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User-Centered System Design

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Back when I did my PhD, I was fortunate to be in Don Norman’s group when they were developing some of the primary design principles about designing for how people really think (“cognitive engineering”).   It focused on designing for the way people work (my twist was designing for how people learn).   I recently ranted about animated gifs, and I’ve got a similar catalyst here.

As background, people don’t do many things exactly the same way. We’re really bad at rote stuff, and instead are widely creative.   If you want information from someone, it might come in many different ways: if you asked how to get somewhere, you might get a map, a set of instructions, a series of landmarks, directions to MapQuest or GoogleMaps, etc.

When you’re designing a web site (or application) that asks for information, you can do several things.   The right thing to do is to have the backend processing be smart.   Put the burden on the system to tolerate user preferences.   For instance, I like that several different address book applications I’ve used accept phone numbers in several different ways: (925) 200-0881, 925.200.0881, 925-200-0881, etc, and remap it to their internal format.   You put it in in a different way, and it comes back in their canonical format.   That *might* drive you mad, but if you vary to widely, it’ll accept your variety just as you want.   Same with dates in many applications.   Great user experience.

Alternatively, if you want to put the burden on the human, provide guidance.   Next to the field, put either instructions (“9 digit starting with area code, no separators”), or better yet, an example (“925-200-0881”) next to the field. This puts the burden on the interface designer to communicate, and the user to adapt so is slightly less elegant, but may be more likely to lead to valid data.   However, it’s at least claer.

The worst case is not to tell the user (presumably not to spoil an elegant interface, cough cough), but to provide feedback if they get it wrong.   The advice above comes after you don’t follow their preferred format.   This is not proactive, but at least it’s helpful, at least if you think that there’s only a small chance they’ll choose any way but the way you expect.

So, of course, I just ran into a bad example where I was entering email addresses.   They had to be separated in the one field, so I could use: spaces, commas, or put them on separate lines.   I tried the latter, and was told it wasn’t in the right format, without telling me what the right format is!   Bad designer, no twinkie!

I’m sorry, but these things were known 15 years ago when I was teaching interface design.   And learning design typically includes some interface design. I mean, you want the learners to be acting, so you’ve got to design interactions, so you’re about usability design as well.   I do believe learning designers need an understanding of usability, even if development really should have all the right skill sets for the necessary jobs: that is a writer for prose, a graphic designer for look and feel, usability expert for interactions, instructional designer for the learning, audio, video, etc.   In the real world, however, you’re likely going to have to do some, or at least evaluate the toolset capabilities, so do get some exposure to basic usability.   A great start is Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things.   Easy and fascinating read, and you’ll never look at the world in the same way again.

However you do it, be sensitive to aesthetics and usability.   You’ll be a better designer, even if you will be a wee bit less tolerant of bad design.   But I think that’s a good thing, or we’ll never move forward!

Learning Experience Portals?

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What is a learning experience platform?  Suddenly the phrase seems ubiquitous, but what does it mean?  It’s been on my mental ‘todo’ list for a while, but I finally spent some time investigating the concept. And what I found as the underlying concept mostly makes sense, but I have some challenges with the label.  So what am I talking about?

It’s ImPortal!

Some background: when I talk about the performance ecosystem, it’s not only about performance support and resources, but finding them.  Ie, it includes  the need for a portal. When I ask audiences “how many of you have portals in your org”, everyone raises their hands. What also emerges is that they have  bunches of them. Of course, they’re organized by the business unit offering them. HR, product, sales, they all have their own portals. Which doesn’t make sense. What does make sense is to have a place to go for thing organized by people’s roles and membership in different groups.

A user-centered way of organizing portals makes sense then. People need to be able to see relevant resources in a good default organization, have the ability to reorganize to a different default, and  search.  Federate the portal and search over all the sources of resources, not some subset.  I’ve suggested that it might make sense to have a system on top of the portals that pulls them together in a user-centric way.

An additional issue is that the contents of said portal should be open, in the sense that all users should be able to contribute their curated or created resources, and the resources can be in any format: video, audio, document, even interactive. In today’s era of increasing speed of change and decreasing resources for meeting the learning needs, L&D can no longer try to own everything. If you create a good culture, the system will be self-policing.

And, of course, the resources aren’t all about learning. Performance support is perfectly acceptable. The in-the-moment video is as needed as is the course on a new skill. Anything people want, whether learning resources from a library to that quick checklist should be supported.

The Learning Experience Platform(?)

As I looked into Learning Experience Platforms (LXP), (underneath all the hype) I found that they’re really portals; ways for content to be aggregated and made available. There are other possible features – libraries, AI-assistance, paths, assessments, spaced delivery – but at core they’re portals. The general claim is that they augment an LMS, not replace it. And I buy that.

