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Clark Quinn’s Learnings about Learning

Taking the step

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A while ago, I wrote an article in eLearnMag, stating that better design doesn’t take longer.  In it, I suggested that while there would be an initial hiccup, eventually better design doesn’t take longer: the analysis process is different, but no less involved, the design process is deeper but results in less overall writing, and of course the development is largely the same.    And I’m interested in exposing what I mean by the hiccup.

What surprised me is that I haven’t seen more movement.  Of course, if you’re a one-person shop, the best  you could probably do is attend a ‘Deeper ID’ workshop.  But if you’re producing content on a reasonable scale, you should realize that there are several reasons you should be taking this on.

Most importantly, it’s for effectiveness.  The learning I see coming out of not only training shops and custom content houses, but also internal units, is just not going to make a difference.  If you’re providing knowledge and a knowledge test, I don’t care how well produced it is, it’s not going to make a difference.  This is core to a unit’s mission, it seems to me.

It’s also a case of “not if, but when” when someone is going to come in with an effective competing approach.  If you can’t do better, you’re going to be irrelevant. If you’re producing for others, your market will be eaten. If you’re producing internally, your job will be outsourced.

Overall, it’s about not just surviving, but thriving.

Yes, the nuances are subtle, and it’s still possible to sell well-produced but not well-designed material, but that can’t last.  People are beginning to wake up to the business importance of effective investments in learning, and the emergence of alternate models (Khan Academy, MOOCs, the list goes on) is showing new ways that will have people debating approaches.  It may take a while, but why not get the jump on it?

And it’s not about just running a workshop. I do those, and like to do them, but I never pretend that they’re going to make as big a difference as could be achieved. They can’t, because of the forgetting curve.  What would make a big difference isn’t much more, however.  It’s about reactivating that knowledge and reapplying.

What I envision (and excuse me if I make this personal, but hey, it’s what I do and have done successfully) is getting to know the design processes beforehand, and customizing the workshop to your workflow: your business, your processes of working with SMEs, your design process, your tools, and representative samples of existing work. Then we run a workshop where we use your examples. Working through the process, exploring the deeper concepts, putting them into practice, and reflecting to cement the learning.  Probably a day.  People have found this valuable in an of itself.

However, I want to take it just a step further. I’ve found that being sent samples of subsequent work and commenting on it in several joint sessions is what makes the real difference.  This reactivates the knowledge, identifies the ongoing mistakes, and gives a chance to remediate them.  This is what makes it stick, and leads to meaningful change.  You have to manage this in a non-threatening way, but that’s doable.

There are more intrusive, higher-overhead ways, but I’m trying to strike a balance between high value and minimal intensiveness to make a pragmatic but successful change.  I’d bet that 90% of the learning being developed could be improved by this approach (which means that 90% of the learning being developed really isn’t a worthwhile investment!).  It seems so obvious, but I’m not seeing the interest in change.  So, what am I missing?

Getting Pragmatic About Informal

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In my post on reconciling informal and informal, I suggested that there are practical things L&D groups can  do about informal learning.  I’ve detected a fair bit of concern amongst L&D folks that this threatens their jobs, and I think that’s misplaced.  Consequently, I want to get a wee bit more specific than what I said then:

  • they can make courses about  how  to use social media better (not everyone knows how to communicate and collaborate  well)
  • share best practices
  • work social media into formal learning to make it easier to facilitate the segue into the workplace
  • provide performance support for social media
  • be facilitating the use of social media
  • unearth good practices in the organization and share them
  • foster discussion

 

I also noted “And, yes, L&D interventions there will be formal in the sense that they‘re applying rigor, but they‘re facilitating emergent  behaviors that they don‘t  own“. And that’s an important point. It’s wrapping support around activities that aren’t content generated by the L&D group. Two things:

  1. the expertise for  much doesn’t reside in the L&D group and it’s time to stop thinking that it all can pass through  the L&D  group (there’s too much, too fast, and the L&D group has to find ways to get more efficient)
  2. there is expertise in the L&D group (or should be) that’s more about process than product and can and should be put into practice.

