Search Results for: Making it Meaningful

Last week, I gave a webinar with the CEO of Upside Learning on microlearning. In the commentary, one of the attendees pointed to the research of Pooja Agarwal. Turns out she’s worked with Roediger (one of the authors of Make It Stick, a book on my list). In a paper I found there, I found justification there for an approach I’ve advocated. My point is that we should make meaningful practice. Which is something I think we don’t focus enough on, so let me elaborate.

So, I argue that even for rote knowledge, you should retrieve in context and apply it. That is, I believe strongly in how Van Merriënboer talks about the knowledge you need and the complex problems you apply it to. That is, the knowledge underpins the ability to determine an appropriate approach and execute.  However, checking to see whether you have the knowledge can be either typical knowledge test or retrieval in some meaningful way. I think the former is boring, but it did seem to align with what learning science would imply.

Fortunately, in that paper (PDF), however, she tested and found that while lower level testing lead to better lower-level recall, it didn’t impact higher-level problem-solving.  Even a combination of low- and high-level questions wasn’t noticeably better than just higher-level question practice. So, if you want the higher-level skills, you practice them and that’s what’s necessary. Such questions require you to know the lower-level material, but don’t seem to need fact-checks.

Which, for experience design, is great news. My book on engagement suggested more meaningful practice. (It’s really on learning experience design, as it’s a complement to my learning science book. The final chapter talks about a design process for integrating learning science with engagement. ) What I proposed was to make practice meaningful by  retrieving information in the context of applying it. This is the case whether it’s mini-scenarios, branching scenarios, or full games.

FYI, if you’re seeking a face-to-face workshop talking about engagement, I’ll point you to my upcoming one at DevLearn in Las Vegas on October 24. The focus is on elegantly integrating engagement, including how to make meaningful practice, It received top ratings across the board when I ran it last year, so I am confident it’s worth it. I’m running a related workshop online right now, but at times most appropriate for the Asia-Pacific region, but if you’re interested, you might check it out.

In this fourth, and final, post about making it meaningful, I talk about process. You need to systematically acquire the necessary additional information to make learning experiences work. And, of course, to then use them. All explored more in the workshop.

And, as always, the text.

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This is the fourth (and final) post about how to ‘make it meaningful‘. I‘ve talked about the key principle, some of the tips and tricks, explored how to tweak some of the elements, and here I want to talk a bit about the necessary process in creating experiences that matter. Here, I‘ll talk about analysis, brainstorming, and tuning.

In most respects, when we do analysis, we‘re largely focusing on the necessary cognitive elements. That is, what the learner needs to do, what the learner already knows. And the associated models, and examples. If we‘re really being good, we collect misconceptions as well. However, we need to go further for experience design. Yet, we have an advantage.

Usually, we see subject matter experts as ‘the enemy‘. They can be hard to get sufficient time with, they can be somewhat condescending, and they too often focus on knowledge. But for our purposes, they have an important advantage: they‘ve found this stuff (whatever it is) fascinating enough to spend the necessary time to become an expert in it!   That‘s valuable, because it gives us a handle on intrinsic interest.

If we can find what makes a domain interesting to one person, we can tap into that. We should be making it manifest in the learning experience. Then, if it‘s not of interest to the learner, maybe they‘re not the right person for this topic. If it‘s generic enough, the problem may be on our side!

We also want to find out what interests our learners. This forms the basis upon which we build worlds in which our stories occur. We want to wrap interesting contexts around the goals we‘re giving learners, but we can‘t do that without knowing what‘s ‘interesting‘!

Once we‘ve gathered the necessary information, then we need to start mapping out the elements of learning. And we should start with practice. There‘s the necessity of being creative around the design process. And this is where what‘s known about creativity matters.

I‘ve written before about brainstorming, and in brief, there are things that work and things that don‘t. We want to diverge and converge, exploring ideas broadly before evaluating them. And we need individuals to think on their own before sharing those ideas.  

