Archives for June 2022

LXD by Design

28 June 2022 by Clark Leave a Comment

Learning Experience Design (LXD), I argue, is the elegant integration of learning science with engagement. All well and good, of course, but how do you introduce it? Specifically, how do we engage people already actively designing? There are a number of ways to cut it. You could talk about the cognitive underpinnings, the implications for the elements of learning, or via the changes in the design process. I do the latter two, with a focus on the engagement side (which I feel is underdeveloped), in my latest book, “Make It Meaningful“. However, what if you’re trying to do both? Here’s a case to visit LXD by design.

It seems pretty safe to say that most people will resist totally throwing out their entire design process. There’s lots of investment. Further, most design processes have a useful basic structure. This suggests looking for the smallest tweaks that will yield the biggest impacts. We’re looking to incorporate the effectiveness of learning science with the emotional appropriateness of engagement. What does this require?

The first change is in the analysis. LXD simply can’t work without performance objectives. If you’re just trying to make people aware, you’re not really on a transformative journey. You want to be focusing on equipping people so that they’re (meaningfully) changed through the process. You also need some new information: why this is necessary for the learners, and why experts find it interesting enough to study. There’s more, but this is key.

Then, your design process differs. You are being creative, given that you’re not just directly practicing. You’re also tuning to get the experience optimized. So, you need to build in some brainstorming, and iteration. In pragmatic ways, of course.

Implementation is also more iterative. You’ll be investing slowly, to allow pivots and to keep the overall costs contained. Postponing programming and preferring paper are components of this.

Even your evaluation is different. You are testing, now, not only effectiveness, but also the experience. Which you may have been doing (*cough* smile sheets *cough*), but you need to test both sequentially, not just one or the other.

All along, there are small changes that will help integrate learning science elegantly with engagement. Making those critical changes will likely take a bit longer, at least at first. On the other hand, you should be getting real outcomes and more engaged learners. Which, ultimately, is what we should be doing.

I’ll be covering this in a workshop for the Learning Guild in two half-day sessions prior to their LXD conference at the beginning of August. (Also doing a session during the conf on emotion.) I hope you’ll find LXD by Design to be a practical and useful, even transformative, experience.

Reality Checks

21 June 2022 by Clark 2 Comments

Of late, there seem to be a rising number of claims: for X or Y, or against Z. This, by the way, happens outside L&D as well, so feel free to extrapolate. Here, however, I want to talk about the necessity of, and some practices for, reality checks.

The problem is that people have vested interests in particular views. Many of the claims that are pushed generate revenue for them, directly or indirectly. They may want you to buy their product, avail yourself of their services, or more. And I get it; I too need to keep the wolves from the door. However, there are ways legit and less so to do it.

So one of the first reality checks is: what does who stand to gain? What’s their angle? Just as when I criticize something and you should rightly query why I’m raising the issue, similarly you should be asking the same of the claim. What’s their angle?

I’m pretty clear that I want our industry to be solid, and yes I want to be someone you might bring in to assist you in avoiding the pitfalls and hew to the best outcomes for your org. Similarly, the folks I’m critiquing might have an angle. They may have a tool, for instance, that they want you to use. Find out what their personal benefit is!

This looking at both sides is a second reality check. I recently heard a colleague claim that when he looks at something new, he immediately looks for contradicting evidence. That’s pretty smart, given that our cognitive architecture has a confirmation bias. That is, we’re inclined to look for information that supports our beliefs, and discount any other. I reckon it’s worth keeping an open mind.

This is a way you can go deeper. What do others say? Are their trusted folks who are supporting the view, or are they leery? What’s their expertise? Some folks will allude to some relevant expertise only for it to be shown that it’s tangential. Similarly, what’s the data say? Is there data? How valid is it? Is it relevant to you?

Ultimately, I want you to stay curious! I reckon that we all can learn more, and should. Learning more doesn’t mean just accumulating information, it means being willing to be wrong, admitting it, and improving. You need to be running your own reality checks on what you, and others, believe. Here’s to a steady increase in the reality of our field!

Critical ID/LXD Differences?