The hype  is a concern: microlearning for instance (in one article that referred to the afore-mentioned in-the-moment video, glossing over that you may learn nothing from it and have to access it again). And of course exaggerated claims about who does what.  It appears several LMS companies are now calling themselves LXPs. I’ll suggest that you want such a tool designed to be a portal, not having it grafted onto to another fundamental raison-d’être. Similarly, many also claim to be social. Ratings would be a good thing, but also trying to be a social media platform would not.

Ultimately, such a capability is good. However, if I’m right, I think Learning Experience Platform isn’t the right term, really they’re portals. Both learning  and experience are wrong; they can be perform in the moment, and generally they’re about access, not generating experiences. And I could be wrong.

Take-home?

Ecosystems should be integrated from best-of-breed capabilities. One all-singing, all-dancing platform is likely to be wrong in at least one if not more of the subsidiary areas,  and you’re locked in.  I think a portal is a necessary component, and the LXPs have many performance & development  advantages for over generic portal tools.

So I laud their existence, but I question their branding. My recommendation is  always to dig beneath the label, and find the underlying concept. For instance, each of the concepts underpinning the term microlearning is valuable, but the aggregation is problematic. Confusion is an opening for error. So too with LXP: don’t get it confused with learning or creating experiences.  But do look to the genre for advanced portals.  At least, that’s my take: what’s yours?

A learning meta-story

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Been thinking about how to generate meaningful learning in optimal (read: concise but effective) ways. And a lot of what I’ve been thinking about involves contextualized meaningful practice (no surprise there, eh?).  So how might this play out?  Thought I’d use a story to convey the experience I’m thinking of:

Pat logs on to the system, and notes that it’s time to take a crack at the next assignment.  In it is a setup  with a role for Pat to play.  The story details a business situation: the organization, it’s current status, and a situation that’s occurred that requires an action.  The details are exaggerated, so it’s a dire situation with a lot riding on the outcome. The instructions are phrased in the form of an email directly from the CEO, with pointers to some folks to talk to for assistance.

The necessity is for Pat to create a plan to address the need.  In this case, it’s a marketing plan for a new product that has been the focus of most of the organization’s effort.  With old products facing receding sales, this product  has to succeed.  The existing plan, legacy of a departed individual, is ‘old school’ and an up-to-date approach is needed.  The indicated need  is heavily aligned with this week’s topic of social-media marketing.

Pat starts work to create a document to send to the CEO. This includes  making ‘calls’ (viewing videos of quick messages from the various roles involved including the product manager, the financial officer) to find out the  parameters which are in play and to get expert knowledge.  There are also some marketing materials available.  

In  previous assignments there were support tools about creating documents and about marketing plans, but this time  such  support isn’t available.  Pat realizes  that this being a more advanced cut through the topic, it’s time to start taking ownership of the process.  The CEO has  asked for an interim plan report  before creating the entire marketing plan, and  Pat uses previous materials and adapts them to  create the  plan.

Pat will get feedback from the CEO to incorporate in the plan before putting together the final submission.  Ultimately, the success of the plan will be presented, and then feedback on the details of Pat’s submission.  The document creation will be  evaluated separately and in the context of previous documents required across this particular topic and previous ones, while the marketing plan itself will be evaluated in terms of it’s response to the context.  

Several things to note here. The contextualized performance requirement isn’t unique, of course.  This very much draws upon similar work seen in Roger Schank’s Story-Centered Curriculum and Goal-Based Scenarios. It differs in that subsequent assignments might use totally separate story settings.  It’s similar also to work like Bransford, et al’s Anchored Instruction.  The notion of embedding performance in context reflects research that shows abstract instruction doesn’t transfer as well. My own proposal (research, anyone?) is that the story should complete before the conceptual feedback is presented, or indeed that the story outcome includes the conceptual feedback in an intrinsic way.

The second important thing is that the document creation details are assessed separately, and tracked across other such assignments that might appear anywhere. The point is to develop meta-skills like digital document creation (and others such as presentations, working in groups, research, etc) as well as the domain skills.

I believe that we need learners to create complex work products that are challenging to auto-mark, because the outcomes are necessary.  This means that you need people in the learning loop; totally asynchronous isn’t going to work to develop rich capabilities. I’m trying to figure out ways to approximate that with as little human intervention as possible because pragmatically we have more learning to achieve than we have resources to achieve that (at least until we get our priorities right ;).

 

Meaningful and meta

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Over the weekend, one of my colleagues posted a rant about MOOCs and critical thinking. And, largely, I think he was right.  There’re several things we need, and MOOCs as they typically are constituted, aren’t going to deliver.  As I talked about yesterday, I think we need a more refined pedagogy.

