Learnlets

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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.

One of the first things learners see is the introduction to the content; it‘s the first place that they can be disappointed, and all too often they are.   They are given objectives that don‘t matter to them, they‘re told what they‘re going to see in dull terms, it‘s all aversive rather than interesting.   Which is a wonderful way to start a learning experience, eh?

What we want to do is bring in the emotion! Almost all of instructional design is about the cognitive part, yet the motivational part is often just as important.   And we‘ve got to go beyond simplistic views of what that means.

Even cognitive science recognizes that there‘s more to the mind that the cognitive aspect, and includes the affective and conative as well.   Affective are your learning characteristics, your learner‘s styles.   Whereas conative is the interesting bit: the intention to learn, which includes things like motivation to learn, anxiety about learning, etc.

I‘ve gone off before about learning styles, and the short answer is to a) use the right media for the message, and b) to provide help for learners.   However, addressing motivation and anxiety is a different, and important, thing.   We want to assist their motivation, which happens by helping the learner connect this experience to themselves and their goals.   And we want to reduce their anxiety to an appropriate level (people perform better under a little pressure), by helping manage their expectations.

To help with motivation, there are a couple of things to do.   We know that learners learn better when we activate relevant information up front (it helps associate the new information to existing information).   I maintain that we want to extend that, and open them up emotionally too. And, I believe that it should be done first.   I think we need to indicate the consequences of the knowledge, either negative for not having the information, or positive for having the information.   I think the consequences can be exaggerated, to increase the emotional impact, within bounds, and it can be done dramatically (see Michael Allen‘s Flight Safety video) or humorously.   I‘ve used comic strips to begin elearning sections (we don’t use comics enough)!

There are nuances here: it has to be specific to the situation, not just a non-related exaggeration.   Done well, it can incorporate the cognitive association activation as well!   But hook them emotionally, and the information will stick better.   Too often in the learning I see, there‘s not just little, but essentially no addressing why this information is important to the learner, and that‘s got to be job number 1, or we risk wasting the rest of the effort.

Then we come to objectives, and here I nod in the direction of Will Thalheimer, who‘s said this better than I: the objectives we show to the learner are not the ones we use to design!   Too often, there‘s a section in the cookie-cutter template for objectives, and we slap in the ones we‘re designing to.   Wrong, bad designer, no Twinkie ™.   We (should) use objectives [previous post] to align what we‘re doing to the real need, but the learners don‘t want to know about our metrics.   The objectives for them need to be rewritten in a WIIFM (What‘s In It For Me) framework. They should get objectives that let them know what they‘ll be able to do that they can‘t do now, that they care about!

Another thing that helps, and now we‘re onto anxiety more, is addressing expectations.   Stephanie Burns showed that of people who set out to accomplish a goal, those that succeeded were those who managed their expectations appropriately.   Similarly, when I run workshops, I find I get less concerns when I help lay out what‘s going to happen and why rather than just barging ahead.   If people don‘t know what to expect, or expect it‘ll be X (e.g. entertaining) and there‘s some Y (e.g. hard work), they get frustrated or concerned with the mismatch.   They can get upset in particular if one aspect is difficult and they feel like they‘re floundering.   Making sure that the expectations are set appropriately helps learners feel like they‘re in synch with what‘s happening, and maintains their confidence.

A role that‘s cognitive as well as motivational is that we don‘t do enough has to do with contextualizing what‘s happening.   Too often, learning is conduced in a vacuum.   Yet Charles Reigeluth‘s Elaboration Theory suggests drilling down, and I say contextualize the learning in the larger context of what‘s happening in the world. Even if we‘re learning about some minor medical procedure, we can talk about how health care is a major issue, and getting it right is one of the components to make it effective and efficient.   Or somesuch, but you can quickly connect what they‘re learning to the real world, and you should.   It‘ll help again associate relevant knowledge and increase the effectiveness of the message by connecting what‘s happening now to what‘s really important.

And, I‘ll finally add, no pre-tests, unless it‘s to let the learners test out. I‘ve talked about that before, so I‘ll merely point you to my previous screed.

So, introduce your learners appropriately to the learning, get them cognitively and emotionally ready for the learning experience, and you won‘t be throwing away all the effort to develop what follows the introduction, you‘ll be maximizing it.   And that‘s what you want, at the end, is for that learning to stick.

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This is the first in a series of thoughts on some broken areas of ID that I will be 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.

The way I‘ve seen many learning solutions go awry is right at the beginning, focusing on the wrong objective.   Too often the objective is focused on rote knowledge, whether it‘s facts, procedures, or canned statements.   What we see is knowledge dump, or as I‘ve heard it called: show up and throw up.   Then, the associated assessment is similarly regurgitation of what you‘ve just heard.   The reasons this happens, and why it doesn‘t work, are both firmly rooted in the way our brains work.

First, our brains are really bad at rote remembering.   We‘re really good at pattern-matching, and extracting underlying meaning.   That‘s why we use external aids like calendars.   Heck, if it‘s rote knowledge, don‘t make them memorize it, let them look it up, or automate it.   OK, in the rare case where they do have to know it, we can address that, but we overuse this approach.   And that‘s due to the second reason.

