Learnlets
Clark Quinn's Learnings about Learning
(The Official Quinnovation blog)

At the just concluded ASTD International Conference and Exhibition, on exhibit were, finally, two instances of something that should’ve been obvious. And I’m not alone in having waited.

Several years ago, Dr. Will Thalheimer was touting a ‘learning follow-on’ solution, a mechanism to continue to reactivate knowledge after a learning experience. He’s talked about the spacing effect (even providing the basis for a diagram in Designing mLearning), drawing upon his experience as one of our best proponents of evidence-based learning design. We know that reactivation leads to better outcomes, whether seeing a re-representation of the concept, a new example (ideally in another context), and most usefully, having more practice. I’m not aware of how the solution he was touting at the time, but as we really haven’t seen any significant awareness raising, I’m not optimistic.

However, at the conference were two separate examples of such systems. They worked differently, but that they exist at all is a positive outcome. Both used diagrams (e.g. Ebbinghaus forgetting curve) to show the effects of memory over time, and it’s apt that the problem is real. If we just use the traditional event model, things are likely to be gone a few days later if it’s not immediately put into action. That doesn’t characterize many of our learning outcomes.

The solutions were different, of course. One used mobile technology to provide reminders and access to content. The other used the web. Both basically provided the same opportunity. I didn’t evaluate the relative costs, ease of integration, etc, but having such capability is great. It’s something that folks could arrange for themselves, but as yet I haven’t really seen it, at least not in a systematic way.

They still separate solutions, not integrated, but it’s reason for hope. It’s surprising no one’s baked it into their LMS, but there you go. At least we’re seeing the beginning of awareness, and hopefully we’ll get more.

Good formal learning consists of an engaging introductions, rich presentation of concepts, annotated examples, and meaningful practice, all aligned on cognitive skills. As we start seeing user-generated online c, publishers and online schools are feeling the pressure. Particularly as MOOCs come into play, with (decreasingly) government funded institutions giving online content and courses for free. Are we seeing the demise of for-profit institutions and publishers?

I will suggest that there’s one thing that is harder to get out of the user-generated content environment, and that’s meaningful practice. I recall hearing of, but haven’t yet seen, a seriously threatening repository of such. Yes, there are learning object repositories, but they’re not yet populated with a rich suite of contextualized practice.

Writing good assessments is hard. Principles of good practice include meaningful decisions, alternatives that represent reliable misconceptions, relevant contexts, believable dialog, and more. They must be aligned to the objectives, and ideally have an increasing level of challenge.

There are some technical issues as well. Extensions that are high value include problem generators and randomness in the order of options (challenging attempts to ‘game’ the assessment). A greater variety of response options for novelty isn’t bad either, and automarking is desirable for at least a subset of assessment.

I don’t want to preclude essays or other interpretive work like presentations or media content, and they are likely to require human evaluation, even with peer marking. Writing evaluation rubrics is also a challenge for untrained designers or experts.

While SMEs can write content and even examples (if they get pedagogical principles and are in touch with the underlying thinking, but writing good assessments is another area.

I’ve an inkling that writing meaningful assessments, particularly leveraging interactive technology like immersive simulation games, is an area where skills are still going to be needed. Aligning and evaluating the assessment, and providing scrutable justification for the assessment attributes (e.g. accreditation) is going to continue to be a role for some time.

We may need to move accreditation from knowledge to skills (a current problem in many accreditation bodies), but I think we need and can have a better process for determining, developing, and assessing certain core skills, and particularly so-called 21st century skills. I think there will continue to be a role for doing so, even if we make it possible to develop e necessary understanding in any way the learner chooses.

As is not unusual, I’m thinking out loud, so I welcome your thoughts and feedback.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the higher education situation, specifically for-profit universities. One of the things I see is that somehow no one’s really addressing the quality of the learning experience, and it seems like a huge blindspot.