So, the L&D group has to start facilitating the sharing of information between folks. How can they represent and share their understandings in ways the L&D group can facilitate, not own?  How about ensuring the availability of tools like blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, discussion forums, media file creating/sharing, and profiles, and  helping communities learn to use them?  Here’s a way that L&D groups can partner with IT and add real value via a synergy that benefits the company.

That latter bit, helping them learn to use them is also important.  Not everyone is naturally a good coach or mentor, yet these are valuable roles.  It’s not just producing a course about it, but facilitating a community around  these roles.  There are a lot of myths about what makes brainstorming work, but just putting people in a room isn’t  it.  If you don’t know, find out and disseminate it!  How about even just knowing how to work and play well with others, how to ask for help in ways that will actually get useful responses, supporting needs for blogging, etc.

There are a whole host of valuable activities that L&D groups can engage in besides developing content, and increasingly the resources are likely to be more valuable addressing the facilitation than the design and development.  It’s going to be just too much (by the time it’s codified, it’s irrelevant).  Yes, there’ll still be a role for fixed content (e.g. compliance), but hopefully more and more curricula and content will be crowd-sourced, which increases the likelihood of it’s relevance, timeliness, and accuracy.

Start supporting activity, not controlling it, and you will likely find it liberating, not threatening.

 

Help? Two questions on mobile for you

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In the process of writing a chapter on mobile for an elearning book, the editor took my suggestion for structure and then improved upon it. I’d suggested that we have two additional sections: one on hints and tips, and the others on common mistakes.  His suggestion was to crowd-source the answers.  And I think it’s a good idea, so let me ask for you help, and ask you to respond via comments or to me personally:

  1. What are the hints and tips you’ve found valuable for mlearning?
  2. What are the mlearning mistakes you’ve seen or experienced that you’d recommend others avoid?

I welcome seeing what you come up with!

Design Readings

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Another book on design crossed my radar when  I was at a retreat and in the stack of one of the other guests was Julie Dirksen’s book Design for How People Learn  and  Susan Weinschenk’s  100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People.  This book provides a nice complement to Julie’s, focusing on straight facts about how we process the world.

Dr. Weinschenk’s book systematically goes through categories of important design considerations:

  • How People See
  • How People Read
  • How People Remember
  • How People Think
  • How People Focus Their Attention
  • What Motivates People
  • People Are Social Animals
  • How People Feel
  • People Make Mistakes
  • How People Decide

Under each category are important points, described, buttressed by research, and boiled down into useful guidelines. This includes much of the research I talk about when I discuss deeper Instructional Design, and more.  While it’s written for UI designers mostly, it’s extremely relevant to learning design as well.  And it’s easy reading and reference, illustrated and to-the-point.

There are some really definitive books that people who design for people need to have read or have to hand. This fits into the latter category as does Dirksen’s book, while  Don Norman’s books, e.g.  Design of Everyday Things  fit into the former.  Must knows and must haves.

Flipping assessment

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Inspired by Dave Cormier’s learning contract, and previous work at learner-defined syllabi and assessment, I had a thought about learner-created project evaluation rubrics. I’m sure this isn’t new, but I haven’t been tracking this space (so many interests, so little time), so it’s a new thought for me at any rate ;).

It occurred to me that, at least for somewhat advanced learners (middle school and beyond?), I’d like to start having the learners propose evaluation criteria for rubrics.  Why? Because, in the course of investigating what should  be important, they’re beginning to learn about what is  important.  Say, for instance, they’re designing a better services model for a not-for-profit (one of the really interesting ways to make problems interesting is to make them real, e.g. service learning).  They should create the criteria for success of the project, and consequently the criteria for the evaluation of the project. I wouldn’t assume that they’re going to get it right initially, and provide scaffolding, but eventually more and more responsibility devolves to the learner.

This is part of good design; you should be developing your assessment criteria as part of the analysis phase, e.g. before you start specifying a solution.  This helps learners get a better grasp on the design process as well as the learning process, and helps them internalize the need to have quality criteria in mind. We’ve got to get away from a vision where the answers are ‘out there’, because increasingly they’re not.

