As part of the continual rethink about what I offer and to who (e.g. training department rethinks to managers, directors, VPs; experience design reviews/refines to learning teams), my thoughts on learning experience design took a leap.   I’ve argued that the skills in Engaging Learning (my book) are the ones that are critical for Pine & Gilmore’s next step beyond their experience economy, the transformative experience economy. But I’ve started to think deeper.

John Seely Brown challenged us at the Learning Irregulars meeting that what fundamentally made a difference was a ‘questing disposition’ found in certain active learning communities.   This manifests as an orientation to experimentation and learning. My curiosity was whether it was capable of being developed, as I’m loath to think that the 10% that learn despite schooling :) is inflexible because I believe that more and better learning has a chance to change our world for the better.

I hadn’t finished the article he subsequently sent me (coming soon), but it drove me back to some early thinking on attitude change.   I recognize that just learning skills aren’t enough, and that a truly transformative experience subjectively needs to result in a changed worldview, a feeling of new perspectives.   This could be a change in attitude, a new competency, or a fundamental change in perspective.

Which brings me back to looking at myth and ritual, something I tried to get my mind around before. I was looking for the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Ritual, and the closest thing I could find is Rapport’s Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, which is almost impenetrably dense (and I’m trained and practiced at reading academic prose!).   However, the takeaway is that ritual is hard to design, most artificial attempts fail miserably.

Others have suggested that transformation is at core about movement, which takes me back to ritual.   Both a search on transformation and a twitter response brought that element to the surface.   The other element that the search found was spirituality (not just religious).   Which is not surprising, but not necessarily useful.

Naturally, I fall back to thinking from the perspective of creating an experience that will yield that transformational aesthetic, but it’s grounded in intuition rather than any explicit guidance. Still, I think there’s something necessary in the perspective that skills alone isn’t enough, and as I said before, as much of our barriers may be attitude or motivation as knowledge and skills.

I’ve skimmed ahead in JSB’s article, and can see I need a followup post, but in the interim, I’d welcome your thoughts on designing truly transformative experiences, not just learning experiences.

Previous Series Post

This is the last formal post in a series of thoughts on some broken areas of ID that I’ve been posting for Mondays.   The intention is to provide insight into many ways much of instructional design fails, and some pointers to avoid the problems. The point is not to say ‘bad designer’, but instead to point out how to do better design.

We’ve been talking about lots of ways instructional design can be wrong, but if that’s the case, the process we’re using must be broken too.   If we’re seeing cookie-cutter instructional design, we must not be starting from the right point, and we must be going about it wrong.

Realize that the difference between really good instructional design, and ordinary or worse, is subtle.   Way too often I’ve had the opportunity to view seemingly well-produced elearning that I’ve been able to dismantle systematically and thoroughly.   The folks were trying to do a good job, and companies had paid good money and thought they got their money’s worth.   But they really hadn’t.

It’d be easy to blame the problems on tight budgets and schedules, but that’s a cop-out.   Good instructional design doesn’t come from big budgets or unlimited timeframes, it comes from knowing what you’re doing.   And it’s not following the processes that are widely promoted and taught.

You know what I’m talking about – the A-word, that five letter epithet – ADDIE.   Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation.   A good idea, with good steps, but with bad implementation.   Let me take the radical extreme: we’re better off tossing out the whole thing rather than continue to allow the abominations committed under that banner.

OK, now what am I really talking about?   I was given a chance to look at an organization’s documentation of their design process.   It was full of taxonomies, and process, and all the ID elements.   And it led to boring, bloated content.   If you follow all the procedures, without a deep understanding of the underpinnings that make the elements work, and know what can be finessed based upon the audience, and add the emotional elements that instructional design largely leaves out (with the grateful exception of Keller’s ARCS model).

The problem is that more people are doing design than have sufficient background, as Cammy Bean’s survey noted.   Not that you have to have a degree, but you do have to have the learning background to understand the elements behind the processes.   Folks are asked to become elearning designers and yet haven’t really had the appropriate training.

