08:53.331)
brilliant approach. so, you know, I just kind of honed that through the years, but he was really kind of the founder of that, like, and really set, I think, the groundwork for that. But it was funny when I interviewed, had to give a lecture and I had mentioned Kirkpatrick's four levels of evaluation. And afterwards, they kind of laughed and they said, well, they said, well, last time the students had, they had a presentation.

Holly Owens (09:13.56)
Yeah.

Karl Kapp (09:19.805)
They were asked about Kirkpatrick's and none of them knew anything about, we didn't know anything about Kirkpatrick's. I'm like, my gosh, like that's like a common thing. So that practical approach that I had was valuable when I came into the department at Bloomsburg back in 1997.

Holly Owens (09:36.45)
Wow. When you say the 90s, I feel like the 90s were like 10 years ago. And it's not.

Karl Kapp (09:44.032)
my gosh, I know. 10 years ago and a million years ago, right?

Holly Owens (09:48.27)
Yes, yes. And when people post those kind of like memes out on social media, like 1930 is the same. We're the same. We're close to 2050, like 1930 to 1990, whatever. And I'm like, stop. Stop making me feel old. But that's that it's fun. I love the 90s are great. Anyways, let's get into your new book. So you have a new book called Action First Learning. And I'm so glad you're here to talk about it. You know, like

Karl Kapp (09:59.561)
Exactly.

Holly Owens (10:16.008)
Action first is like a really powerful phrase and when I think about that as an instructional designer that could mean a variety of different things to me. So tell us a little bit about what does that mean in the context of learning design and then I have a few questions about the book.

Karl Kapp (10:30.557)
Yeah, great. So to me, one of the things that has always, so I got started in games, games, games, gamification, one day I was sitting in my basement playing video games. It was like three o'clock in the morning. My wife's like, it's time. I was playing James Bond double seven night fire. Yes. Talk about 1990. Talk about the 1990. That's such a great game. And I'll tell you how much I did not know back then they had a multiplayer mode and they had these things called.

Holly Owens (10:44.012)
What video games were you playing?

Holly Owens (10:48.837)
my gosh!

Karl Kapp (10:59.817)
AI bots, but you know, we're playing on fuzzy TV. So we call them bots. We're like, why are these Al bots like chasing us? Yeah, that was pretty funny. So I was playing again, but I'm like, well, why are people like, so why am I up till three o'clock in the morning playing this game when

Holly Owens (11:03.691)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (11:11.15)
We have some, we have some Al bots, we have some Al bots chasing us now. Yeah, that's great. I love that.

Karl Kapp (11:28.623)
Online learning, it like puts people to sleep. So that was kind of the premise. So over the years, I've kind of worked on that. And one of the things that really I find sets the tone both in the classroom and online is when people do something first, like if I do a workshop and then halfway through, I'm like, okay, let's do an activity. People are like, yeah.

But if I start out with an activity, they're like, yeah, this is great. You know, and, the momentum continues through the whole experience. And I'm like, what, what, wait a minute, we should do that. Be doing that online too. should do action first. And so I wanted to put together this kind of almost more of a philosophy, right? So, so gamification, problem is one of the problems is people are like, well, is that a game or gamification? Like, I don't really care as long as you're involving the learner, getting them interested and kind of moving them forward.

Holly Owens (11:48.076)
Hahaha

Karl Kapp (12:17.331)
But there's a lot of discussion about, you know, when's it become a game and all that kind of stuff. And so I wanted to get away from that terminology and I wanted to move toward action first. And so no matter what you do, whether it's not gamified, whether it's just an activity, you're helping the learners take action and there is act, you know, activity based learning. The problem with that is again, on the academic side is there's the, sometimes the definitions are so rigid. So I'll get into discussion and somebody would say, well, that's not really

activity based learning, or that's not really problem based learning. That's not really, like, well, why not? they're well, according to such and such years ago, and so I go, okay, okay, I get that. We need that for research, but practitioners don't care. So I said, okay, let's pick a term that I think people can get behind that doesn't have any baggage associated with it. Let's, or trauma.