Experts don‘t know how they do what they do, by and large.   Our brains ‘compile‘ information; expertise implies becoming so practiced that the process is inaccessible to conscious thought (ask an expert concert pianist to describe what they‘re doing while playing and their performance falls apart).   We found this out in the 80‘s, when we built so-called ‘expert systems‘ to do what experts said they did,   When the systems didn‘t work, we went back and looked at what the experts were really doing, and there was essentially zero correlation between what they said they did, and what they actually did.

What happens, then, is that our Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) do recall what they studied, and toss that out.   They‘ll dump a bunch of relevant knowledge on the designer, and the good little designer will develop a course around what the SME tells them.   So, we see objectives like:

Be able to cite common objections to our product.

What‘s needed is to focus on more meaningful outcomes.   Dave Ferguson has written a nice post defending Bloom‘s skill taxonomies, and he‘s largely right when saying that focusing on what people actually do with the knowledge is critical. However, I find it simpler to distinguish, ala Van Merrienboer, between the knowledge the learner needs, and the complex decisions they   apply that knowledge to, with the emphasis on the latter.   So, I’d like to see objectives more like:

Be able to counter customer objections to our product.

The nuances may seem subtle, but the difference is important.

How does a designer do that?   SMEs are not the easiest folks to work with in this regard.   I‘ve found it useful to turn the conversation to focus on the things that the learner needs to be able to do after the learning experience.   That is, ask them what decisions learners need to be able to make that they can’t make know.   Not what they need to know, but what do they need to be able to do.

And, I argue, what will likely be making the difference going forward will be skills: things that learners can do differently, not just what they know.   I recall a case where an organization was not just looking for the learners to understand the organizational values, but to act in accordance with them (and that that meant).   That‘s what I‘m talking about!

When it comes to capturing objectives, I‘m perfectly happy with Mager‘s format of specifying who the audience is, what they need to be able to do, and a way to determine that they‘re successfully performing.   From there, you can work backwards to the assessment, to the concept, examples, and practice that will develop the skills to pass the assessment.

There‘s another step, really, before this, and that‘s determining what decision learners need to make differently or better to impact the bottom line, e.g. choosing objectives that will affect the organization in important ways, but that‘s another topic for another day.

Doing good objectives is both a skill that can be learned, and a process that can be supported.   You should be doing both.   Starting from the right objective makes everything else flow well; if you start on the wrong foot, everything else you do is wasted.   Get your objectives right, and get your learning going!

Monday was the US celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday, and on Tuesday was the inauguration of the first African American president of the United States.   That’s an awesome juxtaposition; that’s change, baby!   I not only found it wonderful, but informative.

As background, I was highly trained to write in a very logical progression, choosing careful vocabulary, and in an objective manner. That’s a side-effect of graduate school and an academic career (one of my previous lives).   It mostly needs to be that way for scientific reasons, but for non-specialists, it’s way too dry.   I also read quite critically, serving on conference program and thesis committees, and on the editorial board for an academic journal. I have had some subsequent experience in writing more generally: for articles, for online learning, and even some marketing material.   And some formal training on speaking, for communicating.   I like to believe I’m not bad, but I always want to get better.

In that context, as I read the text of Martin Luther King’s speech as transcribed in my local newspaper, I was struck by what seemed outright florid prose: “seared in the flames of withering injustice”, “joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity”, etc.   If it was marketing, you’d pan it as over-the-top.   “This is a famous talk?”, I wondered.

Then yesterday I heard President Obama’s inauguration speech, and joined in on tweeting my favorite bits (“judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy”).   It was, quite simply, inspiring.   Afterward, a tweet pointed me to a blog comparing this inauguration speech with ex-President Bush’s farewell address.   This wasn’t a fair comparison (and he’s subsequently updated the post to compare the first inauguration speech of Bush with Obama’s, and it’s very interesting), but it caused me to go back and look at the talk transcript.

Once again, in print, we see what reads like slightly-purple prose: “rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace”, “gathering clouds and raging storms”.   It seems too much, when read, but when I pictured it as being spoken, it has a whole different effect.   That’s important.

Reading and listening are different, and we (should) write differently for each.   It’s difficult in elearning, when we are often required to have written transcripts of all audio.   We have to strike a balance in that instance. But we tend to overwrite; I can take pretty much any designer’s prose and hack 40% off (including my own first pass :).

So how can words that seem over the top on the page come across so sincere and important face-to-face?   It has to do with the delivery, the transparent sincerity and obvious passion.   And that’s the lesson.

For me, I have a personal passion for learning and technology to help individuals and organizations achieve their goals; it’s what I’m here to do.   I talk about putting emotion into learning, too, but I don’t practice it in my speaking as well as I could, and should.   I do use humor, but I need to put more passion into my speaking.   And, with the inspiration from yesterday, I will.

More broadly, however, is something I heard Lance Secretan say: “don’t just motivate, inspire”.   It’s something I try to bake into elearning introductions, inspiring interest in the coming materials. I don’t see it enough, and I think it can be ramped up more than we do.   The clients and the SMEs say that we can’t treat such material in this way, but I think the audiences prefer it.   It’s got to be authentic, but when it is, it’s amazing!

I find that people are most often in the learning field not by default, but by choice; they like creating a difference.   Despite the challenges to doing what you really believe is good work, you persevere, because it matters.   Tap into that passion, and let it show in your work.   Tap into the passions of others when you’re channeling a SME, and let that show.   To the SME, the topic is interesting, so find their passion and channel that, not just the knowledge.   It’s one of my tricks in learning design, and I hope it will become one of yours.   Here’s to better learning!