In a recent post, Jane Bozarth goes to task on ‘best practices’, which I want to elaborate on.   In the post, she talks about how best practices are contextualized, so that they may work well here, but not there.   She’s got a cute and apt metaphor with marriage, and she’s absolutely right.

However, I want to go further.   Let me set the stage: years ago as a grad student, our lab was approached with the task of developing an expert system for a particular task.   It certainly was something we could have done.   Eventually, we asked what the description was for the ideal performance, and were told that the best source was the person who’d been doing it the longest.   Now, people are fabulous pattern matchers, and performing something for a long time with some reflection on improvement likely could get you some really good performance. However, there are some barriers: experts no longer have access to their own performance; without an external frame of reference, they can get trapped into local maxima; and other phenomena of our cognitive architecture interfere with optimal performance (e.g. set effects, functional fixedness).   I’ve riffed on this often; it’s compiled and they tell stories about what they do that have little correlation to what they actually do. We didn’t end up taking up the opportunity.   So it may be the best out there, but is it the best that can be?

And that’s the problem.   Why are we only looking at what the best is that anyone’s doing?   Why not abstract across that and other performances, looking for emergent principles, and trying to infer what would on principle be the best?   That is, if it hasn’t already been documented in theory and is available (academics do that sort of thing as a career, and in between the obfuscation there are often good thoughts and answers).   The same with benchmarking: it’s relatively the best, not absolutely the best.

I’ve largely made a career out of trying to find the principled best approaches, interpreting cognitive science research and looking broadly across relevant fields (including HCI/UI, software engineering, entertainment, and others) to find emergent principles that can guide design of solutions.   And, reliably, I find that there are idea, concepts, models, etc that can guide efforts as broadly dispersed as virtual worlds, mobile, adaptive systems, content models, organizational implementation, and more.   Models emerge that serve as checklists, principles, frameworks for design that allow us to examine tradeoffs and make the principled best solution.   I regularly capture these models and share them (e.g. my models page, and more recent ones regularly appear in this blog).

I’m not saying it’s easy, but you look across our field and recognize there are those who are doing good work in either translating research into practice or finding emergent patterns that resonate with theoretical principles.   It’s time to stop looking at what other organizations are doing in their context as a guide, and start drawing upon what’s known and customizing it to   your context, and then having a cycle of continual tuning. With the increasing pressures to be competitive, I’d suggest that just being good enough isn’t.   Being the best you can be is the only sustainable advantage.

Let’s see: copy your best competitor, and keep equal; or shoot for the principled best that can be in the category, and have an unassailable position of leadership?   The answer seems obvious to me.   How about you?

Where do the problems lie in getting good learning experiences? We need them, as it’s becoming increasingly important to get the important skills really nailed, not just ‘addressed’.   It’s not about dumping knowledge on someone, or the other myriad ways learning can be badly designed.   It’s about making learning experiences that really deliver.   So, where does the process of creating a learning experience go wrong?

There’s been a intriguing debate over at Aaron (@mrch0mp3rs) Silver’s blog about where the responsibility lies between clients and vendors for knowledge to ensure a productive relationship.   One of the issues raised (who, me?) is understanding design, but it’s clearly more than that, and the debate has raged.

Then, a post in ITFORUM asked about how to redo instructor training for a group where the instructors are SMEs, not trainers, and identified barriers around curriculum, time, etc.   What crystallized for me is that it’s not a particular flaw or issue, but it’s a system that can have multiple flaws or multiple points of breakdown.

The point is, we have to quit looking at it as design, development, etc; and view it not just as a process, but as a system. A system with lots of inputs, processes, and places to go wrong.   I tried to capture a stereotypical system in this picture, with lots of caveats: clients or vendors may be internal or external, there may be more than one talent, etc, it really is a simplified stereotype, with all the negative connotations that entails.

Note that there are many places for the system to break even in this simplified representation.   How do you get alignment between all the elements?   I think you need a meta-level, learning experience creation system design. That is, you need to look at the system with a view towards optimizing it as a system, not as a process.

I realize that’s one of the things I do (working with organizations to improve their templates, processes, content models, learning systems, etc), trying to tie these together into a working coherent whole. And while I’m talking formal learning here, by and large, I believe it holds true for performance support and informal learning environments as well, the whole performance ecosystem.   And that’s the way you’ve got to look at it, systemically, to see what needs to be augmented to be producing not content, not dry and dull learning, not well-produced but ineffective experiences, but the real deal: efficient, effective, and engaging learning experiences. Learning, done right, isn’t a ‘spray and pray’ situation, but a carefully designed intervention that facilitates learning.   And to get that design, you need to address the overall system that creates that experience.