Holly Owens (13:08.622)
or trauma or like negative connotation, know, all the different things. You know, it's interesting, you you brought up a good point, like everybody tries to put some of these things into boxes that they're, but that's not how instructional design is. That's not how L and D is. Like it could, one day it could be one thing, the next day it could be a different thing. Anyways, I digress. I could go on.

Karl Kapp (13:14.558)
Yeah.

Karl Kapp (13:25.289)
Right.

Karl Kapp (13:30.505)
Yeah, no, that's a great, mean, Holly, that's such a great point because people do try to put it in boxes. And then I think the box limits, like one time I did a blog post and I said, according to such and such research, the best time, the best length of a video is about five minutes. And this person who obviously was a PhD student said, how dare you give that advice? The researchers didn't look at 430. They didn't look at 501.

We don't know the is I'm like, my God, like, come on. So we're supposed to wait till we test every second and then we give advice to the practitioners. I'm like, yeah, that's not, that's not happening.

Holly Owens (13:58.136)
my god. Yeah.

Holly Owens (14:08.374)
Yeah, that's not, it'll never get finished and there'll always be, like that's what research is though. You're sharing different, you're doing experiments different ways or case studies different ways. So that person obviously didn't understand. Right, right.

Karl Kapp (14:19.017)
You're sharing it in process, right? mean, there's an end monolith of knowledge that, we finally found it. You're working it out as it goes along. People change, research elements change. So I just thought that was so funny. So to your point, people do like to kind of box that in from the research perspective, it leaves the practitioners with what? I mean, some practitioners are still doing learning styles. So we have a long way to go to get kind of the research out there. So let's not.

Let's not hoard it until we're perfect. Let's get it out there. And so that was part of the impetus. then finally, I was looking back at action first comics and you know, a superman. Yes. That played a large role as well.

Holly Owens (14:58.222)
I was gonna say I love that theme in your book. I love it.

Yeah, and also too, I to mention that you have coloring pages in the book. Yeah, so I think that's really cool, I mean, that's not the coolest part. So tell us a little bit more, like what's the book, what's it about? Like how's it going to help us as instructional designers or those in higher education in the field? I definitely have already considered that this might be my next book that I'm going to use to teach with because of what you're covering and how it correlates with the

Karl Kapp (15:09.255)
I do, yeah.

Holly Owens (15:34.008)
the curriculum teaching, think it's fantastic. And you're such a, you break it down so simply for people to kind of understand these different learning experiences. So tell us a little bit more about what the book's about.

Karl Kapp (15:43.997)
Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. So, the book is the first chapter is like kind of what is action first learning? What are some of the research behind it? That kind of stuff. And then I have nine chapters that take a different action first learning technique and then explain the technique. Now, I don't think that there's only nine. There's lots more than nine, but you you've run out of book space. So right.

Holly Owens (16:06.446)
You can run out of pages. Yeah.

Karl Kapp (16:08.681)
So I'm hoping more people will kind of expand, but so for example, one of the chapters is on card games. And so what I do in every chapter is I start with an action first thing that you have to do. So when you read the chapter, you got to take action before you're allowed to read the rest of it. I don't know how that's enforced, but...

Holly Owens (16:26.082)
You're modeling what you're preaching, I love it.

Karl Kapp (16:28.507)
Exactly. And then the next step after that is, I have a case study of, of people doing that. And then I also say this book, like, like, I think I've written like, I don't know, like 10 books or whatever. And every book that you're writing, yeah, it's kept me busy.

Holly Owens (16:41.078)
A lot. It told me a lot of books you read when I researched how many books you've written. It's awesome. I mean, like I'm you're my role model. I haven't written one book, but I feel like I have all this knowledge to just put down.

Karl Kapp (16:55.133)
Yeah. Well, I always say, mean, if you have a class, you have a book. mean, you could, so, you can easily write, write a book. but one of the things that, every time I write a book, you know, you always get criticism. you know, I one book and said, this is great, but there's no case studies. Okay. There are another book. This is a great case studies are great, but there's no step-by-step instruction. Okay. Hey, this is great. But so, there's no takeaways. So this book is also a combination of what I learned. every chapter has a detailed case study.

