Learnlets

Last Friday’s #GuildChat was on Agile Development.  The topic is interesting to me, because like with Design Thinking, it seems like well-known practices with a new branding. So as I did then, I’ll lay out what I see and hope others will enlighten me.

As context, during grad school I was in a research group focused on user-centered system design, which included design, processes, and more. I subsequently taught interface design (aka Human Computer Interaction or HCI) for a number of years (while continuing to research learning technology), and made a practice of advocating the best practices from HCI to the ed tech community.  What was current at the time were iterative, situated, collaborative, and participatory design processes, so I was pretty  familiar with the principles and a fan. That is, really understand the context, design and test frequently, working in teams with your customers.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and the Agile Manifesto puts a stake in the ground for software engineering. And we see a focus on releasable code, but again with principles of iteration and testing, team work, and tight customer involvement.  Michael Allen was enthused enough to use it as a spark that led to the Serious eLearning Manifesto.

That inspiration has clearly (and finally) now moved to learning design. Whether it’s Allen’s  SAM  or Ger Driesen’s  Agile Learning Manifesto, we’re seeing a call for rethinking the old waterfall model of design.  And this is a good thing (only decades late ;).  Certainly we know that working together is better than working alone (if you manage the process right ;), so the collaboration part is a win.

And we certainly need change.  The existing approaches we too often see involve a designer being given some documents, access to a SME (if lucky), and told to create a course on X.  Sure, there’re tools and templates, but they are focused on making particular interactions easier, not on ensuring better learning design. And the person works alone and does the design and development in one pass. There are likely to be review checkpoints, but there’s little testing.  There are variations on this, including perhaps an initial collaboration meeting, some SME review, or a storyboard before development commences, but too often it’s largely an independent one way flow, and  this isn’t good.

The underlying issue  is that waterfall models, where you specify the requirements in advance and then design, develop, and implement just don’t work. The problem is that the human brain is pretty much the most complex thing in existence, and when we determine a priori what will work, we don’t take into account the fact that like Heisenberg what we implement will change the system. Iterative development and testing allows the specs to change after initial experience.  Several issues arise with this, however.

For one, there’s a question about what is the right size and scope of a deliverable.  Learning experiences, while typically overwritten, do have some stricture that keeps them from having intermediately useful results. I was curious about what made sense, though to me it seemed that you could develop your final practice first as a deliverable, and then fill in with the required earlier practice, and content resources, and this seemed similar to what was offered up during the chat to my question.

The other one is scoping and budgeting the process. I often ask, when talking about game design, how to know when to stop iterating. The usual (and wrong answer) is when you run out of time or money. The  right answer would be when you’ve hit your metrics, the ones you should set before you begin that determine the parameters of a solution (and they can be consciously reconsidered as part of the process).  The typical answer, particularly for those concerned with controlling costs, is something like a heuristic choice of 3 iterations.  Drawing on some other work in software process, I’d recommend creating estimates, but then reviewing them after. In the software case, people got much better at estimates, and that could be a valuable extension.  But it shouldn’t be any more difficult to estimate, certainly with some experience, than existing methods.

Ok, so I may be a bit jaded about new brandings on what should already be good practice, but I think anything that helps us focus on developing in ways that lead to quality outcomes is a good thing.  I encourage you to work more collaboratively, develop and test more iteratively, and work on discrete chunks. Your stakeholders should  be glad you did.

A continued bane of my existence is the ongoing requirements that are put in place for a variety of things.  Two in particular are related and worth noting: accreditation and compliance.  The way they’re typically construed is barking mad, and we can (and need to) do better.

To start with accreditation. It sounds like a good thing: to make sure that someone issuing some sort of certification has in place the proper procedures.  And, done rightly, it would be. However, what we currently see is that, basically, the body says you have to take what the Subject Matter Expert (SME) says as the gospel. And this is problematic.

The root of the problem is that SMEs don’t have access to around 70% of what they do, as research at the University of Southern California’s Cognitive Technology group has documented. However, of course, they have access to all they ‘know’.  So it’s easy for them to say what learners should know, but not what learners  actually should be able to do.  And some experts are better than others at articulating this, but the process is opaque to this nuance.

So unless the certification process is willing to allow the issuing institution the flexibility to use a process to drill down into the actual ‘do’, you’re going to get knowledge-focused courses that don’t actually achieve important outcomes. You could do things like  incorporating those who depend on the practitioners, and/or using a replicable and grounded process with SMEs that helps them work out what the core objectives need to be; meaningful ones, ala competencies. And a shoutout to Western Governors University for somehow being accredited using competencies!

Compliance is, arguably, worse.  Somehow, the amount of  time you spend is the important determining factor. Not what you can do at the end, but instead that you’ve done  something  for an hour.  The notion that amount of time spent relates to ability at this level of granularity is outright maniacal.  Time would matter, differently for different folks, but you have to be doing the right thing, and there’s no stricture for that.   Instead, if you’ve been subjected to an hour of information, that somehow is going to change your behavior. As if.

Again, competencies would make sense.  Determine what you need them to be able to do, and then assess that. If it takes them 30 minutes, that’s OK. If it takes them 5 hours, well, it’s necessary to be compliant.

I’d like to be wrong, but I’ve seen personal instances of both of these, working with clients. I’d really like to find a point of leverage to address this.  How can we start having processes that obtain necessary skills, and then use those to determine ability, not time or arbitrary authority!  Where can we start to make this necessary change?