Search Results for: engag

Engaged and/or Effective

30 April 2024 by Clark Leave a Comment

I’ve regularly talked about how learning can, and should, be ‘hard fun’. Yet, I haven’t really talked about each, effectiveness and engagement, independently. Of course, there’s a quadrant map that separately talks about engaged and/or effective. Let me remedy the lack!

The lack of either engagement or effectiveness is relatively rare, thankfully. You do see it, when under-skilled and under-resourced folks are making a course. For instance giving SMEs authoring tools or dumping a bunch of PPTs and PDFs on an inexperienced instructional designer. Or, when folks won’t spend enough to even get production values, let alone actual effectiveness. What you get is information dump (because experts don’t have access to what they actually do, research tells us), but not with professional polish. It’s ‘content’ without distinction. More importantly, if there is practice, it’s on knowledge retrieval rather than knowledge application. Which leads to what in cognitive science is called ‘inert knowledge’. It may be remembered, but it won’t be used when relevant.

We also see a lot of ‘tarted up’ information dump. Here, there are good production values. It looks nice, because it’s well-produced. However, it’s still information (usually with a quiz). Here, folks know a bit about visual design, and use tools and templates that make it look good. They may even have experienced designers on staff, but…time and cost expectations keep folks from doing the right thing. It could also be a lack of understanding of the importance of challenging contextual practice. That’s all too common, too! It’s still a trivial pursuit.

Quite simply, learning needs to be effective. If it’s not, we’re wasting money. Now, that’s been shown to be the case in many ways. Over the years, we’ve heard estimates from 10-15% of our training efforts are working. Which means we’re wasting 85-90% of our investment. Yet we know what leads to good learning (e.g. the Serious eLearning Manifesto). Learning science gives us good guidelines, but we still see too much information dump. Yet, if it’s not engaging, learners aren’t likely to commit appropriately, and we’re not optimizing the outcomes. It just seems like work.

When we understand the necessary alignment between engagement and effectiveness, however, we truly can deliver ‘hard fun’. That alignment is what my research and design efforts yielded. It was also the core of my book on serious game design and my most recent tome on making learning meaningful. (The latter is really a complement to my learning science book, and an attempt to bring both together to do learning experience design.)

It’s not necessarily easy to generate ‘hard fun’, nor is it the cheapest option. However, it gets easier with practice (like most things), and it’s the most cost-effective option. That is, if you truly want results. But if you don’t, why are you bothering? There are requirements, like making sure you have a real learning need, but that should be true, regardless. You shouldn’t be asking about engaged and/or effective, you should be shooting for both. Right?

Getting Engagement Right

9 November 2023 by Clark Leave a Comment

I’m on record stating that I think learning experience design (LXD) is the elegant integration of learning science and engagement. In addition, I’ve looked at both. Amongst the things that stand out for me are that there are an increasing suite of resources for learning science. For one, I have my own book on the topic! There are other good ones too. However, on the flip side, for engagement, I didn’t find much. I had intended to write an LXD book, but then ATD asked for the learning science one. Once it was done, however, I quickly realized that I wanted to write the complement. Thus, Make It Meaningful was born. It’s available, but I’m also running a workshop on the topic, starting this coming week! Four weekly 2 hour meetings, at the convenient time of noon ET. It’s all about getting engagement right. So, what’s covered?

For the first week, there’s an overview of the importance of engagement, and how to set the ‘hook’. We’ll briefly review the reasons why to consider the engagement side (and trust me, this is something you want to do). Then we’ll talk about the first step, getting learners to the a motivated state to begin the learning. We’ll look at barriers to success as well, and what to do.

In the second week, we’ll talk about ‘landing’ the experience. Once the hook is set, it doesn’t mean you’ve got them through the experience. Instead, there’s much to do to maintain that motivation. In addition, you want to ensure that anxiety doesn’t overwhelm the learning, and you want to build confidence. We’ll talk about principles as well as heuristics.

In the third week, we dig into what this means in practical terms. What is an engaging introduction? What about the models and examples? The critical element is the practice that learners perform. We’ll talk about how aligning the practice with the desired objectives while making a compelling context is necessary, but doable.

In the last week, we’ll talk about making a design process that can reliably deliver on learning experience. We’ll take a generic design process and go through the changes that ensure both an effective learning design and an engaging experience. We’ll work from analysis, through specification, and on to evaluation (we won’t talk much about implementation, because of my quip that getting the design right leaves lots of ways to create the solution, and not doing so renders everything else extraneous.

Sure, you can just buy the book, and that’s ok. I’m all about getting the word out, and getting better learning happening for our learners. However, in the workshop, not only do you get the book, but we’ll work through the ideas systematically, put them into practice, and address the individual questions you may have. Look, getting engagement right is an advanced topic, but it’s increasingly what will differentiate our solutions from the knowledge ones that come from typical approaches, no matter how technologically augmented. This stuff matters! So, I hope to see you there.