It has step-by-step instructions, and it has, this is good for teaching this. So card games are good for teaching discrimination where you sort one thing from another. And then I say when to use them. So every chapter provides kind of a roadmap of what it is, why it's effective, how people have used it and why you should use it, and then how you can use it. And then finally, you know, the age of AI, I put a little AI prompt in there.

If you're not familiar with AI or you do AI, can copy that prompt, paste it into AI, and it can help you with whatever that action-first learning approach happens to be.

Holly Owens (18:01.358)
I mean, you have all the things in the book now. Like nobody can criticize it.

Karl Kapp (18:04.807)
Well, I mean, you know, if someone said, know, if you're not, if you're, if you're not taking arrows in the chest, then you're not far enough out ahead, something like that, right? So, yes, I mean, you're always going to take arrows and that's fine. And, and, and that's just what you do when you're in the position and, and always, I always say, you know, take the best comments and disregard those.

Holly Owens (18:21.09)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Karl Kapp (18:34.663)
then take the worst comments and disregard those and then the truth is probably somewhere in

Holly Owens (18:39.042)
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things I think that's a struggle, especially in this industry, is that people think that commonly training is the answer. So one of the core ideas in the book is we should design for doing, not just the knowledge piece of that. So as an instructor in higher education and an instructional designer, all these different things, what does that look like in practice to people? Because I think

We have a lot of listeners on the show who are transitioning teachers and they're thinking about getting into instructional design. So can you give us an idea of like, what does that look like in practice?

Karl Kapp (19:13.843)
Yeah, think the very first thing to think about is what does a person have to do? So, and part of problem is when we talk to a subject matter expert, we usually ask them like, what do they have to know? And what do you know? And that kind of stuff. And I think we get the wrong impression, but what we have to do is what do we want, at the end of the day, what do we want the person to do? So if you think about like YouTube, for example, it's really like I had to change the shower head in my shower upstairs.

I didn't need to know the history of the showerhead. didn't even know how showerheads are built. All I needed to know is what do I unscrew and which direction and then what do I screw back in, right? That's what I needed to know. So that also got me thinking like, okay, how do we take action? so if you look at your classroom and same thing with learning objectives, sometimes I call them learning objections because if you went to the learner,

Holly Owens (20:01.698)
I love that, sorry.

Karl Kapp (20:03.185)
Right. The learner goes, I already know how to do that. Like if you say today, you will learn three ways to, and they'll go, I know four ways. This is a waste of my time. So, I think let's start out like, okay, you're in a sales situation. Try to sell somebody. okay. You forgot to say this, this, this, and this. now we, and going back to Macklemm Knowles, now the adult learner knows they don't know something. So if you put them in a situation where they have to apply knowledge, even if they don't, even if you haven't taught it before,

because they're adult learners, they have some level of knowledge. Even if they don't know it and when they try to apply it, then they're more open to learning because they know they don't know it. And you've created the schemas and the pathways and so start people out. And it can be very simple. You could say, hey, we're going to learn about, let's say history. We're going to learn about the history of the Civil War. Let's put these battles in order.

People are like, I don't know. And they're in cards and you sort them in order. And then you can go back. Okay. Why did you think the Gettysburg was before, you know, something Hill or something like that. Right. And now you can discuss it and now people go, yeah. And now you're, you're exposing and, and, and, remedying. Paradigms. And if you do it in a sales situation and somebody's like, well that's why sales doesn't work. And it's the whole idea of practice. Like I feel like people, especially in corporations.

Holly Owens (21:06.136)
Yep.

Karl Kapp (21:24.713)
Feel like they don't need to practice like I've been a salesperson for 50 years. I don't need to practice Well, how do you know you're any good? How do you know?