Note that while we might have to do it alone, the best outcomes will come with a diverse team sharing the goal of creating a great learning experience. I‘d even suggest that teams where mostly you work alone carrying a design forward make a habit of connecting at certain points in the design process, and particularly at the space of getting creative around practice and the overall story settings.

Of course, that doesn‘t mean what you come up with will be right. Tuning should be built into your process. That is, prototyping, testing, and refining should be expected. Humans are a funny lot, and recognizing that our expectations and what actually happens won‘t necessarily converge.  

And you want to use the lowest fidelity prototype you can. You want to minimize investment in making ideas concrete early on, so that you‘ve less sunk costs to fret over. Look to be agile early one, trying things out and iteratively refining rather than coming up with an overarching plan and then implementing the whole thing.  

There‘s more, of course, but these are some of the areas where we need to modify what we do. There‘s more detail to this, of course, and if you‘re interested in the more, I‘ll encourage you to sign up for the workshop. This is the topic of the fourth and final week!   Of course, it‘s a full workshop, so in addition to the content, we‘ll have live sessions to workshop some ideas and discuss what we‘ve done, and assignments with personal feedback.   Hope to see you there!

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All posts in the Make It Meaningful series:

First: Hook

Second: Tips’n’Tricks

Third: Elements

Four Process

This is the third of four posts about making learning meaningful. Here, I talk about the implications for some key learning elements.

And, as always, the text.

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This is the third post about how to ‘make it meaningful‘. I talked about tricks and tips in the previous one, and here I want to talk about the implications for elements in creating experiences that matter. Here, I‘ll talk about Introductions, Examples, Practice, and Closings.

The introduction first, of course, hooks them in as we talked about in the first post. That might even happen before the learning experience introduction, though you will want to reiterate the WIIFM.   I like to use what I call a ‘motivating‘ example, that shows the consequences from having (or not) the skill(s) addressed. It‘s not a reference example that shows the whole process, but instead just makes clear the outcomes of this in a way the learner ‘gets‘.  

In addition to the cognitive necessity of reactivating relevant knowledge (which can be done in an engaging way), we want to also set appropriate expectations about the coming experience. A mismatch can undermine learner motivation. So, if there are things that they won‘t expect (unless that‘s deliberate), ensure that they have fair understandings.  

We also want to ensure that they understand what the outcomes will be. This does not mean sharing our design objectives, but instead the objectives that they care about. Rewrite them as (again) the WIIFM that they‘ll get out of it. The point being that basically we‘re opening the emotional as well as the cognitive story.

Examples are modeling the application of the model (which I‘m not covering here) to a context. These are important to help the learner understand how the skill gets applied to particular situations. From a cognitive standpoint, there are a number of elements such as showing the thinking and covering an appropriate suite of contexts. From an engagement perspective, however, these should be engaging stories (see the previous post). There should be a challenge, and the struggle of solving, and finally an outcome (including bad ones).  

The spread across contexts necessity plays out in practice, too. And, so too, does story. From an engagement perspective, as we discussed last week, we need appropriate challenge, and a settings that‘s both appealing to the learner and relevant to the goal. This is the biggest point at which creativity comes into play. Getting this right is key.

And, just as we opened the emotional experience with the introduction, we need to close it too. In addition to the usual ‘further directions‘ and re-contextualization of what they‘ve learned, we have some engagement aspects. We should acknowledge the learner‘s effort and accomplishments, and signify their transition to a new state of being. This could include connecting them to their new community of practice.

There‘s more, and this order is not the one you‘d use in design, but these are the critical elements. There‘re more details to this, of course And, if you‘re interested in the more, I‘ll encourage you to sign up for the workshop. This is the topic of the third week!   Of course, it‘s a full workshop, so in addition to the content, we‘ll have live sessions to workshop some ideas and discuss what we‘ve done, and assignments with personal feedback.   Hope to see you there! More in my next post.

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All posts in the Make It Meaningful series:

First: Hook

Second: Tips’n’Tricks

Third: Elements

Four Process

This is the second of four posts where I’m talking about the next step beyond trivial engagement. Here I talk about some tips ‘n’ tricks that help us take our learning designs deeper in meaning.