I realize that in many cases they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. They want to keep costs down, and they’re heavily scrutinized.  Consequently, they worry very much about having the right content.  It’s vetted by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and has to be produced in a way that, increasingly, it can serve face to face (F2F) or online.  And I think there’s a big opportunity missed.  Even if they’re buying content from publishers, they are focused on content, not experience.  Both for the learner, and developing learner’s transferable and long-term skills.

First, SMEs can’t really tell you what learners need to be able to do. One of the side-effects of expertise is that it gets compiled away, inaccessible to conscious access.  Either SMEs make up what they think they do (which has little correlation with reality) or they resort to what they had to learn. Neither’s a likely source to meaningful learning.

Even if you have an instructional designer in the equation, the likelihood that they’re knowledgeable enough and confident enough to work with SMEs to get the real outcomes/objectives is slim.  Then, they also have to get the engagement right.  Social engagement can go a good way to enriching this, but it has to be around meaningful tasks.

And, what with scrutiny, it takes a strong case to argue to the accrediting agencies that you’ve gone beyond what SMEs tell you to what’s really needed. It sounds good, but it’s a hard argument to an organization that’s been doing it in a particular way for a long time.

Yet, these institutions also struggle with retention of students.  The learners don’t find the experience relevant or engaging, and leave.  If you took the real activity, made it meaningful in the right way, learners would be both more engaged and have better outcomes, but it’s a hard story to comprehend, and perhaps harder yet to implement.

Yet I will maintain that it’s both doable, and necessary.  I think that the institution that grasps this, and focused on a killer learning experience, coupled with going the extra mile to learner success (analytics is showing to be a big help here), and developing them as learners (e.g, meta-learning skills) as well as performers, is going to have a defendable differentiator.

But then, I’m an optimist.

On a recommendation, I’ve been reading Jonah Sach’s Winning the Story Wars.   While it’s ostensibly about marketing/advertising, which interests me not, I was intrigued by the possibilities to understand stories from a different perspective.   I was surprised to find that it offered much more.

The book does cover the history of advertising, going through some classic examples of old-style advertising, and using some surprisingly successful examples to elicit a new model.  Some personal stories and revelations make this more than a conceptual treatise.

The core premise is turning your customer into a potential hero of an important journey.  You play the role of the mentor, providing the magic aid for them to accomplish a goal that they know they need, but for a variety of reasons may have avoided.  The journey is motivated from core values, a feature that resonates nicely with my personal quest for using technology to facilitate wisdom.

The book also provides, as one of the benefits, a nice overview of story, particularly the hero’s journey as synthesized by Joseph Campbell across many cultures and time periods.  If you find Campbell a tough read, as many do, this is a nicely digested version.  It talks in sensible ways about the resistance, and trials, and ultimate confrontation.

The obvious focus is on new way to build your brand, tapping into higher purpose, not the more negative fears of inadequacy.  So this book is valuable for those looking to market in a higher way.  And I do intend to rethink the Quinnovation site as a consequence.  But I suggest there’s more.

The notion of the individual being offered the opportunity to play a transformative role seems to be a useful framing for learning. We can, and should, be putting learners in meaningful practice roles, and those roles can be coming from learners’ deep motivators. One of the heuristics in learning game design is Henry Jenkins’ “put the player in a role they’d like to be in”.  This provides a deeper grounding, put the learner in a role they aspire to be in.

I think this book provides not only practical marketing advice, but also guidance for personal journeys and learning.  I think that the perspective of designing stories and roles that are based on personal values to be a great opportunity to do better design. I haven’t completely finished it yet, but I’ve already found enough value in the majority of it to recommend it to you.

I ranted a couple of weeks ago about how we need to move out of our complacency and make a positive change.  As I sometimes do, I stumbled upon a diagram that characterizes the type of change I think we need to be considering.

The perspective riffs off of the concept of the relative value of formal versus informal learning methods shift as performers move from novice to expert. (And, as I’ve previously noted, what’s considered in/formal changes depending on if you’re the performer or designer.)  And, too often, we tend to restrict our interventions to the formal side, yet there are lots of things we can be doing on the informal side.