So the things we need, to me, are two things:

  1. meaningful learning, whereby we have individuals learning skills that are applicable in their lives, and
  2. meta-learning, or learning to learn, so that people can continue to develop their skills in the face of increasing change.

And I don’t think the typical ‘text on screen with a quiz’ that he was ranting about is going to do it. Even with hand-shot videos.  (Though I disagree when he  doesn’t like the word ‘engage’, as I obviously believe that we need engagement, but of both heart  and mind, not just tarted up quizzes.)  He wanted critical thinking skills, and I agree.

Hence the activity framework. Yes, it depends on your design skills, but when done right, focusing on having learners create products that resemble the outputs that they’ll need to generate in their lives (and this is strongly influenced by the story-centered curriculum/goal-based scenario work of Roger Schank) is fundamentally invoking the skills they need. And having them show the thinking behind it developing their ‘work out loud’ (“show your work”) skills that ideally will carry over.

Ideally, of course, they’re engaging with other learners, commenting on their thinking (so they internalize critiquing as part of their own self-improvement skill set) and even collaborating (as they’ll have to).  And of course there are instructors involved to evaluate those critical skills.

As an aside, that’s why I have problems with AI. It’s not yet advanced enough yet, as far as I know, to practically be able to evaluate the underlying thinking and determine the best intervention.  It may be great when we are there, but for now in this environment, people are better.

The other component  is, of course, gradually handing off control of the learning design responsibility to the learners. They should start choosing what product, what reflection, what content, and ultimately what activity.  This is part of developing their ability to take control of their learning as they go forward.  And this means that we’ll have to be scrutable in our learning design, so they can look back, see how we’re choosing to design learning, so they can internalize that meta-level as well.

And we can largely use MOOC technologies (though we need to have sufficient mentors around, which has been a challenge with the ‘Massive’ part).  The point though, is that we need curriculum design that focuses on meaningful skills, and then a pedagogical design that develops them  and the associated learning skills.  That’s what I think we should be trying to achieve.  What am I missing?

The Grail of Effective and Engaging Learning Experiences

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There’s a considerable gap between what we can be doing, and what we are doing.  When you look at what’s out there, we see that there are several way in which we fall short of the mark.  While there are many dimensions that  could be considered, for the sake of simplicity let’s characterize the two important ones as effectiveness of our learning and the engagement of the experience.  And I want to characterize where we are and where we could be, and the gaps we need to bridge.

GrailEffectiveEngagingLearningIf we map the space, we see that the lower left is the space of low engagement  and low effectiveness.  Too much elearning resides there.  Now, to be fair, it’s easy to add engaging media and production values, so the space of typical elearning does span from low to high engagement. Moving up the diagram, however, towards increasing effectiveness, is an area that’s less populated.  The red line separates the undesirable areas from the space we’d like to start hitting, where we begin to have some modicum of both effectiveness  and  engagement, moving towards the upper right.  This space is relatively sparsely populated, I’m afraid.  And  while there are instances  of content that do increase the effectiveness, there’s little that really hits the ultimate goal, the holy grail, with a fully integrated effective and engaging experience is achieved.

How do we move in the right direction? I’ve talked before about trying to hit the sweet spot of maximal effectiveness within pragmatic constraints.  Certainly from an effectiveness standpoint, you should be looking at the components of the Serious eLearning Manifesto.  To get effective learning, you need a number of elements, for instance:

  • meaningful practice: practice aligned with the real world task
  • contextualized practice: learning across contexts that support transfer
  • sustained practice: sufficient and increasingly challenging practice to develop the skills to the necessary level
  • spaced practice: practice spread out over  time (brains need sleep to learn more than a certain threshold)
  • real world consequences providing feedback  coupled with scaffolded  reflection
  • model-based guidance: the best guide for practice is a conceptual basis (not rote information)
  • appropriate examples: that show the concepts being applied in context

Some of these elements, also contribute to engagement, as well as others.  Components include:

  • learning-centered  contexts: problems learners recognize as important
  • learner-centered contexts: problems  learners want to solve
  • emotionally engaging introductions: hooking learners in viscerally as well as cognitively
  • adapted challenge: ramping up the challenge appropriately to avoid both boredom and frustration
  • unpredictability: maintaining the learner’s attention through  surprise
  • meaningfulness: learners playing roles they want to be in
  • drama and/or humor

The integration of these elements was the underlying premise behind Engaging Learning, my book on integrating effectiveness and engagement, specifically on making meaningful practice, e.g. serious games.  Serious games are one way to achieve this end, by contextualizing practice as decisions in a meaningful environment and using a game engine to adapt the  challenge and providing essentially unlimited practice.

Other approaches achieve much of this effectiveness in different ways. Branching scenarios are powerful approximations to this by showing consequences in context but with limited replay, and so are constructivist and problem-based learning pedagogies. This may sound daunting, but with practice, and some shortcuts, this is doable.