Holly Owens (21:31.372)
Yeah. And when this stuff changes or using the same methods, mean, people could possibly still be sitting down typing on a typewriter. Like, why aren't you getting on a computer? You know, that's what I think about is in terms of like the, what are they doing that's archaic? And like, if you've done it for 50 years, if you've done it for 20 years, like, are you constantly reinventing yourself and your methods to align with what's happening in the world? Hello, AI. Hello, all the different things.

Karl Kapp (21:39.923)
Right.

Thanks,

Holly Owens (22:01.166)
that are impacting our industry? You know, it's a good question to ask.

Karl Kapp (22:05.309)
Yeah, it's got to be. yeah, yeah. I mean, we can have a whole other conversation on how the industry is changing. Once said as a side note, I love your microphone, how it changes color.

Holly Owens (22:10.254)
yeah, you're definitely coming back because this is not enough time for me.

thank you. It's a conversation starter. Thank you. And it's really cool because one of the things you can do, muted. So when it's not changing colors, that means I'm muted. And I love that because sometimes, you know, you're in the Zoom meeting or you're in the Riverside recording and I forget to unmute myself. So I just use that if I need to mute if something's happening in the background. Yeah. Yeah.

Karl Kapp (22:22.483)
That is very cool. Yeah.

Karl Kapp (22:32.25)
very nice.

Karl Kapp (22:43.014)
that's great. That's a nice feature. Yeah.

Holly Owens (22:46.808)
Well, let's talk a little bit more. Let's wrap up a little bit on the book. So tell people like where they can they access it? Where can they get it? You know, we're to put all the links in the show notes. I want you to advertise it as much as possible. I'm going to go and get it. I did a little bit of research about it. So tell us where to find it. Amazon.

Karl Kapp (22:55.433)
Yeah.

Karl Kapp (23:00.969)
Great, thank you.

So I always say, you know, it's available where finer books are sold, but I think it's also available not as fine books are sold. But you can get it. So the place probably the best is ATD has a website. And the cool thing about that is there's actually an instructor guide and a coloring book that's available as downloadable items. Yes. So go to ATD.

Holly Owens (23:25.622)
I love that.

Yes.

Karl Kapp (23:30.607)
If you don't want to go there, you can certainly go to Amazon. That helps my Amazon numbers, but it's not the best book. And then Barnes and Nobles, yes, still around. And you can go ahead and get the book there. you follow me on LinkedIn, I have a newsletter called L &D Easter Eggs. And I always am posting links and stuff like that. I did a post a while back and I'll repost it on when this airs.

Holly Owens (23:50.152)
I love that.

Karl Kapp (23:57.289)
on I put together a curriculum of all my YouTube videos, LinkedIn learning courses, articles that correspond with each chapter of the book. So if you're like, hey, I want to know about digital card games, you can go and look at everything I've done in digital card games. If you want to know about escape rooms, you can look at escape rooms. You want to know about creating an AI chatbot, you you can go there. So I'm building out a whole playlist.

Holly Owens (24:07.874)
How cool.

Karl Kapp (24:23.571)
that links back to the book. that can be helpful. I mean, you gotta have the book out there and all that kind of stuff, but this kind of goes beyond that and helps people really implement it.

Holly Owens (24:33.998)
and you're organized, like you don't feel overwhelmed. Like I like to take active notes as I'm writing the book, but then you go and you organize and you give us all these guides and things. And I love the fact that you design and a Shruter guide for people who you want to use to sing in their courses. That is like, that's golden within itself. So thank you for doing that. mean, I don't know what I do without some of the books that I've read. Like, you know, I really love design for how people learn. It's one that...

Karl Kapp (24:36.649)
Right.

Karl Kapp (24:52.021)
yeah, no problem.

Karl Kapp (25:02.814)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (25:02.947)
consistently and that's the current book I use but just the guides and things are there they're so valuable.

Karl Kapp (25:10.877)
Yeah, the one thing I love about this field is everyone's so giving and they publish everything and they're not keeping it secrets and that kind of stuff. I think that's one of things that makes this field from the academic and the professional side so invigorating because people are sharing and are helping and it's a helping industry.

Holly Owens (25:14.667)
Yes.