This also ties into the activity model I’ve been talking about, in that the rationale for the assessment is discussed explicitly, make the process of learning and thinking transparent and ‘out loud’.  This develops both domain skills and meta-learning skills.

It is also another ‘flip’ of the classroom to accompany the other ways we’re rethinking education.  Viva La Revolucion!

Making rationale explicit

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In discussing the activity-based learning model the other day, I realized that there had to be another layer to it.  Just as a reflection by the learner on the product they produce as the outcome of an activity should be developed, there’s another way in which reflection should come into play.

What I mean here is that there should be a reflection layer on top of the curricula and the content as well, this time by the instructor and administration. In fact, there may need to be several layers.

For one, the choice of activities should be made explicit in terms of why they’re chosen and how they instantiate the curricula goals.  This includes the choice of products and guidance for reflection activities.  This is for a wide audience, including fellow teachers, administrators, parents, and legislators.  Whoever is creating the series of activities should be providing a design rationale for their choice of activities.

Second, the choice of content materials associated with the activities should have a rationale. Again, for  fellow teachers, administrators, parents, and legislators.  Again, a design rationale makes a plausible framework for dialog and improvement.

In both cases, however, they’re also for the learners.  As I subsequently indicated, I gradually expect learners to take responsibility for setting their own activities, as part of the process of becoming self learners.  Similarly, the choice of products, content materials, and reflections will become the learners to improve their meta-learning skills.

All together, this is creating a system that is focused on developing meaningful content and meta-learning skills that develops learners into productive members of the society we’re transitioning into.

(And as a meta-note, I can’t figure out how to graft this onto the original diagram, without over-crowding the diagram, moving somehow to 3D, or animating the elements, or…  Help!)

Reconciling Formal and Informal

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Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about informal learning, which ends up sounding like formal learning, and this can be confusing.  So I’ve been trying to reconcile these two viewpoints, and this is how I’m seeing it.

There are really two viewpoints: that of the learning and development (L&D) professional, and that of the performer. Each of these sees the world differently, and we need to separate these out.

performer versus L&D views of formal and informalLet’s get formal learning out of the way first.  Performers know when they’re on deck for a course.      They’re even willing to take courses when they know there’s a significant skill shift they need, or when they’re novices in a new area.  If you’ve addressed the emotional side – motivation and anxiety – they can be eager participants.  And L&D knows formal learning (all too well), they know how to design and develop courses (or think they do; there’s a lot of bad stuff being produced under the rubric ‘course’ that’s a waste of time and money, but that’s another topic).

Now, let’s move on to informal learning, as this is where, to me, we have a conflict.

The performer is focused on the tasks they need to perform. When they’re practitioners in the area, they’re much more likely to want the resources ‘to hand’: job aids, information, wizards, etc.  This also includes search engines, portals, and more.  Further, they’re likely to want people when that’s relevant: coaching, mentoring, answers that aren’t yet codified, finding new ideas and solutions.  The latter, resources and people, are to them informal learning. They’re answers, not courses.

Now, from the perspective of the L&D group, job aids are  formal learning. They’re designed, developed, and delivered.  They’ve got the ‘secret sauce’ provided by folks who understand how we perceive information, work, learn, and more. So here we have a mismatch.  Now, not all L&D groups take ownership of this area, but they could and should.    (While I think portals should be too, it’s less likely that the L&D group has a role here, and that too should change.)

Then we move to the social side: communication, collaboration, and more.  Here, L&D and the performer are largely in agreement, this is informal learning. However, there’s really another mismatch.  L&D tends to think there’s little they can do here, and that’s a mistake. They can do several things: they can make courses about how  to use social media better (not everyone knows how to communicate and collaborate well), share best practices, work social media into formal learning to make it easier to facilitate the segue into the workplace. They can also provide performance support for the social media, and be facilitating it’s use. They can unearth good practices in the organization and share them, foster discussion, etc; seed, feed, weed, and breed. (And, yes, L&D interventions there will be formal in the sense that they’re applying rigor, but they’re facilitating emergent  behaviors that they don’t own.)

