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Evidence-based Design

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In my last post, I asserted that we need evidence-based design for what we do.  There are a number of sources for same. Of course, you could go do a Master’s or Ph.D. in cognition and learning, but there are shorter paths.

There are several good books out (and I believer that there is at least one more on the way) that summarize the implications of research design. Ruth Clark has been a co-author on a couple, eLearning and the Science of Instruction, and the subsequent Efficiency in Learning.  Julie Dirksen’s Design for How People Learn is another good one. Michael Allen’s work on design is also recommended, e.g. Guide to eLearning.

Will Thalheimer, Ruth, and Julie regularly write and talk about these things in other forums than books.  Go listen to them!  I try as well, though often filtered through games, mobile, or elsewhere.  There’re others, too.

A number of people run workshops on deeper design. I know I have one, and I’m sure others have them as well. Do try to make sure that it covers both cognitive and emotional elements, focusing on meaningful change.

There are gaps: there isn’t all the research we need, or at least not digested.  The role of emotional engagement isn’t as well fleshed out as we’d like, and some of the research is frankly focused on studies too small to give practical guidelines (c.f. the consternation on serious game design that surrounded a recent post).  Where we don’t have research, we have to make inferences from theoretical frameworks, but you should know those too.  It’s better than going on ‘intuition’ or folk science.

Still, there’s no excuse to do un-engaging, over-written, and under-practiced learning.  Better design doesn’t take longer (with the caveat that there’s some initial hiccup ’til we make the change).  We have the knowledge, and the tools aren’t the barrier.  Let’s do better, please!

No Folk Science-Based Design!

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When we have to act in the world, make decisions, there are a lot of bases we use.  Often wrongly.  And we need to call it out and move on.

As I pointed out before, Kahneman tells us how we often make decisions on less than expert reflection, more so when we’re tired, and create stories about why we do it. If we’re not experts, we shouldn’t trust our ‘gut’, but we do.  And we will use received wisdom, rightly or wrongly, to justify our choices.  Yet sometimes the beliefs we have about how things work are wrong.

While there’s a lot of folk science around that’s detrimental to society and more, I want to focus on folk science that undermines our ability to assist people in achieving their goals, supporting learning and performance.  Frankly, there are a lot of persistent myths that are used to justify design decisions that are just wrong.  Dr. Will Thalheimer, for instance, has soundly disabused Dale’s Cone.  Yet the claims continue. There’re more: learning styles, digital natives, I could go on.  They are  not sound bases for learning design!

It goes on: much of what poses under ‘brain-based’ learning, that any interaction is good, that high production values equal deep design, that knowledge dump and test equals learning.  Folks, if you don’t  know, don’t believe it.  You  have  to do better!

Sure, some of it’s compelling.  Yes, learners do differ.  That doesn’t mean a) that there are valid instruments to assess those differences, or more importantly b) that  you should teach them differently.  Use the best learning principles, regardless!   And using the year someone’s born to characterize them really is pretty coarse; it almost seems like discrimination.

Look, intuition is fine in lieu of any better alternative, but when it comes to designing solutions that your organization depends on, doing anything less than science-based design is frankly fraudulent.  It’s time for evidence-based design!

Designing Higher Learning

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the higher education situation, specifically for-profit universities. One of the things I see is that somehow no one’s really addressing the quality of the learning experience, and it seems like a huge blindspot.

I realize that in many cases they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. They want to keep costs down, and they’re heavily scrutinized.  Consequently, they worry very much about having the  right  content.  It’s vetted by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and has to be produced in a way that, increasingly, it can serve face to face (F2F) or online.  And I think there’s a big opportunity missed.  Even if they’re buying content from publishers, they are focused on content, not  experience.  Both for the learner, and developing learner’s transferable and long-term skills.

First, SMEs can’t really tell you what learners need to be able to do. One of the side-effects of expertise is that it gets compiled away, inaccessible to conscious access.  Either SMEs make up what they  think  they do (which has little correlation with reality) or they resort to what they had to learn. Neither’s a likely source to meaningful learning.

Even if you have an instructional designer in the equation, the likelihood that they’re knowledgeable enough and confident enough to work with SMEs to get the real outcomes/objectives is slim.  Then, they also have to get the engagement right.  Social engagement can go a good way to enriching this, but it has to be around meaningful tasks.

And, what with scrutiny, it takes a strong case to argue to the accrediting agencies that you’ve gone beyond what SMEs tell you to what’s really needed. It sounds good, but it’s a hard argument to an organization that’s been doing it in a particular way for a long time.

Yet, these institutions also struggle with retention of students.  The learners don’t find the experience relevant or engaging, and leave.  If you took the real activity, made it meaningful in the right way, learners would be both more engaged and have better outcomes, but it’s a hard story to comprehend, and perhaps harder yet to implement.