Holly Owens (25:19.521)
Yeah.

Holly Owens (25:30.41)
I 100 % agree with that. don't know how other communities are. I imagine they're not. They like to keep secrets, but we don't. We just share everything. And if it's like, it doesn't work, we'll try something else. If it doesn't work, we'll point you to the person that can help you. Here's the expert in action learning and all those different things. So I want to kind of, as we start to wrap up the episode, I want to shift the conversation a little bit. Like I mentioned earlier, we have a lot of transitioning teachers that listen to this show and they're always looking for a, you know,

Karl Kapp (25:39.838)
Bye.

Holly Owens (25:56.662)
advice from experts like yourself about you, you're a consultant, you're in, you teach in higher education, you are a leader in this space, you're an influence in this space. So people thinking about leaving the education space, maybe stepping into a role, say in instructional design or learning experience design, do you have any advice that you could give them, maybe one to three things like?

Karl Kapp (26:16.371)
So, yeah, so one thing I would say is create instruction, online instruction, like before you need to, like start doing it. So do it for nonprofits, do it for your kids' school, do it for yourself, do it for your hobbies, whatever. Just get into the practice of developing online instruction and presenting it. I think that's really important. The second thing is get involved with communities of practice like this one.

where you can get good information and good ideas and there's all kinds of professional organizations so you can become a member of those as well. then the third one is you kind of have to, so this is advice that's counter, like a lot of people that are self-help people say, say no to everything except your core goal, like don't get distracted, don't say yes to everything.

I kind of have the opposite. like to say yes to everything. Like, I've never done that before. Let me try that out. Ooh. Okay. Well, maybe I won't do that again. Or yeah, let me try this. so I was, that's

Holly Owens (27:19.606)
I feel like you and I are kindred spirits there because I do a lot too and I don't I don't but everything kind of connects. It all connects. It definitely does.

Karl Kapp (27:28.583)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If you do it right, or even if you just do it, it just connects. And I find, you know, if I, if I do something over here on the corporate side, comes back to the classroom. do something in the classroom. It comes back to my consulting. come back. So, so yeah, those are my three pieces of advice. You know, create instruction, even if somebody hasn't asked you to go ahead and join a community of practice and, learn from the others and get solace from the others. And then say yes to lots of different opportunities and implement those opportunities. And then finally, I would say, ground yourself in the science.

There's a lot of people that are accidental instructional designers, which is fantastic, but they don't have the learning science to back up some of the decisions that they make. even if you're an accidental instructional designer, if you're coming from an education background, typically you've had some training and pedagogy or some of the research behind teaching methods and techniques. So that's going to be an advantage as you move forward. So those are my, guess, yeah, absolutely.

Holly Owens (28:21.742)
Yeah, there's tons of transferable skills there. Then that's one thing we do talk about a lot is the transferable skills. Yeah. So thank you so much. This went by super fast for me. I'm gonna have to have you back on so we can talk about some other things that you're into and things that you're doing. And I wanna let everybody know that how to access and get.

Karl Kapp (28:31.913)
I did.

Holly Owens (28:45.134)
Your copy of Action First Learning is going to be in the show notes. Please go out to LinkedIn World, follow Karl. Everything's gonna be there for you to find him. It's so easy. It's gonna all be linked. Karl, any final thoughts from you before we end the episode for the audience?

Karl Kapp (29:00.201)
One of my favorite quotes is by Mario Andretti and he said, if everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough. So that's piece of advice.

Holly Owens (29:09.843)
Ooh, I love it. I feel like I'm definitely out of control right now.

Karl Kapp (29:15.421)
me. Like I that used to give me like so much like I can't control it. Nothing's going on. Then I read that quote and like, my gosh, it all kind of makes sense. Right.

Holly Owens (29:22.606)
It's all coming together. Well, this was so much fun. I can't wait to drop this episode and make sure that if you're listening to our show, you're also giving us a great review. Karl, thanks again for being on the show. I loved having you. This has been a great conversation.

Karl Kapp (29:40.073)
Thanks, I've had a great time.