This latter, the use of social media in the organization for work should happen, as that’s where the continual innovation happens.  As I say: optimal execution is only the cost of entry; continual innovation is the necessary competitive differentiator.  Formal learning helps execution, and so does performance support, but innovation comes from social interaction.  And L&D groups shouldn’t leave innovation to chance. They have a role to play.

social formal is not informal learningThere’s one more confounding factor.  Adding social into formal learning is worthwhile, but  folks might get confused that doing so is also informal learning, and it’s not.  Having requirements for personal reflections via a blog, discussions via forums, and collaborative assignments via wikis, and more, to facilitate learning are all good things, but certainly from the view of the performer it is not  informal.

So, when you hear someone talking about informal learning and it sounds like formal learning, realize that they may be missing this final piece, the perspective of the performer. L&D can and should take on informal learning as well, but it’s not helpful if they think that just doing performance support and adding social into formal learning is all that needs to be considered as informal learning.

That’s the way I’m seeing the confusion emerge.  Does it make sense to you?

Educational Game Design Q&A

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I was contacted for a research project, and asked a series of questions. Thought I’d document the answers here, too.

Q0. How many years have you been designing educational games?

Over 30, actually, off and on.  Started with my first job out of college, designing and programming educational computer games.  Been a recurrent theme in my career since then.

Q1. Please walk us through your process for creating an educational game from concept to implementation. Please use one of your games as an example.

A long answer is the only option (it’s a big process).  Using a design framework of Analysis, Specification, Implementation, and Evaluation:

Analysis

For any educational task, you have to start by looking at what your design objective is: you need to document what folks should be able to do that they can’t do now. I argue that this is most importantly going to manifest as an ability to make better decisions, ones that the learner doesn’t reliably make now.  It’s complicated, because SMEs don’t always have access to how they do what they do, and you have to work hard.  This isn’t unusual to learning  design, except perhaps the focus on skills.

Then, you need to know how folks go wrong; what are the reliable misconceptions. People don’t tend to make random mistakes (though there is some randomness in our architecture), but instead make mistakes based upon some wrong models.

You also need to know the consequences of those mistakes, as well as the consequence of the right answer. Decisions tend to travel in packs, and if you make this one wrong, you’re then likely to face that other one. You need to know what these are.  (And the probabilities associated with them).

In addition, you need to know the settings in which these decisions occur, as many as possible.

And you need to know what makes this task inherently interesting (it is).  Here’s where the SME is your friend, because they’re so passionate about this they’ve made it the subject of their expertise, find out what makes them  find it interesting.

Specification

With this information, you address those aligned elements from effective education practice and engaging experiences.    You need to find a storyline that integrates what makes the task interesting with the settings in which the decisions occur.  I like a heuristic I heard from Henry Jenkins: “find a role the player would like to be in”. Exaggeration is a great tool here: e.g. you’d likely rather be working on the ambassador’s daughter than just another patient.

You need to make those misconceptions seductive to get challenge. You don’t want them getting it right unless they really  know their stuff.

You need to handle adjusting the difficulty level up at an appropriate rate; you might have complications that don’t start until after they’ve mastered the interface.

You need to specify characters, dialog, rules that describe the relationships, variables that code the state of the game, a visual (and auditory) look and feel.  The UI expressed to the learner, and more.

You’ll need to specify what the ‘perspective’ of the player is in relation to the character.

Overall, you need to nail meaningfulness, novelty, and the cycle of action and feedback to really get this right.

Finally, you need to specify the metrics you’ll use to evaluate your creation. What will be the usability goals, educational outcomes, and engagement metrics that will define you’re done?

Implementation & Evaluation

I’m a design guy, so I don’t talk so much about implementation, and evaluation follows the above.  That said…

The tools change constantly, and it will vary by size and scope. The main thing here is that you will  have to tune.  As Will Wright said, “tuning is 9/10ths of the work”.  Now that’s for a commercially viable game, but really, that’s a substantial realization compared to how complex the programming and media production is.

Tuning requires regular evaluation.  You’ll want to prototype in as low a fidelity as you can, so it’s easier to change.  Prototype, test, lather, rinse, repeat.  (Have ever 3 words ever sold more unnecessary product in human history?)

There’s much  more, but this is a good first cut.

Q2. Describe your greatest success, challenge, failure.