The client has to ‘get’ that they need good learning outcomes, the vendor has to know what that means.   The designer/SME relationship has to ensure that the real outcomes emerge.   The designer has to understand what will achieve these outcomes.   The ‘talent’ (read graphic design, audio, video, etc) needs to align with the learning outcomes, and appropriate practices, the developer(s) need to use the right tools, and so on.   There are lots of ways it can go wrong, in lack of understanding, in mis-communication, in the wrong tools, etc.   Only by looking at it all holistically can you look at the flows, the inputs, the processes, and optimize forward while backtracking from flaws.

So, look at your system.   Diagnose it, remedy it, tune it, and turn it into a real learning experience creation system.   Face it, if you’re not creating a real solution, you’re really wasting your time (and money!).

Getting the details right about instructional design is quite hard, or at least it appears that way, judging from how many bad examples there are.   Yet the failures are more from a lack of knowledge rather than inherent complexity.   While there are some depths to the underlying principles that aren’t sufficiently known, they can be learned.   However, a second level of embedding systematic creativity into the process is another component that’s also missed, however this time it’s from a broken process more than a lack of knowledge.

What we want are learning solutions that really shine: where the learning experience is engaging, efficient, and effective.   Whether you’re creating products for commercial sale, or solutions for internal or external partners, you want to take your learning experience design to the next level.   So, how does an organization improve their learning design process to create stellar learning?

Let’s go through this, step by step.   First, you’ve got to know what you should be doing. I’ve gone on before about what’s broken in learning design, and what needs to be done.   That can be learned, developed, practiced, and refined.   Ideally, you’d have a team with a shared understanding of what really good learning is composed of and looks like. But it’s not just the deep learning.

There’s more: the team needs to develop both the understanding of the learning principles, and a creative approach that encourages striking a balance between pragmatic constraints and a compelling experience.   Note that creating a compelling experience isn’t about wildly expensive productive values, but instead about ensuring meaningfulness, both of the content, and the context (read: examples and practice). The learners have to be engaged cognitively and emotionally, challenged to work through and apply the material, to really develop the skills. If not, why bother?   Again, it’s not about expensive media; it can be done in text, for crying out loud! (Not that I’m advocating that, but just to emphasize it’s about design, not media.)

I find that it’s not that designer’s aren’t creative, however, but that there’s just no tolerance in the system for taking that creative step.   Yes, it can be hard to break out of old approaches, but there has to be an appreciation for the value of creating engaging experiences.   I will admit that initially the process may take a bit longer, but with practice the design doesn’t take longer, yet the results are far better.   It does, however, take a shared understanding of what an engaging experience is just as it takes the understanding of the nuances of creating meaningful learning.

And that level of understanding about both deep learning and creative experience design can be developed as a shared understanding among your team in very pragmatic ways (applying those principles to the design of that learning, too).     It’s just not conscionable anymore to be doing just mediocre design.   It won’t lead to learning and is a waste of money, as well as a waste of learner’s time.

That covers the design, and even a bit of the process, but what’s needed is a look at your design tools and processes. And I’m not talking about whether you use Flash or not, what I’m talking about is your templates.   They can, and should, be structured to support the design I’m talking about.   Too often, the constraints in existence stifle the very depth and creativity needed, saddling them with unnecessary components and not requiring the appropriate ones.   Factors that can be improved include templates for design, tools for creation, and even underlying content models!   They all have to strike the balance between supportive structure and lack of confinement.

Look, I’ve worked numerous times on projects where I’ve helped teams understand the principles, refine their processes, and yielded far better outcomes than you usually get.   It’s doable!   Yes, it takes some time and work, but the outcome is far better. On the flip side, I’ve reliably gone through and eviscerated mediocre design, systematically.   The point is not to make others look bad, but instead to point out where and how to improve product.   Those flaws from the teams that developed it can be remedied.   Teams can learn good design.   My goal, after all, is better learning!

A caveat: to the untrained eye, the nuances are subtle.   That’s why it’s easy to slide by mediocre design that looks good to the undiscerning stakeholder.   Stellar design doesn’t seem that much better, until you ascertain the learner’s subjective experience, and look at the outcomes as well.   In fact, I recall one situation where there was a complaint from a manager about why the outcome didn’t look that different.   I walked that manager through the design, and the complaints changed to accolades.

You should do it because it’s the right thing to do, but you can justify it as well (and when you do walk folks through the nuances, they’ll learn that you really do know what you’re talking about).   There’s just no excuse for any more bad learning, so please, please, let’s start creating good learning experiences.