For example, Socratic Arts has a powerful online pedagogy that leverages media and a constructivist pedagogy in a relatively simple framework. The learner is given ‘assignments‘ that mirror real world tasks, via emails or videos of characters playing roles such as a boss.  The outputs required similarly mimic work products you might find in this area. Scaffolding is available in a couple of ways. For one, there are guidelines about Videos of experts and documents are available as resources, to support the learner in getting the best outcome.  While it’s low on fancy visual design,  it’s effective because it’s closely aligned to the needed skills post-learning.  And the cognitive challenge is pitched at the right level to engage the intellect, if not the aesthetics.  This is a cost-effective balance.

The work I did with the Wadhwani Foundation hit a slightly different spot in trying to get to the grail.  I didn’t have the ability to work quite as tightly with the SMEs from the get-go, and we didn’t have the ability to simulate the hands-on tasks as well as we’d like,  but we did our best to infer real tasks and used low-tech simulations and scenarios to make it effective.  We did use more media, animations and contextualized videos, to make the experience more engaging and effective as well.

The point being that we can start making learning more effective and engaging in practical ways. We need to make it effective, or why bother?  We should make it engaging, to optimize the outcomes and not insult our learners. And we can.  So why don’t we?

Engaging Learning

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How do you systematically design learning experiences that effectively engage the learner?

This was the question I set out to address more than 5 years ago.   Based upon years of deep investigation into learning & instruction theories and design processes, and practical experience in designing games, I wrote Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games.

The book was based upon work I’d published as an academic, but was focused very pragmatically.   There were already a few books out about the value of computer games to support learning, notably Marc Prensky’s prescient Digital Game-Based Learning, and Clark Aldrich’s Games and the Future of Learning was also already out.   Subsequently, books by Gee, Shaffer, and others have highlighted the opportunities.

However, I thought and think that my book had a unique contribution, being quite specific around:

  • the principles that underpin why games are the best learning
  • how to modify your design processes to successfully design games

Having looked at the books out there, I still feel it does the best job of making the case.

ElementsAt core was an alignment between what makes effective learning practice, and what makes engaging experiences.   Looking across educational theories, repeated elements emerge. Similarly with experience design.   It turns that they perfectly align.   If you recognize that, and can execute against it, your learning will be greater than the sum of the parts, and will both seriously engage and truly educate.   Learning can, and should, be hard fun!

The workshops I’ve run based upon the book have been very well received, reinforcing the value of the book.   Similarly, the content has been solicited as a component of both Silberman’s Handbook of Experiential Learning, and the Guild’s Immersive Learning Simulation report.   I’ve now heard Tony O’Driscoll talk about the design principles for learning experiences in Virtual Worlds (in his and Karl Kapp’s coming book on the topic), and they’re the same principles!

So why hasn’t the book penetrated corporate learning more than it has?   There are several contributing factors.   First, the work I published as an academic didn’t hit the mainstream.   I was part of the international society on computers, and a member of the group specifically about learning through computers (IFIP WG 3.3). They’d just started their own journal, and I wanted to support it (and get a publication). In retrospect, it would’ve been better to publish in one of the more recognized journals on the topic.   As I was overseas, the work never hit the US academic awareness.

Second, I didn’t really understand book marketing then, and trusted that the publisher did.   At the time, they weren’t very pro-active in developing a joint understanding of responsibility (that’s changed), and my book fell through their cracks (and I’m not a marketing person).   (Still, I’m going to be a bit more proactive on the mobile learning book, and they have promised likewise.)

I still firmly believe that the book is the best guide to designing meaningful learning experiences that are centered on deep practice, and a guide for everything from better multiple choice questions to full on simulation-driven serious games.   I’ve tracked the rest of the books out there, and they do a good job of arguing why games are a powerful learning environment, why they make business sense, and more.   However, Engaging Learning is still the best book out there that tells designers how to go about making them.   Sure, I recommend having the workshop to actually get a chance to practice the skills (you know, get your whole team to lift their game), but many who have read it have told me they found value in the book on it’s own.

I don’t say this to generate sales; I get so little it’s not going to make a difference.   I say this because I really worked hard to ensure there is a lot of value in it for you.   I’m just trying to make sure there’s better learning out there, and there’s a lot more need than I can service individually.   There are other good books, Michael Allen’s Guide to eLearning being one, but my book focuses specifically on helping you make more meaningful practice, and that’s a big area of needed improvement, and a major opportunity in making your learning more meaningful.

Please, wherever you draw inspiration, however you figure it out, make more engaging learning. Align the elements of effective practice and the elements of engaging experiences, and make your learning rock. For your learners’ sake, please!