Largely, however, I see learning and development (L&D) groups as focusing exclusively on novices, or to beginning practitioners, and leaving practitioners and experts on their own.  Even if they’re addressing these more advanced audiences, they tend to use the ‘course’ as the vehicle, when it’s not really  necessary.  These audiences know what they need to know, and just want that useful information, they don’t need the full preparation that novices do.  Novices don’t know what they need to know nor why it’s important, so we provide all that in a course model.  We can be much more telegraphic to advanced performers, and the value of social networks starts kicking in here too.

The point I’m trying to make is that we can, and should, take responsibility for the rest of the performers. We can assist their performance, hence the term we’ve been preferring in the Internet Time Alliance: performance consultant.  This implies facilitating performance across the organizational roles, top to bottom and from beginner to expert.

I’d like to suggest that L&D groups need to become focused on facilitating organizational performance, which includes but is not limited to training.  It’s going to benefit the organization, it’s going to lead to greater strategic contributions and associated value, and it’s an approach that will likely preclude a long slow march to irrelevance and extinction.  Better the folks that understand how we learn and perform (and if you don’t, what are you waiting for?) take responsibility than having it devolve by default to business units and/or IT, eh?

#itashare

A colleague recently queried: “How would you support that Jeopardy type games (Quizzes, etc.) are not really games?”  And while I think I’ve discussed this before, I had a chance to noodle on it on a train trip.  I started diagramming, and came up with the following characterization.

I separated out two dimensions. The first  is differentiating between knowledge and skills.  I like how Van Merriënboer talks about the knowledge you need and the complex problems you apply that knowledge to.  Here I’m separating ‘having’ knowledge from ‘using’ knowledge, focusing on application.  And, no surprise, I’m very much on the side of using, or doing, not just knowing.

The second dimension is whether the learning is essentially very true to life, or exaggerated in some way.  Is it direct, or have we made some effort to make it engaging?

Now, for rote knowledge, if we’re contextualizing it, we’re making it more applied (e.g. moving to the skills side), so really what we have to do is use extrinsic motivation.  We gamify knowledge test (drill and kill) and make it into Jeopardy-style quiz shows.   And while that’s useful in very limited circumstances, it is not what we (should) mean by a game.  Flashy rote drill, using extrinsic motivation, is a fall-back, a tactic of last resort.  We can do better.

What we should mean by a game is to take practice scenarios and focus on ramping up the intrinsic motivation, tuning the scenario into a engaging experience.  We can use tools like exaggeration, humor, drama, and techniques from game design, literature, and more, to make that practice more meaningful.  We align it with the learners interests (and vice-versa), making the experience compelling.

Because, as the value chain suggests, tarting up rote knowledge (which is useful if that’s what we need, and sometimes it’s important, e.g. medical terminology) is better than not, but not near as valuable as real practice via scenarios, and even better if we tune it into a meaningful experience.  Too often we err on the side of knowledge instead of skills, because it’s easy, because we’re not getting what we need from the SME, because that’s what our tools do, etc, but we should be focusing on skills, because that’s what’s going to make a difference to our learners and ultimately our organizations.

What we should do is be focusing on better able to do, moving to the skill side. Tarted up quiz shows are not really games, they’re simplistic extrinsic response trainers.  Real, serious, games translate what Sid Maier said about games – “a series of interesting decisions” – into a meaningful experience: a series of important decisions.  Practicing those are what will make the difference you care about.

Attending the SolutionsFest at the Learning Solutions conference last week, despite my earlier rant, I saw signs of hope.  A quick spot check revealed a number of approaches going above and beyond.

One direction I was pleased to see was a move to more performance support. I saw several solutions that were more focused on providing information as needed, or letting you  navigate to it, rather than thinking everything had to be ‘in the head’. This is definitely a promising sign.  They’re not hard to build, either.

The second promising sign was the use of scenarios. Several different solutions were focused on putting learners into contexts and asking them to perform. This is definitely the direction we need to see more of.  And, again, it’s not that hard to do!