My greatest success, at least the most personally rewarding in terms of feeling like making a contribution, is definitely the Quest game. When you’re making a game that can save kids’ lives, you’ve got to feel good about it. On no  budget (we eventually got a little money to hire my honors student for a summer, and then some philanthropic money to do a real graphic treatment), we developed a game that helped kids who grow up without parents experience a bit of what it’s like to survive on your own (goal: talk to your counselors).  Interestingly, I subsequently got it ported to the web as a student project (as soon as I heard about CGI’s, the first web standard to support maintaining ‘state’, I realized it could run as a web game), and it still runs!  As far as I know, BTW, it’s the first web-based serious game ever.

My greatest challenge was another game you can still play on the web.  We’d developed a ‘linear scenario’ game on project management for non-project-managers, and they liked it so much they then asked for a game to accompany it.  But we’d already accomplished the learning!  Still, we did it.  I made the game about just managing to cope with missing data, scope creep, and other PM issues, so engineers could a) understand why they should be glad there were  project managers, and b) that they shouldn’t be jerks to work with.

Biggest failure that I recollect was a team brought together by a publisher to work with the lead author on a wildly successful book series.  There was a movie script writer who’d become a game designer, and me, and a very creative team. However, we had a real problem with the SME, who couldn’t get over the idea that the ‘game’ had to develop the concept without getting mired in the boring details of particular tools. We would get progress, and then generate a great concept, and we’d be reined back in to “but where’s the tool simulation”?  Unfortunately, the SME had ultimate control, not the creative team, and the continuing back and forth ultimately doomed the project.

Q3. When determining game play is avoiding violence an issue? Q4.  Is accounting for gender an issue when creating games?

I answered these two questions together; I don’t shy away from controversy, and believe that you use the design that works for the audience and the learning objective.  I believe education trumps censorship.  I argued many years ago (when Doom was the GTA of the day) that you could get meaningful learning experiences out of the worst of the shoot-em-ups.  Not that I’d advocate it.  Same with gender.  Figure out what’s needed.

As a caveat, I don’t believe in gratuitous violence, sex, or gender issues, (Why is sex more taboo than violence? I don’t get it.) but I believe you need to address them when relevant in context. In ways that glorify people, not violence or intolerance.

Q5. How did you develop your creation process?

I went from ad h0c at the start to trying to find the best grounding for process possible.  Even as an undergrad I had received a background in learning, but as a grad student I pursued it with a vengeance (I looked at cognitive, behavioral, constructivist, ID, social, even machine  learning looking for insight).  At the time, the HCI field was also looking at what made engaging experiences, and I pursued that too. The real integration happened when I looked systematically at design and creative processes: what worked and what didn’t.  Using the learning design process as a framework (since folks don’t tend to adopt new processes whole-cloth, but tend to modify their existing ones), I worked out what specifically was needed in addition to make the process work for (learning) game design.

Q6.  How do you work? Individually? As a team? If so, how do you develop a team?

Euphemistically, I work however anyone wants.  I seldom really do individual, however, because I have no graphic design skills to speak of (much to my dismay, but a person’s got to know their limitations, to paraphrase the great sage Harry Calahan).  Also, I strongly believe you should source the full suite of talent a game design needs: writing, audio, graphic, programming, UI, learning design, etc.  Naturally, in the real world, you do the best you can (“oh, I can do a good enough job of writing, and you can probably do a good enough job of audio as well as the programming”).

Q7. Is there a recipe for success in this industry? If so what is it and what would you say your biggest lesson has been so far?

My short answer is two-fold. I immodestly think that you really have to understand the alignment between effective practice and engaging experience (there’re lots of bad examples that show why you can’t just shove game and instructional designers into a room and expect anything good). Second, you have to know how to work and play well with others.  Game design is a team sport.

And finally, you really, really, have to develop your creative side.  As I tell my workshop attendees: I’ve got bad news, you have a big job ahead of you; if you’re going to do good serious game design, you’re going to have to play more games, go to more amusement parks, read more novels, watch more movies. It’s a big ask, I know, an onerous task, but hey, you’re professionals.   But you also have to be willing to take risks. Much to m’lady’s dismay, I argue that I continue to have to crack bad jokes as practice to find out what works (that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it).