Yet I will maintain that it’s both doable, and necessary.  I think that the institution that grasps this, and focused on a killer learning experience, coupled with going the extra mile to learner success (analytics is showing to be a big help here), and developing them as learners (e.g, meta-learning skills) as well as performers, is going to have a defendable differentiator.

But then, I’m an optimist.

Norman’s Design of Future Things

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Donald Norman’s book, The Design of Everyday Things is a must-read for anyone who creates artifacts or interfaces for humans.  This one goes forward in the same vein, but talking about how new tech in the roughly 20 years since that book came out, and the implications.  There are some interesting thoughts, though few hints for learning.

In the book, Don talks about how new technologies are increasingly smart, e.g. cars are almost self-driving (and since the book was published back in 2007, they’re now already on the cusp).  As a consequence, we have to start thinking deeply about when and where to automate, having technologies make decisions, versus when we’re in the loop.  And, in the latter case, when and how we’re kept alert (pilots lose attention trying to monitor an auto-pilot, even falling asleep).

The issue, he proposes, is that tenuous relationship between an aware partner and the human.  He uses the relationship between a horse and rider as an example, talking about loose-rein control and close-rein control. Again, there are times the rider can be asleep (I recall a gent in an Irish pub bemoaning the passing of the days when “the horse knew the way home”).

He covers a range of data points from existing circumstances as well as experiments in new approaches.  This ranges from noise to crowd behavior.  For noise, he looks at  how the way mechanical things made noises were clues to their state and operation, and that we’re losing those clues as we increasingly make things quiet. Engineers are even building in noise as a feature when it’s disappeared via technical sophistication.  For crowd behavior, one example is how the removal of street signs in a couple of cities have reduced accidents.

At the end, he comes up with a set of design principles:

  1. Provide rich, complex, and natural signals
  2. Be predictable
  3. Provide a good conceptual model
  4. Make the output understandable
  5. Provide continual awareness, without annoyance
  6. Exploit natural mapping to make interaction understandable and effective

For learning, he talks about how robots that teach are one place in which such animated and embodied avatars make sense, whereas in may situations they’re more challenging.  He talks about how they don’t need much mobility, can speak, and can be endearing. Not to replace teachers, but to supplement them. Certainly we have the software capability, but we have to wonder what sort of system makes sense to invest in the actual embodiment versus speaking from a mobile device or computer.

As an exercise, I looked at his design principles to see what might transfer over to the design of learning experiences.  The main issue is that in learning, we want the learner facing problems, focusing on the task of creating a solution with overt cognitive awareness, as opposed to an elegant, almost unconscious, accomplishment of a goal.  This suggests that rule 2, ‘be predictable’, might be good in non-critical areas of focus, but not in the main area.  The rest seem appropriate for learning experiences as well.

This is a thoughtful book, weaving a number of elements together to capture a notion, not hammer home critical outcomes.  As such, it is not for the casual designer, but for those looking to take their design to the ‘next level’, or consider the directions that will be coming, and how we might prepare people for them. Just as Don proposed that the interface design folks should be part of the product design team in The Invisible Computer, so too should the product support specialists, sales training team, and customer training designers be part of the design team going forward, as the considerations of what people will have to learn to use new systems are increasingly a concern in the design of systems, not just products.

Refining Designing

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A couple of months ago, I posted on thinking about designing, calling for designing ‘backwards and forwards’.  And it’s continued to percolate, rightly or wrongly.

As I originally structured it, you worked backwards (1) from the ultimate performance you need to put information in the head, and in the world, and then designed forward (2) the combined learning experience, and the performance resource.  While the HPT movement thinks about this as well (they definitely talk about whether it should be a learning or performance support solution; I don’t know but assume they will do a mix if needed).  Which I don’t disagree with, but I realized I needed to address one issue.

designing backward from desired performanceIt occurred to me that when you design your resource(s), that has to happen first.  If there are resources, they should be included in the learning experience.  That is, you want to provide practice with the resources as part of the learning experience to develop the performer’s ability to use the resources in the performance situation.

Thus, I’ve ended up redesigning it such that performance resource(s) influence the learning experience design (3), and are available in the learning experience as well as in the performance environment.  It’s more complex, but more accurately captures the types of thinking we need to have as designers.  We need to create what’s in the world and then prepare what’s in the head to accommodate the new performance environment.

Which, of course, may actually need to be iterative. As Atul Gawande points out in his book, his checklists were rigorously trailed and refined. That sort of evaluation and revision should be part of our ongoing processes too.  We shouldn’t assume we’ll get it perfect the first time. And the existing environment prior to our intervention will also factor into our resource and experience design.

