I had the (dubious) pleasure of picking up an award for a client at an eLearning awards ceremony a number of years back. There’s been some apt criticism of the whole awards industry thing overall, but it did give me a chance to see what was passing as award-winning content.   And I was dismayed.   One memorable example had traditional HR policy drill-and-kill tarted up into a ‘country fair’ theme. It was, frankly, quite well produced and visually attractive.   And complete dreck, instructionally.   Yet, it had won an award!

My client typically fights the good fight when they can (hey, they use me ;), but sometimes they can’t convince the client or know not to bother. In another instance, I actually took on the design for a project, and at the end the client’s manager asked what was so special. After I walked him through it, he was singing the hallelujah chorus, but there’s an important point here.   I’ve heard this tale from many of my colleagues as well, and it indicates a problem.

Quality design is hard to distinguish from well-produced but under-designed content.

To the layperson, or even perhaps the ordinary instructional designer, the nuances of good content aren’t obvious. If the learning objective is focused on knowledge, it’s because that’s what the SME told us was important. So what if the emotional engagement is extrinsic, not intrinsic, it’s still engaging, right?   We cover the content, show an example, and then ensure they know it.   That’s what we do.

SO not.   Frankly, if you don’t really understand the underlying important elements that constitute the components of learning, if you can’t distinguish good from ordinary, you’re wasting your time and money.   If that were the only consequence,well, shame on the buyer.   But if there’s a Great eLearning Garbage Patch, it gets harder to pitch quality.   If you don’t care that it ‘sticks’ and leads to meaningful behavior change in the workplace, you shouldn’t even start. If you do care, then you have to do more.

Hey, low production values aren’t what make the learning occur, it’s just to minimize barriers (“ooh, this is so ugly”).   Learning is really a probability game (you can’t make a learner learn), and every element you under-design knocks something like 10-50% off the likelihood it’ll lead to change.   Several of those combined and you’ve dropped your odds to darn near zero (ending up working only for those who’ll figure it out no matter what you do to them).

And the problem is,   your client, your audience, doesn’t know.   So you can lose out to someone who shows flashy content but knows bugger all about learning.   You see it everywhere.

So, we have to do more.   We have to educate our clients, partners, and the audience.   It’s not easy, but if we don’t, we’ll continue to be awash in garbage content. We’ll be wasting time and money, and our effort will be unappreciated.

If you’re a designer, get on top of it, and get good at explaining it. If you’re a customer, ask them to explain how their content actually achieves learning outcomes.   Or get some independent evaluation.   There are still vulnerabilities, but it’s a push in the right direction.   We need more better learning!

If you want to achieve meaningful outcomes in the space of the important work, you need to ensure that the process is optimized. This means that you want to streamline formal learning, maximize the utility of resources, and facilitate optimal interaction. This is the realm of learning experience design.

Learning experience design can, and should, operate at several levels. For one, you want individual learning experiences to be optimal. You want a minimalist approach that combines effective cognitive design with engaging emotional design. You want the formal resources to be designed to mesh with the task and provide effective information design. And you want the social learning tools to be organized around the way the team coheres.

Here we are talking deeper instructional design, information mapping, and aligned social media.

At the next level, you want your learning development processes to make it easy to do good learning design: you want your tools and templates to scaffold proper outcomes (and preclude bad design), and you want your oversight to be based upon sound principles.

Here we are on about design processes and teams, as well as tools. We can be talking about content models and delivery architectures as well.

At a higher level, you want your components of learning to complement one another, so courses are designed in synchrony with your resources and networks, and vice versa, and you want your IT infrastructure to be based upon structures that maintain security, reliability, and maintainability with flexibility so as not to preclude new directions.

Here we are talking content frameworks and hosting architectures, semantics, and organizational alignment and culture.

Unfortunately, most organizations in my experience, are using flawed models at the first level, are embryonic at the second, and are oblivious of the top. Yet, the competitive advantage will increasingly come from just such an optimized structure, as working *smarter* will increasingly be the only sustainable edge. So, are you ready to move ahead?

Richard Nantel tweeted about Chris Dede talking about Educational Malpractice. Unfortunately, while it does accurately characterize the education space, it is not inappropriate to apply to the workplace as well. I would extend that to Training Malpractice, but I want to take it further. Because organizations are committing crimes at more than just the training level.