One interesting takeaway was that the innovative solutions seemed to come more from small or internal groups rather than the big teams.  Which only reinforces my overall concern with the industry as a whole.  I wonder if it’s easier for small teams to adapt to advice of folks like Michael Allen (no more boring elearning), Julie Dirksen (Design for How People Learn) and Will Thalheimer than it is for big teams, who not only have to change processes but also educate their customers.

This is an unscientific sample; I did a quick tour of the displays, but couldn’t see all as there were some that were just too crowded.  I also looked at them relatively briefly and didn’t make comprehensive notes, so this is just a read of my state of mind as I finished.  It doesn’t ameliorate the overall concern, but it does provide some hope that things are changing in small pockets.

Of late, I’ve seen a disturbing trend.  Not only are the purveyors of existing solutions preaching caution and steadiness, but it even seems like some of the  ’names’ of the field are talking in ways that make it easy to think that the industry is largely doing ok.  And I do not understand this, because it’s demonstrably wrong.  The elearning industry, and the broader learning industry, is severely underperforming the potential (and I’m being diplomatic).

We know what leads to effective learning outcomes.  And we’ve known it for decades (just because MOOCs are new doesn’t mean their pedagogies are): clear models, annotated examples, and most importantly deep and meaningful practice focused on significant skill shifts (let alone addressing the emotional side of the equation).  Learners need to perform, repeatedly, with guidance, over more and more complex contexts until they achieve the level of performance they need.  However, that’s no where near what we’re seeing.

What we see are knowledge dump/test tarted up with trivial interactions.  People will pass a test, but they will not have achieved the ability to affect any meaningful business outcomes.  If it’s knowledge that performers need, create a job aid, not a ‘spray and pray’.  And facilitate people in self-helping.  As things get more complex and moving faster, there’s no way everything can be kept up with by new course development, even if it were a useful approach, and mostly it’s not.

We’re even measuring the wrong things.  Cost per seat hour is secondary (at best).  That’s ‘fine-tuning’, not the core issue.  What’s primary is business impact.  Are you measurably improving key performance indicators as outcomes?

And that’s assuming courses are all the learning unit should be doing, but increasingly we recognize that that’s only a small proportion of what makes important business outcomes, and increasingly we’re recognizing that the role needs to move from instructional designer to performance consultant.  More emphasis can and should be on providing performance resources and facilitating useful interactions rather than creating courses.  Think performance support first, and communities of practice, only resorting to courses as a last result.

Tools that make turning Powerpoint presentations into page-turning content aren’t going to fix this, nor are tools that provide prettified drill-and-kill, nor ones that let you host and track courses.  There are places for those, but they’re not the bulk of the opportunity, and shouldn’t be the dominant solutions we see. There’s so much more: deeply engaging scenarios and simulation-driven interactions on the formal side, powerful job aid tools for performance support (particularly mobile), coaching and mentoring as a better solution than courses in many (most) cases, performer-focused portals of tools, underlying powerful content management suites, and rich social environments to support performers making each other smarter and more effective.

I’m not quite sure why the easy tools dominate the expo halls, except perhaps because anyone can build them.  More worrisome is that it can let designers off the hook in terms of thinking deeper.  We need to focus first on rich outcomes, and put the tools secondary.

While the industry congratulates itself on how they make use of the latest technology, the lack of impact is leading a drive to irrelevancy.  Learners tolerate the courses, at best.  Operations groups and others are beginning to focus on the performance solutions available.  Executives are beginning to hear a message that the old approach is a waste of resources.

Hiding your head in the sand isn’t going to cut it. The industry is going to have to change.  And that means you will have to change.  But you’re a professional in learning, right?  So lead the way.  The best way to change is to take that first step.

Daniel Coyle gave a wonderfully funny, passionate, and poignant keynote, talking about what leads to top performance. Naturally, I was thrilled to hear him tout the principles that I suggest make games such a powerful learning environment: challenge, tight feedback, and large amounts of engaging practice. With compelling stories to illustrate his points, he balanced humor and emotional impact to sell a powerful plea for better learning.

In a clever talk, Aaron Dignan used game theory to talk about how to improve the workplace.