And, as always, the text.

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This is the second post about how to ‘make it meaningful‘. I talked about some tricks to maintain engagement in the previous one, and here I want to talk about what this means for the elements of learning. Here, I‘ll talk about story, challenge, exaggeration, and humor.  

First, a good experience has the characteristics of a lived story. To me, there are three major components: goal, role, and world. The goal is what the learner needs to achieve. (We choose this so that the learner won‘t achieve it unless or until they understand the necessary elements.) The role is the character that the learner is playing in trying to achieve this goal. They should be aligned. And the world is the context in which this is happening. The fantasy wrapping. Again, alignment.

The challenge to actually achieving the goal is important as well. This is what leads to learning and engagement. The alignment between Csikszentmihalyi‘s Flow and Vygotsky‘s Zone of Proximal Development lets us know that there‘re two extremes: ‘so difficult as to be frustrating‘ and ‘so easy as to be boring‘. In between is where learning, and engagement, happen. This increases as the learner‘s abilities do.

Another element to keep things from being boring is some exaggeration. That is, most of life is mundane, but our work is challenging. In the learning experience, however, what would seem challenging at work seems mundane because there is nothing really at stake.  

Thus, we can exaggerate: let‘s not work on just a patient, but the rebel leader‘s daughter, or not just a business deal, but the one that will save the company!   And, typically, we keep this down to about one level above real life, to not violate the willingness to suspend disbelief.

Finally, we can talk about humor. It‘s challenging to do, as it can be culturally specific, but appropriately applied humor can build trust and safety, and support greater exploration. And, if we realize business is a culture, we find some universals we can leverage. Timing matters, too, not just in the ‘letting a joke land‘ sense, but where and when humor‘s appropriate.  

There‘s more, but these tips ‘n’ tricks are typically missed opportunities. There‘re more details to this, of course. And, if you‘re interested in the more, I‘ll encourage you to sign up for the workshop. This is the topic of the second week!   Of course, it‘s a full workshop, so in addition to the content, we‘ll have live sessions to workshop some ideas and discuss what we‘ve done, and assignments with personal feedback.   Hope to see you there! More in my next post.

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All posts in the Make It Meaningful series:

First: Hook

Second: Tips’n’Tricks

Third: Elements

Four Process

I believe that in addition to learning science, the other key element of Learning Experience Design is engagement. More than the trivial tarting-up, however, trying to make it meaningful. I’ve put together four posts covering some of the key elements, and this is the first. I’m talking about setting the ‘hook’ (and, really, the key element).

And, as always, the text.

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In anticipation of my upcoming ‘Make it Meaningful‘ workshop through the Learning Development Accelerator, I wanted to provide an overview of the topic. I think it‘s important to share some of the elements that are on tap. There‘re four parts: 1. The Hook, 2. Elaborations, 3. Elements, and 4. Process.  

Today, I want to talk about the core principle that makes it work. To do so, I want to start with the structure that I suggest is at core what you need to initially hook folks. And that takes 3 separate elements that the learner needs to ‘get‘:

1. You know, I do need this
2. And, I don‘t already know it
3. And, this experience will change that

That‘s it. I‘ll posit that if you can achieve this, you‘ll have a learner willing to start the learning experience. And, as a concomitant claim, that we can do this. Let me elaborate.

I think that we can get people to recognize that they need it. It‘s actually an implication from Deci & Ryan‘s Self-Determination Theory that Matt Richter of the Thiagi group helped me understand. I claim that we need learners to see the WIIFM, the What‘s In It For Me. And I‘ll suggest this comes from consequences, either the positive consequences of knowing it, or the negative ones of not knowing it. It‘s not as good, perhaps, as true intrinsic motivation, but it‘s good enough, and more reliable.

Then, you can‘t have them thinking they already know it. In general, that might not be a problem, but in certain circumstances it can be. For instance, in a truck-selling situation, the sales folks believed they already knew how. We had to make it very clear that they didn‘t before they were willing to engage. And, once they were aware, they were quite competitive in trying to rectify the situation.