Let’s start with formal learning, or training. Remember, our goals are retention over time until the learning is needed, and transfer to all appropriate situations, not just ones that are seen in the learning experience. Now, realize that one of the worst things you can do to lead to long term retention is to try to have all the learning condensed into one session.. Consequently, the ‘massed practice’ of the learning *event* is a broken model! Similarly, the ‘knowledge test’ as a form of assessment has essentially no transfer value to meaningful practice. Yet these are the trusted hallmarks of corporate learning.

But wait, there’s more! Beyond courses, there are performance support resources. Are they organized by need, so that each performer has a unique portal? Well, no. (“Portals? Yeah, we’ve got hundreds of them!”). Every unit has it’s own place to put things for others, and the poor worker has to search high and low to find resources. No wonder they give up. Worse, courses are designed in lieu of any cognizance of the resources.

And while informal learning, as facilitated by search and social networks, may not be actively discouraged, the lack of any cohesive effort to coordinate the network, let alone aligning with resources and formal learning, characterizes the average workplace. Sharing may not be valued or even punished!

The levels above this (systems, strategies) are even more broken. How, when companies supposedly believe that “employees are our most important asset”, can this wholesale malfeasance continue? Please, help right this wrong. If you need help, ask, but don’t continue these mistakes. For your company and your own self-respect.

On our weekly twitter learning fest, #lrnchat, I regularly identify myself as a learning experience design strategist.   I don’t always assume people know what that means, but for that audience I figure they can infer what it means.   However, I think the idea is worth exploring, because increasingly I think that not only is that what I do, but it also is important.

First, I think it is important to stop thinking about content, and start thinking about learning experience.   It’s too easy, when focusing on content, to focus on knowledge, not skills, yet skills are what will make the difference – the ability to do.   Also, it helps focus on the conative side of learning, the motivation for and anxiety about learning when you think about the learner experience. And, as always, I take a broad interpretation of learning, so this holds true beyond formal learning; it applies to thinking about performer experience when you consider the tools they’ll have, and even the way that access to communities and other informal learning components will be made available in situ.

When you think about creating learning experiences, you are talking about design.   How do you create effective and engaging learning experiences?   You need a design process, tools, and good concepts around learning and engagement.   Really, both my book on designing engaging learning experiences, and my forthcoming one on mobile learning, are at core about design.   And there are levels of design, from individual experiences to the architecture and infrastructure that can support the rich suite of experiences that characterize an organization’s full needs.

Which takes us to the last part, strategy.   By and large, I don’t do the design anymore, since I can add more value at a higher level.   Increasingly, what I’m doing is helping organizations look at their needs, current state, teams, processes, and more, and helping them develop a strategic approach to delivering learning experiences.   I help design pedagogies, processes, templates, and short-, medium-, and long-term steps.   And it is in this way that I accomplish what my first real client told me I did for them, I helped them take their solutions to the ‘next level’.

I think learning experience design is important, so important that I want to not just execute against a project at a time, but find ways to develop capability so a lot more good learning experience is created.   That means working with groups and systems. More organizations need this than might be imagined: I’ve done this for for-profit education, education publishing, those servicing corporate learning needs, and of course organizations (governmental and corporate)   wanting their external or internal learning solutions to be effective and engaging.   The sad fact is, too much ‘learning design’ is content design, still.   I’m always looking for ways to help spread a better way of creating learning.

For example, I ran a ‘deeper ID’ workshop this week for a team, and presented the concepts, modeled the application to samples of their learning objectives, gave them a practice opportunity, and wrapped up, across each of the learning elements. It was a way to address learning design in a bigger way. An extension would be to then submit sample content to me to have me comment, developing their abilities over time, as I did with another client working on integrating scenarios.

There are lots of ways this plays out, not just workshops but developing content models, spreading new metaphors for mobile learning, creating pedagogy templates, and more, but I reckon it is important work, and I have the background to do it.   I’ve found it hard to describe in the past, and I do question whether the ‘learning’ label is somewhat limiting, given my engagement in social learning with ITA and more, but I reckon it’s the right way to think about it. So I’ll keep describing it this way, and doing this work, until someone gives me a better idea!