Blind adherence to ADDIE will, I think, lead to more boring elearning than someone creative taking their best instincts about how to get people to learn.   Again, Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping is a pretty good shortcut that I’ll suggest will lead to better outcomes than ADDIE.

Which isn’t to say that following ADDIE when you know what you’re doing, and have a concern for the emotional and aesthetic side (or a team with same), won’t yield a good result, it will.   And, following ADDIE likely will yield something that’s pretty close to effective, but it’s so likely to be undermined by the lack of engagement, that there’s a severe worry.

And, worse, there’s little in their to ensure that the real need is met, asking the designer to go beyond what the SME and client tells you and ensure that the behavior change is really what’s needed.   The Human Performance Improvement model actually does a better job at that, as far as I can tell.

It’s not hard to fix up the problem.   Start by finding out what significant decision-making change will impact the organization or individual, and work backward from there, as the previous posts have indicated. I don’t mean to bash ADDIE, as it’s conceptually sound from a cognitive perspective, it just doesn’t extend far enough pragmatically in terms of focusing on the right thing, and it errs too much on the side of caution instead of focusing on the learner experience.It’s not clear to me that ADDIE will even advocate a job aid, when that’s all that’s needed (and I’m willing to be wrong).

Our goal is to make meaningful change, and that’s what we need to do.   I hope this series will enable you to do more meaningful design.   There may be more posts, but I’ve exhausted my initial thoughts, so we’ll see how it goes.

Previous Series Post | Last Series Post

This is one in a series of thoughts on some broken areas of ID that I’ve been posting for Mondays.   The intention is to provide insight into many ways much of instructional design fails, and some pointers to avoid the problems. The point is not to say ‘bad designer’, but instead to point out how to do better design.

Instructional design has established that the correct order of elements is introduction – concept – example – practice (and feedback) – summary.   While that’s a good default, it doesn’t have to be that way, and there are times when it makes sense to provide other approaches or even self-navigation.   What we shouldn’t see is the prevalent (click to advance ‘next’ button), with linear navigation forwards and back.   Or, rather, we shouldn’t see that without some other support.   And more.

When we did a course on speaking to the media (and without an LMS to handle the navigation, so no built-in ‘next button’), we had a scheme that both provided a good default, and allowed self-navigation.   We had the elements of each of the 3 modules labeled from a learner perspective (e.g. Show Me, Let Me). And we had a nav bar in the upper left that let you choose where to go. At the bottom of the screen (we erred for scrolling rather than one page to minimize clicks and load times, this was over 10 years ago) were also some options of where to go next, with one indicated as the recommended choice.   We graphically supported this with a dotted   line leading the learner through the content and to the default choice (follow the bouncing ball).

Was there benefit from this?   Anecdotaly, I heard (I’d returned to the US) that about half the users followed the bouncing ball, but the other half (presumably the self-capable learners) took the initiative for their own learning and used the nav bar to go where and when *they* wanted to.   I note that UNext/Cardean had a similar nav structure at one time.

Now, you may have heard of case-, problem- or project-based learning. In this case, before you present the concept, you present either an example (a case-study) or a problem.   These serve as the introduction, but are attuned to different ways of learning.

If you buy into some of the learning style models, they have cycles through different learning approaches, but recognize that different learners could prefer to start in different areas.   That was the premise that drove at least part of the strategy behind the adaptive learning system project I led from 1999-2001. We had the system   recommend a path, and alternatives, but it was based upon who they were as a learner.

It turns out that some learners could prefer an example first, that links concept to context, some prefer problems first, to get concrete about what the situation’s about, and some might prefer a more typical approach.   We didn’t have all the answers at the time, but we had a good set of rules, and were going to extract better ones as we went along.

The point is, while a good default is a reasonable choice, having some alternative paths might be worth considering, and allowing learner navigation is almost essential.     Allowing learners to test out is a good option as well.   Don’t lock your learners into a linear experience, unless you’ve really designed it as an experience, focusing on the overall flow and testing and refining until your learners tell you it is an experience.   And I do recommend that, it’s not as tough as it sounds.   However, don’t take just the easy default, learners prefer and deserve choice.   So consider some alternative pedagogies, consider the learner, and think outside the line.