If you can get a handle on these three elements: understanding the alignment, able to convince people to work with you on it, and push the envelope, I reckon you can succeed. What do you reckon?

Kapp’s Gamification for Learning and Instruction

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Karl Kapp’s written another book, this time on gamification,  and I certainly liked his previous book with Tony O’Driscoll on Virtual Worlds.  This one’s got some great stuff in it too, and some other ideas that raise some hackles.

Let me get one of the quibbles out of the way at the start: I  hate  the title “The Gamification of Learning and Instruction” (to the point I previously wrote a post arguing instead for ‘engagification‘).  Karl  makes it clear that he’s not on the trivial notion of gamification: “Gamification is not  Badges, Points, and Rewards”.  My problem is that by just having the title, folks who don’t read the book will still point to it to justify  doing  the trivial stuff. I’d much rather he’d titled it something like “Beyond Gamification” or “Engagification” or “Serious Gamification” or something.  He can’t be blamed for people misusing the term, and even his book, but I still fret about the possible consequences.

With that caveat, I think there is a lot to like here.  Karl’s got the right perspective: “Serious games and gamification are both trying to  solve a problem, motivate people, and promote learning using  game-based  thinking and techniques.”  He does a good job of laying out the core ideas, such as:

“Games based on this complex subject matter work, not  because they include all the complexities, but precisely  because they reduce  the complexity and use broad generalizations to represent reality. The player  is involved in  an abstraction of events, ideas, and reality.”

I liked his chapter 2, as it does a good job of exploring the elements of games (though it’s not quite as categorical as I’d like ;).  He’s got pragmatic advices there, and lots of examples to help illustrate the possibilities.  He goes beyond serious games in a number of ways, talking about adding motivation factors for other things than making good decisions. I worry somewhat that folks might (and do) use the same things to get people to do things that they might not otherwise believe are good to do, and the ethical issues aren’t addressed too much, but again that’s not Karl’s point, as his many examples clearly show.

Chapters 7-9 are, to me, the most valuable from my point of view; how do you  do  game design (the focus of  Engaging Learning). Chapter 7  talks about Applying Gamification to Problem Solving and helps explain how serious games provide deep practice. Chapter 8 maps gamification on to different learning domains such as declarative, procedural, affective, and more. There are valuable hints and tips here for other areas as well as the ones I think are most important.  And Chapter 9 provides valuable guidance about the design process itself.

I wish there was more discussion of how meaningful challenges for problem-solving will  make  fact based learning more relevant, rather than just gamifying it, but that’s not necessarily the role of this book.  I very much like this statement, however: “The gamification of learning cannot be a random afterthought. It needs  to be carefully planned, well designed, and  undertaken with a careful balance of game, pedagogy, and simulation.”  Exactly!  You can’t just put instructional designers and game designers in the room together and expect good things to happen (look at all the bad examples of edutainment out there); you have to understand the alignment.

There are some interesting additional chapters.  Guest authors come in and write on motivations and achievements (Blair), the gamer perspective (presumably son Kapp), a case study of a serious initiative in gaming (Sanchez), and alternate reality games (Olbrish).  These provide valuable depth in a variety of ways; certainly Alicia Sanchez is walking the walk, and the alternate reality games that Koreen Olbrish are talking about have struck me as a really compelling opportunity.

There are flaws. I can’t comprehend how he can go from talking about objectives straight to talking about content.  Games are not about content, they’re about context; putting the player into a place where they have to make the decision that they need to be able to make as an outcome.  This statement really strikes me as wrong: “The goal of  gamification is to take content that is typically presented as a lecture or an  e-learning course and add  game-based elements…”. Given my focus on ability, not content, this predictably irks me.

Karl also misses what I would consider are some important folks who probably should be referenced.  While he did get Raph Koster and Jane McGonigal, he hasn’t cited Aldrich, Gee, Shaffer, Barab, Jenkins, Squire, Steinkuehler, or even Quinn (ok, I had to say it).  It seems a bit narrow-focused to miss at least  (the ‘other’ Clark)  Aldrich, who’s written now 4 books on the topic.  I mean, being an academic and all…. :)

Overall, I know he’s fighting for the right things, and think there’s some very broad and useful information in here. If you’re looking to make your learning designs more effective, this book will show you a lot of examples, give you some valuable frameworks, and provide many hints and tips.

