Too often I see instructional design training and tools, in addition to talking about ‘objectives‘ and ‘assessment‘ (which I tend to call ‘practice‘, for hopefully obvious reasons), talking about ‘content‘. And I think that simplification is a path to bad learning design. It misses emphasizing the nuances, and that‘s a bad thing.
What should be the elements of content are an introduction to the learning experience, a presentation of the concept(s), examples that illustrate applying the concept to contexts, and a closing of the experience. Each of these have component parts that, when addressed, contribute to the likelihood of a good learning outcome. Ignoring them, however, is likely to lead to a lack of impact.
The problem is that our cognitive architecture is prone to mistakes in execution. We‘re bad at remembering bits and pieces, and we naturally can skip steps. That‘s why we create external tools like checklists and templates to support good design. So if we‘re not scaffolding here, we run the risk of creating content that may be well-written, but isn‘t well-designed.
And we see this all too often: eLearning that‘s content-heavy and learning light. It may have good production values, with a consistent look-and-feel, elegant prose, and great images, but it also tends to have too much rote information, little enough concepts, sparse and un-illuminating examples, and no real emotional ‘hook‘.
Instead, we could be using checklists or templates to ensure we get the right elements. We could have support for designing introductions, concept, examples, and closing, (and better support for good practice too ;). It doesn‘t have to be built into an authoring tool, but certainly should be manifest in the development tools for interim representations.
There are other reasons to be a bit more granular, such as flexible content that supports repurposing for delivery in the moment, and adaptive learning, but overall the real reason is for good design. It doesn‘t have to be granular, but it does have to explicitly consider the elements that contribute to learning and get those right. Right?
I’m with you, part way, on the elements. My tangent begins where presentation ends. How can we design learning experiences that involve learners to a higher degree? Specifically, why must the instruction explicitly connect the concept to concepts? Providing learners with a range of applications is okay, so far as it goes. I’m concerned it can seem prescribed to learners who know their contexts. I would think they’d be thinking about how they might apply what they’re learning while they’re taking in the presentation. As for making mistakes, I think it’s a vital component of a learning experience. Few are able to transfer instruction to application without fail. An environment where it’s safe to make mistakes as learners progress towards skilled practitioners, with coaching and constructive feedback available, should be an ideal designers pursue.
Let me turn the question around. Why does design and tooling always end up focusing on content-heavy development, i.e., text, pictures, animations? Even in textbook days, it seemed like the focus of authoring was on the main body of the chapters, the figures, the tables, not the exercises. For me, a really good set of realistic challenging problems beats another lecture any day. Why aren’t there more books like Wetherell’s Etudes for Programmers? (http://www.amazon.com/Etudes-Programmers-Charles-Wetherell/dp/0132918072)
What forces keep leading designers astray here?
Thanks for the feedback. Urbie, I presume you wonder why connect concepts to contexts, and my explanation is that by seeing how concepts play out in context, you can decouple the concept and context and recouple in new contexts, but you need to see some examples of how concepts get contextualized. And I think the way you create experiences is designing them explicitly; specifically hooking the learner in emotionally, viscerally, first. That could be a problem-based approach (no one says these elements have to be in a specific order). And making mistakes has to be allowed; you need to make the challenge sufficient that there is a good potential for initial failure.
Chris, good point. Absolutely the practice to me comes first in design and in emphasis. I’ve argued elsewhere that our ratios are wrong: 80/20 content/practice is backwards! The minimum amount of content to support success on practice (at least, ultimately ;) is the right approach, not the minimum amount of practice to ensure the content’s been seen (practice ’til you can’t get it wrong, not just until you get it right). I think the forces are obeisance to SMEs and accreditation bodies that require same. Plus the emphasis on ‘rapid’ which supports content dump and knowledge test. Wrongly.
You have made a good point in that article – this is one of the reasons I’m really happy gamification is a thing, there definetely needs to be more emphasis put on the process of learning and its effectiveness.
John, this doesn’t make any sense. In what way at all does gamification have any thing to do with the quality of the content? The only way gamification (and I’m deeply hoping you mean serious games, not scores and leaderboards) makes sense is for meaningful practice, and that’s not what I’m talking about here (though of course it’s important).