That said, does this conceptualization help?  I’m trying to find ways to represent design that helps reduce our overemphasis on all training being about trying to put everything ‘in the head’, and this, combined with my earlier thoughts on learning experience design, is part of my ongoing effort.  If, however, it’s either too confusing, or already common knowledge, I need to work more.  Feedback?

 

 

Designing Backward and Forward

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At the recent DevLearn, several of us gathered together in a Junto  to talk about issues we felt were becoming important for our field. After a mobile learning panel I realized that, just as mlearning makes it too easy to think about ‘courses on a phone’, I worry that ‘learning experience design’ (a term I’ve championed) may keep us focused on courses rather than exploring the full range of options including performance support and eCommunity.

So I began thinking about performance experience design as a way to keep us focused on designing solutions to performance needs in the organization.  It’s not just about what’s in our heads, but as we realize that our brains are good at certain things and not others, we need to think about a distributed cognition solution, looking at how resources can be ‘in the world’ as well as in others’ heads.

The next morning in the shower (a great place for thinking :), it occurred to me that what is needed is a design process  before we start designing the solution.  To complement Kahnemann’s Thinking Fast and Slow (an inspiration for my thoughts on designing for how we really think and learn), I thought of designing backward and forward.  Let me try to make that concrete.

Designing for PerformanceWhat I’m talking about is starting with a vision of what performance would look like in an ideal world, working backward to what can be in the world, and what needs to be in the head.  We want to minimize the latter.  I want to respect our humanity in a way, allowing us to (choose to) do the things we do well, and letting technology take on the things we don’t want to do.

In my mind, the focus should be on what decisions learners should be making at this point, not what rote things we’re expecting them to do.  If it’s rote, we’re liable to be bad at it.  Give us checklists, or automate it!

From there, we can design forward to create those resources, or make them accessible (e.g. if they’re people).  And we can design the ‘in the head’ experience as well, and now’s the time  for learning experience design, with a focus on developing our ability to make those decisions, and where to find the resources when we need them.  The goal is to end up designing a full performance solution where we think about the humans in context, not as merely a thinking box.

It naturally includes design that still reflects my view about activity-centered learning (which I’m increasingly convinced is grounded in cognitive research).  Engaging emotion, distributed across platforms and time, using a richer suite of tools than just content delivery and tests.  And it will require using something like Michael Allen’s Successive Approximation Model perhaps, recognizing the need to iterate.

I wanted to term this performance experience design, and then  as several members workshopped this with me, I thought we should  just call it performance design (at least externally, to stakeholders not in our field, we can call it performance experience design for ourselves).  And we can talk about learning experience design within this, as well as information design, and social networks, and…

It’s really not much more than what HPT would involve, e.g. the prior consideration of what the problem is, but it’s very focused on reducing what’s in the head, including emotion in the learning when it’s developed, using social resources as well as performance support, etc.  I think this has the opportunity to help us focus more broadly in our solution space, make us more relevant to the organization, and scaffold us past many of our typical limitations in approach.  What do you think?

Transcending Experience Design

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Last week’s #lrnchat touched on an important topic, experience design. I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth taking several different cuts through it.  The one I want to pursue here is the notion of transformative experience design.

A number of years ago, now, Pine & Gilmore released a book talking about an Experience Economy.  In it, they posited that we’d gone from the agricultural economy, through a product and service economy, to what they termed an ‘experience economy’: where people paid for quality experiences. You can see this in themed cruises & restaurants, Apple’s product strategy, Disney, etc.  I think it’s a compelling argument, but what really struck me was their next step. They argued that what was due next was a ‘transformation economy’, where people paid for experiences that change them (in ways that they desire or value).

And I argue that that’s what my book  Engaging Learning was all about, how to create serious games, which really are experiences with an end in sight. The point here is not to tout the book, but instead to tout that a meld of experience design and learning design, learning experience design, is the path to this end.

There are things about experience design that instructional design largely ignores: emotion, multiple senses, extended engagement.  While I feel that not enough has been written systematically about experience design (interface design yes, but not the total cross-media picture, e.g. Disney’s Imagineering), their intuitive approaches acknowledge recognizing the ebb and flow of emotions – motivation, anxiety – and beliefs about one’s role (epistemology, there I said it).

On the other hand, learning design is (properly done) grounded in cognitive science, with empirical results, but is incomplete in breadth.  We know what we do, but our view is so  limited!

Together, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  It’s about thinking beyond content, it’s about contextualizing, designing to “bewitch the mind and ensnare the senses”.  Really, it’s about creating a magic experience that transcends content and truly is transformative.  Are you ready to take that next step?