Finally, learners have to believe that what you‘re doing will effectively accomplish this (in a reasonable fashion). And this may be particularly problematic, if they‘ve previously experienced engaging but not effective, or even worse, boring content.   You may have to do some extra work to convince them that you‘ve really changed!

Once you‘ve got your learners hooked, you‘ll have to deliver, but if you don‘t hook ‘em up front, it‘ll be of no avail. To paraphrase, you may be able to bring a learner to learning, but you can‘t make ‘em think. We‘ll talk about this in the next segment.  

So, get the WIIFM, and help them see that they need it. There‘re more details to this, of course. And, if you‘re interested in the more, I‘ll encourage you to sign up for the workshop. This is the topic of the first week!   Of course, it‘s a full workshop, so in addition to the content, we‘ll have live sessions to workshop some ideas and discuss what we‘ve done, and assignments with personal feedback.   Hope to see you there! More in my next post.

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All posts in the Make It Meaningful series:

First: Hook

Second: Tips’n’Tricks

Third: Elements

Four Process

For sins in my past, I’ve been thinking about assessments a bit lately. And one of the biggest problems comes from trying to find solutions that are meaningful yet easy to implement. You can ask learners  to  develop meaningful artifacts, but getting them assessed at scale is problematic. Mostly, auto-marked stuff is used to do trivial knowledge checks. Can we do better.

To be fair, there are more and more approaches (largely machine-learning powered), that can do a good job of assessing complex artifacts, e.g. writing. If you can create good examples, they can do a decent job of learning to evaluate how well a learner has approximated it. However, those tools aren’t ubiquitous. What is are the typical variations on multiple choice: drag and drop, image clicks, etc. The question is, can we use these to do good things?

I want to say yes. But you have to be thinking in a different way than typical. You can’t be thinking about testing knowledge recognition. That’s not as useful a task as knowledge retrieval. You don’t want learners to just have to discriminate a term, you want them to  use the knowledge to do something. How do we do that?

In  Engaging Learning, amongst other things I talked about ‘mini-scenarios’. These include a story setting and a required decision, but they’re singular, e.g. they don’t get tied to subsequent decisions. And this is just a better form of multiple choice!

So, for example, instead of asking whether an examination requires an initial screening, you might put the learner in the role of someone performing an examination, and have alternative choices of action like beginning the examination, conducting an initial screening, or reviewing case history. The point is that the learner is making choices  like the ones they’ll be making in real practice!

Note that the alternatives aren’t random; but instead represent ways in which learners reliably go wrong. You want to trap those mistakes in the learning situation, and address them  before they matter!  Thus, you’re not recognizing whether it’s right or not, you’re using that information to discriminate between actions that you’d take.  It may be a slight revision, but it’s important.

Further, you have the consequences of the choice play out: “your examination results were skewed because…and this caused X”.  Then you can give the principled feedback (based upon the model).

There are, also, the known obvious things to do. That is, don’t have any ‘none of the above’ or ‘all of the above’. Don’t make the alternatives obviously wrong. And, as Donald Clark summarizes, have two alternatives, not three. But the important thing, to me, is to have different choices based upon using the information to make decisions, not just recognizing the information amongst distractors. And capturing misconceptions.

These can be linked into ‘linear’ scenarios (where the consequences make everything right so you can continue in a narratively coherent progression) or branching, where decisions take you to different new decisions dependent on your choice.  Linear and branching scenarios are powerful learning. They’re just not always necessary or feasible.

And I certainly would agree that we’d like to do better: link decisions and complex work products together into series of narratively contextualized settings, combining the important types of decisions that naturally occur (ala Schank’s Goal Based Scenarios and Story-Centered Curriculum and other similar approaches).  And we’re getting tools that make this possible. But that requires some new thinking. This is an interim step that, if you get your mind around it, sets you up to start wanting more.

Note that the thinking here also covers a variety of interaction possibilities, again drag’n’drop, image links, etc. It’s a shift in thinking, but a valuable one. I encourage you to get your mind around it. Better practice, after all, is better learning.