You. Need. To. Know. Practice!

Everyone’s fretting about the role of IDs (instructional designers) in an age of AI (artificial intelligence). And, there’s so much wrong with this! Quite simply, IDs are still going to be necessary. They always have been, except too much of society has a legacy belief that undermines that awareness. And, to be fair, too few IDs actually know what they should. So, I want to make it perfectly clear: You Need To Know Practice!

Let’s start with the need for practice. Despite being obvious, it’s seemingly unknown! Or, rather, it’s got a mistaken interpretation. For one, folks think that if we present information, that learning will occur. Er, no. That’s definitely wrong; we need to practice retrieving the knowledge. Information dump means, quite literally, wasted money. It’s highly unlikely that presenting information will stick in our brains! If we need information (and we devolve to this all too often), put it in the world. If it absolutely has to be in the head (And yes, there are times this matters. Medical vocabulary is the example I always use; you don’t want to remove an elbow because you didn’t know the term for knee), you can use drill and kill, but that’s highly unlikely to be the case. Good analysis here is the first step. As the old canard has it: tellin’ ain’t training.

Then, it’s not knowledge retrieval we need to practice, or even test. Pooja Agarwal’s research (warning, PDF) shows that what we need to test is the ability to use the information. Too often, we have a legacy belief that we should knowledge test, and that’s sufficient: if they have the knowledge they can do the task. Again, no! It turns out that asking learners to use the knowledge already requires them to access it, so we don’t need that test. Yes, we need generative/elaborative activities to cement that understanding, but that’s prior to retrieval practice.

What’s critical to learning is practice using the information in the way that it will be used after the learning experience! What that means is understanding the actual performance, and designing (essentially) simulated practice. They can be mini-scenarios, branching scenarios, or full simulations. This is where IDs do what can’t be done in other ways. There aren’t technologies that can create meaningful practice; it takes IDs to design them. Technology may be able to play a role, but an ID needs to determine the necessary tasks. (Note: SMEs can’t do this, no matter what technology they use. For instance because they don’t have access [again, PDF] to about 70% of what they actually do.)

Another thing IDs do that I don’t have any reason to believe technology can solve is to choose the suite of contexts. That is, across examples and practice, the minimum set of situations that will foster transfer to all appropriate situations, and no inappropriate ones! Technology doesn’t understand context in any meaningful way. Again, the ID is the one who can (and should) select the minimum appropriate set of contexts.

These two core roles are, to me, what an ID alone can do. There’s probably more, like determining the best way to present information to the learner. What media should we use in this particular instance (is virtual reality [VR] necessary here?), etc. One of the tasks that I think IDs particularly need to perform is the afore-mentioned analysis. How can you determine what people actually need to know if you don’t know what performers are actually doing when they do it right? This sort of analysis can’t be put to technology, either.

Note that feedback is a necessary component of practice. It’s the reflection to the action, but it needs to be nuanced. It needs to be informative (read: useful), minimal, and non-personal. Getting this right is another aspect. Spacing out the practice, too, ends up being important (hence my engagement with Elevator 9). While technology may be able to help here, most likely on the spacing, it could err on the side of not getting feedback right because context again. We learn, after all, through action and reflection, and practice is action, and feedback is reflection. Even things that aren’t biologically primary, in the Geary sense, should be learnable by being driven to resources by practice and feedback.

Of course, all of the above does presume that the ID actually has the necessary skills. Which comes from applying the foundational knowledge of how people learn, e.g. learning science. (Which reminds me that we [the Learning Development Accelerator] are having a Learning Science Conference for just this reason!) We do need to have the professional background to adequately execute the necessary tasks. I’ve pointed before to the recommendation that the next economy will be a transformation one. That is, where we pay for experiences that change us in ways we want or need to be changed. And, that’s what IDs do, when we’re on our game. We are the future!

Tech isn’t, or shouldn’t be the worry. We can (read: should) be the necessary component. Of course, not only we, but society needs to know this. So we can and should promote this awareness. And, of course, counter any vendor who wants to pretend otherwise ;). ID skills are necessary. You need to know practice! You also need to know when to practice, and when to find other solutions, like job aids. But if you do, you’re increasingly invaluable. That’s my stance; am I missing something?