Learning Design isn’t for the wimpy

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I’ve had my head down on a major project, a bunch of upcoming speaking engagements, some writing I’ve agreed to do, and…(hence the relative paucity of blog posts).  That project, however, has been interesting for a variety of reasons, and one really is worth sharing: ID isn’t easy.  We’ve been given some content, and it’s not just about being good little IDs and taking what they give us and designing instruction from it.  We could do it, but it would be a disaster (in this case, that’s what we’re working from, a too-rote too-knowledge-dump course).  And it’s too often what I’ve seen done, and it’s wrong.

SMEs don’t know how they do what they do.  Part of the process of becoming expert is compiling away the underlying thinking that goes on, so it moves from conscious to subconscious.  So when the time comes to work with SMEs about what’s needed, they a) make up stories about what they do, or b) resort to what they’ve learned (e.g. knowledge). It’s up to the ID to push back and unpack the models that guide performance.  Yet that’s hard, particularly when they’re not domain experts, and SMEs have issues.

It takes a fair bit of common sense (remarkable by how uncommon it is), and willingness to continually reframe what the expert says and twist it until it’s focused on how they make decisions. There’re formal processes call Cognitive Task Analysis when you need them, but a ‘discount CTA’ approach (analogous to Nielsen’s ‘discount usability‘) would be appropriate in many cases.Such an approach includes getting some really good examples of both successes and failures of the task under consideration, and working hard to extract the principles that guide success.  But SMEs can’t be order takers; they have to be willing to fight to understand what decisions do learners need to make that they can’t make now, and how to make those decisions.

It really helps to either have a deep background in the field, or a broad background.  You can get the former by teaching ID to  a SME, or having an ID work in a particular field for a long time.  The latter works if you’re more in the ‘gun for hire’ mode. You then need, however, a broad knowledge that you can draw upon to make some reasonable inferences. That’s what I typically do, as my deep expertise is in learning design, but fortunately I’m eternally curious (used to lie on the floor with a volume of the World Book spread out in front of me). Model-based and systems thinking help immensely.

You really have to work hard, use your brain, draw upon real world knowledge  and  go to the mat with the material.  If you’re not willing to do this, you’re not cut out to be a learning designer. There’s much more, understanding the way we learn, experience design, and more, but this is part of the full picture.

An integrating design?

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In a panel at #mlearncon, we were asked how instructional designers could accommodate mobile.  Now, I believe that we really haven’t got our minds around a learning experience distributed across time, which our minds really require.  I also think we still mistakenly think about performance support as separate from formal learning, but we don’t have a good way to integrate them.

I’ve advocated that we consider learning experience design, but increasingly I think we need performance experience design, where we look at the overall performance, and figure out what needs to be in the head, what needs to be in the world, and design them concurrently.  That is, we look at what the person knows how to do, and what should be in their head, and what can be designed as support.  ADDIE designs courses.  HPT determines whether to do a job aid (the gap is knowledge), or training (the gap is a skill).  I’m not convinced that either really looks at the total integration (and willing to be wrong).

What was triggered in my brain, however, was that social constructivism might be a framework within which we could accomplish this.  By thinking of what activities the learners would be engaged in, and how we’d support that performance with resources and other learners and performers as collaborators when appropriate, we might have a framework.  My take on social constructivism has it looking at what can and should be co-owned by the learner, and how to get the learner there, and it naturally involves resources, other people, and skill development.

So, you’d look at what needs to be done, and think through the performance, and ask what resources (digital and human) would be there with the performer, the gap between your current learner and the performer you’d need, and how to develop an experience to achieve that end state.  The notion is what mental design process designers may need going forward, and what framework provides the overarching framework to support that design process.

It’s very related to my activity framework, which nicely resonates as it very much focuses on what you can do, and resourcing that, but that framework is focused on reframing education to make it skills focused and developing self learning. This would require some additions that I’ll have to ponder further.  But, as always, it’s about getting ideas out there to collect feedback. So, what say you?

Design Readings

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Another book on design crossed my radar when  I was at a retreat and in the stack of one of the other guests was Julie Dirksen’s book Design for How People Learn  and  Susan Weinschenk’s  100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People.  This book provides a nice complement to Julie’s, focusing on straight facts about how we process the world.

Dr. Weinschenk’s book systematically goes through categories of important design considerations:

  • How People See
  • How People Read
  • How People Remember
  • How People Think
  • How People Focus Their Attention
  • What Motivates People
  • People Are Social Animals
  • How People Feel
  • People Make Mistakes
  • How People Decide

Under each category are important points, described, buttressed by research, and boiled down into useful guidelines. This includes much of the research I talk about when I discuss deeper Instructional Design, and more.  While it’s written for UI designers mostly, it’s extremely relevant to learning design as well.  And it’s easy reading and reference, illustrated and to-the-point.

There are some really definitive books that people who design for people need to have read or have to hand. This fits into the latter category as does Dirksen’s book, while  Don Norman’s books, e.g.  Design of Everyday Things  fit into the former.  Must knows and must haves.