14 June 2022 by Clark 4 Comments

I’ve argued both that Learning Experience Design (LXD) is an improvement on Instructional Design (ID), and that LXD is the elegant integration of learning science with engagement. However, that doesn’t really unpack what are the critical ID/LXD differences. I think it’s worth looking at those important distinctions both in principle and practice. Here, I’m talking about the extensions to what’s already probably in place.

Principle

In principle, I think it’s the engagement part that separates the two. True, proper ID shouldn’t ignore it. However, there’s been too little attention. For instance, only one ID theorist, John Keller, has really looked at those elements. Overall, it’s too easy to focus purely on the cognitive. (Worse, of course, is a focus purely on knowledge, which really isn’t good ID).

I suggest that this manifests in two ways. First, you need an initial emotional ‘hook’ to gain the learner’s commitment to the learning experience. Even before we open them up cognitively (though, of course, they’re linked)! Then, we need to manage emotions through out the experience. We want to do thinks like keep challenge balanced, anxiety low enough not to interfere, build confidence, etc.

We have tools we can use, like story, exaggeration, humor, and more to assist us in these endeavors. At core, however, what we’re focusing on is making it a true ‘experience’, not just an instructional event. Ideally, we’d like to be transformational, leaving learners equipped with new skills and the awareness thereof.

Practice

What does this mean in practice? A number of things. For one, it takes creativity to consider ways in which to address emotions. There are research results and guidance, but you’ll still want to exercise some exploration. Which also means you have to be iterative, with testing. I understand that this is immediately scary, thinking about costs. However, when you stop trying to use courses for everything, you’ll have more resources to do courses right. For that matter, you’ll actually be achieving outcomes, which is a justification for the effort.

Our design process needs to start gathering different information. We need to get performance objectives; what people actually need to do, not just what they need to know. You really can’t develop people if you’re not having them perform and getting feedback. You also need to understand why this is needed, why it’s important, and why it’s interesting. It is, at least to the subject matter experts who’ve invested the time to be experts in this…

Your process also needs to have those creative breaks. These are far better if they’re collaborative, at least at the times when you’re ideating. While ideally you have a team working together on an ongoing basis, in many cases that may be problematic. I suggest getting together at least at the ideating stage, and then after testing to review findings.

You’ll also want to be testing against criteria. At the analysis stage, you should design criteria that will determine when you’re ‘done’. When you run out of time and money is not the right answer! Test usability first, then effectiveness, and then engagement. Yes, you want to quantify engagement. It doesn’t have to be ‘adrenaline in the blood’ or even galvanic skin response, subjective evaluations by your learners is just fine. If you are running out of time and money before you’re achieving your metrics, you can adjust them, but now you’re doing it on consciously, not implicitly.

I’m sure there more that I’m missing, but these strike me as some critical ID/LXD differences. There are differences in principle, which yield differences in practice. What are your thoughts?

Shameless self-promotion

7 June 2022 by Clark Leave a Comment

We interrupt your usual blog fodder with this commercial announcement. Our programming will resume after this break:

Ok, well, there actually is some shame. I don’t usually do this, but I don’t think it’s unjustified (and I’m excited). My next book is now out! In fact, it’s in my mitts. Obviously, it can be in yours, too. Now, there’s a screwup in the printing, but it’s minor (and possibly a blessing)? Anyway, it’s time for some shameless self-promotion.

So, Make It Meaningful: Taking Learning Design from Instructional to Transformational is designed to complement the learning science books by providing the other half of the Learning Experience Design (LXD) story. I believe LXD is the elegant integration of learning science and engagement. The former’s well covered; this addresses the latter (and the integration). I immodestly think it’s a substantive contribution.

However, while the book looks great (to my admittedly biased eye), the title didn’t make it onto the spine! It’ll look a touch weird on your shelf. On the other hand, presuming that’s fixed (working on it), that means that any current versions will be collector’s items, right? Well, maybe…(looking for silver linings).

As a side note that I’ll be running a workshop on this topic at the DevLearn conference in Las Vegas in October. I’ll also be running a LXD design workshop online to accompany the conference in August.

So that’s it, my almost shameless self-promotion. You can check out more about it here or here.

We now return you to your usual blog, (p)resuming next week at the same bat time, bat channel.