On Monday, a hearty Twitter exchange emerged when Jane Bozarth quoted Roger Schank “Why do we assume that theories of things must be taught to practitioners of those things?”   I stood up for theory, Cammy Bean and Dave Ferguson chimed in and next thing you know, we’re having a lively discussion in 140 characters.   With all the names to include, Dave pointed out we had even less space!

One side was stoutly defending that what SMEs thought was important wasn’t necessarily what practitioners needed.   The other side (that would be me) wanted to argue that it’s been demonstrated that having an underlying model is important in being able to deal with complex problems.

So, of course, the issue really was what we mean by theory.   It’s easy (and correct) to bash conceptual knowledge frameworks that don’t have applicability to the problem at hand; Dave revived the great quote: “In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.” He also cited Van Merrienboer & Kirschner as saying that teaching theory to successful practitioners can be detrimental. (BTW, see Dave’s great series of posts ‘translating‘ their work.) On the other hand, having models has clearly been shown to be valuable in adapting to complexity and ambiguity.   What’s a designer to do?

So, let me be clear.   If there’s a rote procedure to be followed, there’s no need for a theory.   In fact, there’s no need for training, since you ought to automate it!   Our brains are good at pattern matching, bad at rote repetition, and it seems to me to be sad if not criminal to have people do rote stuff that could be done better by machine; save the interesting and challenging tasks for us!

It’s when tasks are complex, ill-structured, and/or ambiguous with lots of decisions, that we need theories.   Or, rather, models.   Which, I think, is part of the confusion (and I may be to blame! :).

I’m   talking about an understanding of the underlying model that guides performance.   Any approach to a problem has (or should) a rationale behind it about why that’s the reason you do it this way, not that way.   It’s based upon some theory, but it should be resolved into a model that has just enough richness to help you decide when to do X and when to do Y. As I said many years ago:

I see mental models as dynamic.   That is, they’re causal explanations of system behaviour.   They are used to explain observed outcomes and to predict the effects of perturbations.

It’s the explanation and prediction capabilities that are important.   The problem is, if the situation’s complex enough (and most are, whether it’s controlling a production line, or dealing with a customer, or…), you can’t train on all the situations that a learner might face.   So then you need to provide guidance.   Yes, we’ll use example and practice context to support transfer, but we should refer back to a model that guides our performance. And that’s useful and necessary.

Cammy noted that it’s extra work to develop that model, and I acknowledge that.   I’ve said that good instructional design requires more work and knowledge on the part of the designer than we typically expect, which is why I don’t think you can do good ID without knowing some learning theory. (BTW, my Broken ID series addresses a lot of the above.)

So, let me be clear: in any reasonably complex domain (and you shouldn’t be training for simple issues: just give a job aid or automate or…), you should present the learner with a model that you reinforce in examples and practice.   It should not be an abstract academic theory, but a practical guide to why things are done this way and what governs the adaptation to circumstances.   As that model is acquired through examples and practice, you provide the basis for self-improving performance.

That’s my model for designing effective learning.   What’s yours?

On a side note, what I recall as to the various tweets, and what Twitter shows from each person, doesn’t have a perfect correlation.   While I acknowledge my memory failing more frequently (just age, not dementia or Alzheimer’s, I *think*), I’m pretty sure that Twitter dropped some of those messages from the record (the same time they acknowledged having trouble with dropping avatar images).   Tweeter beware!

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.

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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.

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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.

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This is one in a series of thoughts on some broken areas of ID that I’m 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.

When it comes to closing the elearning experience, not surprisingly too often we drop the ball here, too.   Our endings tend to be too abrupt, and merely rehash what has been learned, and, if we’re lucky, point out further directions. Not that we don’t want to let them know what they‘ve learned, and indicate that if they want to go deeper, they should go here, and they’re now prepared to learn about this thing over there.   But there’s so much more!

First of all, if we’re viewing this as an experience, developing motivation and addressing the emotional components, and we should be, then we should close off the experience emotionally as well.   We should acknowledge the effort they’ve put in, and celebrate the fact that they‘ve learned the ability to do something new (and it should be do something new, if you‘ve got your objectives right).

Ideally, we’d personalize this, and say something like”you did really good on A, but your B was a little weak, try a bit of C to build that up” or whatever.   We don’t always have the ability to track performance at this more granular level, nor the ability to make the learning content adapt in that way, but it’s conceptually feasible and you should be thinking about how you might accomplish that.

Also, in the introduction, we drilled down from the larger context in the world (right?), and we should similarly drill back up.   Let‘s reconnect the learner with the broader context, and reactivate and associate the learning experience by letting them know how what they now can do plays a role in the world.   It‘s not just “you learned X”, but “you learned X, which means Y”.

Finally, let me add a valuable lesson I learned.   I was working on some content for speaking to the media, and the SMEs (hello, Jane & Susan!) had a nice statement format that worked really well (with a memorable acronym: the SEX statement – Statement, Examples, eXplanation – I’ve never forgotten it :).   However, they realized that the opportunities to apply it might be few and far-between, so they encouraged ways to practice it.   They suggested using it with co-workers, bosses, even your kids!

The important point was the effort they put in to help you keep it active until you needed it, and that‘s too often an element we forget.   We can and should stream out reactivations at a rate that is appropriate for how soon and how often we’ll apply the skills, but our decision about how to support the learner’s retention should be conscious and related to their task and practice opportunities.

Note that this can and should be all done in a minimum amount of words.   It doesn’t take much, a sentence or two at most, unless it‘s been a big elearning experience, but it is appropriate.

So, in summary, make sure you wrap up the learning experience with the same care that you began it. Make it an experience to be remembered!

Cathy Moore has a lovely post with a slideshow that talks about using action mapping to design better elearning, and it’s a really nice approach.   While I don’t know from Action Mapping (tm?), I do know that the approach taken avoids the typical mistakes and focuses on the same thing I advocate: what do people need to be able to do?

The presentation rightly points out the problems with knowledge dump, and instead focuses on the business goal first, and then asks you to map out what the learner would need to be able to do to achieve that business goal.   That’s the point I was making in my ‘objectives‘ post of the Broken ID series.

Cathy nicely elaborates on that point, going directly to practice that has them doing the task, as close as possible to the real task.   Finally, she has you bring in the minimum information needed to allow them to do the task.   This is really a great ‘least assistance‘ approach!

Now, it’s not talking about examples or models (though those could fit under the minimum information principle, above), nor introducing the topic, so I’d want to ensure that the learners are engaged into the learning experience up-front, and provide a model to guide their performance in the task.   What this does, however, is give you a framework and set of steps that really focuses on the important elements and avoiding the typical approach that is knowledge-full and value-light.   Recommended.