X-based learning: sorting out pedagogies and design

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It’s come up in a couple of ways how my (in progress) activity-based framework for learning is related to other models, e.g. performance-based learning.  And, looking around, I am reminded that there’s a plethora of models that have overlap.  I’ll try to sort them out.  This will undoubtedly be an ever-growing list, as there seems to be X-based learning where X = anything, and I’m sure folks supportive of their approach will let me know ;).  Recognize that these are very sketchy descriptions, intended to communicate similarities, not tease apart deep nuances.

At core is the reasoning that meaningful activities have myriad benefits.  Learners are engaged in working on real things, and the contextualization facilitates transfer to the extent that you’ve designed the activity to require the types of performance they’ll need in the world.  There’s the opportunity to layer on multiple learning goals from different domain, and 21st century skills like media communications, and if it’s social (which is a recurring theme in these models) you get things like leadership and teamwork as well.  Better engagement and learning outcomes are the big win.

First, there’s already an activity-based learning out of India!  It seems to focus on having learners do meaningful things, which very much is at core here. There’s also an activity-based curriculum, by the way, which is also the way I’m thinking of it: a sequence of activities is a curriculum.  This fits within  active learning, arguably, in that there’s a desire for the learner to be actually doing  something as the basis of learning, though the types of classroom activities of debates and discussions seem not as powerful as others cited below.

So, performance-based learning seems to be focused on assessment, having the students actively demonstrate their ability.    This is, to me, an important aspect, as cognitive science recognizes that passing a knowledge test about  something is not likely to transfer to the ability to do  (we call it ‘inert knowledge’).  That’s the point of having products of activities, at least reflection , so it sounds very much is in synergy.  This also appears to be the focus of  outcomes-based learning,  which also emphasizes actual production, but while touting constructivism seems to end up being more a tool of the status quo.  This can also be similar (and ideally should be) to competency-based learning, where there are explicit performance outcomes expected, rather than grading on the curve.

And there is problem-based learning and project-based learning.  Both focus on having learners engage in meaningful activity, with the distinction between the two having to do with whether the problem is set by the instructor, or whether the project is decided is decided by the students. There are arguments for both, of course; for me, problems are easier to specify, it takes a special teacher to help shape a project and wrap the learning goals around it.  I reckon serious games are problem-based learning, by the way.

Service learning  is another related idea, that has learners doing meaningful projects out in the community. This is activity-based and expands upon the meaningfulness by connecting it to the community.  I’ve been a fan of the Center for Civic Education’s Project Citizen as an example of this, having students try to pass legislation to improve things in their area, and consequently learning about law-making.

Inquiry-based learning shares the focus on activities of information gathering, but has primarily been based in science.    It seems to not have a goal other than exploration and understanding, with an even  more extreme view of learner control.  This seems good with a self-motivated learner, and as long as the learner is either a self-capable learner, or there’s a facilitator, it could work. This seems very similar to the MOOC approach of Siemens & Downes.  It also seems to be almost identical to the community of inquiry approach.

I frankly want an activity-based pedagogy and curriculum to support all of these models.  The benefits, and the resistance to knowledge dump and fact test forms of learning, drive this perspective.  Getting there requires a different type of learning design that one focused on standards. You need to shift, focusing on what do the students need to be able to do afterwards, and working backward from there. Understanding by design is a design approach that works backwards from goals, and if you set your outcomes on performance, and then align activities to require that performance, you have a good chance of impacting pedagogy, and learning, in meaningful ways.  I admit it surprises me that this needs to be pointed out, but I see the consequences of content-driven (forward) design too often to argue.

The point is to find an umbrella that holds a suite of appropriate pedagogies and makes it difficult to do inappropriate ones.  As Les Foltos tweeted: “We need to fan the fires for these instructional strategies. They don’t align well with standardized tests”.  Exactly.