Engaging people at work

12 September 2023 by Clark Leave a Comment

Last week, Donald Taylor wrote an interesting post, wondering about ‘learner engagement’. That’s a topic I do talk a wee bit about ;). He closed with a call for feedback. So, while I did comment there, I thought it potentially would benefit from a longer response. I think it’s more general than learner engagement, so I’m talking about engaging people at work. (But it’s still relevant to his thesis without quibbling about that!)

In his post, he talked about three levels: asset, culture, and environment. I’m not sure I quite follow (to me, culture is an environmental level), and I’ve talked about individual, team, and organizational levels. To his point, however, there are steps to take at every level.

He starts at the individual level, talking about designing learning experiences. I agree with his ‘do deeper analysis’ recommendation, but I’d go further. To me, it’s not just if they recognize that content’s valuable, it’s about building, and maintaining, motivation while controlling anxiety (c.f. Make It Meaningful!). I don’t think he’d disagree.

At the next level up, it’s about making sure people are connected. Here, I’d point to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), and ‘relatedness’. I don’t mind Dan Pink’s reinterpretation of that to ‘purpose’, in that I think people need to know how what they’re doing contributes to something bigger, and that something bigger supports society as a whole.

Finally, to me, is culture. You want a ‘learning organization‘, as Don agrees. He says to start with a sympathetic manager, but I think L&D needs to create that culture internally first, then take it to the broader organization (and starting with said manager is a good next step).

I think that latter step solves Don’s final step of breaking down barriers, but he’s a smart guy and I’m willing to believe I’m missing some nuance. I do like his focus on ‘find a measure’ to use. However, ultimately, it should improve a lot of measures around adapting to change: innovation, retention, and success. That’s my take, I welcome yours!

Engaging Learning and the Serious eLearning Manifesto

9 July 2019 by Clark Leave a Comment

Way back in ’05, my book on games for learning was published. At its core was an alignment between what made an effective education practice and what makes engaging experiences. There were nine elements that characterized why learning should be ‘hard fun’. More recently, we released the Serious eLearning Manifesto. Here we had eight values that differentiated between ordinary elearning and serious elearning. So, the open question is how do these two lists match up? What is the alignment between Engaging Learning and the Serious eLearning manifesto?

The elements of the Serious eLearning Manifesto (SeM) are pretty straightforward. They’re listed as:

performance focused
meaningful to learners
engagement driven
authentic contexts
realistic decisions
real-world consequences
spaced practice
individualized challenges

The alignment (EEA: Effectiveness-Engagement Alignment) I found in Engaging Learning was based upon research I did on designing games for learning. I found elements that were repeated across proposals for effective education practice, and ones that were stipulated for engaging experiences. And I found a perfect overlap. Looking for a resolution between the two lists of elements looks something like:

clear goals
balanced challenge
context for the action
meaningful to domain
meaningful to learner
choice
active
consequences
novelty

And, with a little wordsmithing, I think we find a pretty good overlap! Obviously, not perfect, because they have different goals, but the important elements of a compelling learning experience emerge.

I could fiddle and suggest that clear goals are aligned to a performance focus, but instead that’s coming from making their learning be meaningful to the domain. I suggest that what really matters to organizations will be the ability to do, not know. So, really, the goals are implicit in the SeM; you shouldn’t be designing learning unless you have some learning goals!

Then, the balanced challenge is similar to the individualized challenge from the SeM. And context maps directly as well. As do consequences. And meaningfulness to learners. All these directly correspond.

Going a little further, I suggest that having choice (or appearance thereof) is important for realistic decisions. There should be alternatives that represent misconceptions about how to act. And, I suggest that the active focus is part of being engaging. Though, so too could novelty be. I’m not looking at multiple mappings but they would make sense as several things would combine to make a performance focus, as well as realistic decisions.

Other than that, on the EEA side the notion of novelty is more for engaging experiences than necessarily specific to serious elearning. On the SeM side, spaced practice is unique to learning. The notion of a game implies the ability for successful practice, so it’s implicit.

My short take, through this exercise, is to feel confident in both recommendations. We’re talking learning experience design here, and having the learning combine engagement as well is a nice outcome. I note that I’ll be running a Learning Experience Design workshop at DevLearn in October in Las Vegas, where’ll we’ll put these ideas to work. Hope to see you there!

Fun, Hard Fun, & Engagement

18 December 2018 by Clark 3 Comments

At Online Educa in Berlin, they apparently had a debate on fun in learning. The proposition was “all learning should be fun”. And while the answer is obviously ‘no’, I think that it’s too simplistic of a question. So I want to dig a bit deeper into fun, engagement, and learning, how the right alignment is ‘hard fun’.

Donald Clark weighs in with a summary of the debate and the point he thought was the winner. He lauds Patti Shank, who pointed out that research talks about ‘desirable difficulty’. And I can’t argue with this (besides, Patti’s usually spot-on). He goes on to cite how you read books that aren’t funny, and that how athletes train isn’t particularly giggle-inducing. All of which I agree with, except this “Engagement and fun are proxies and the research shows that effort trumps fun every time.” And I think tying engagement and fun together is a mistake.

There is the trivial notion of fun, to be fair. The notion that it’s breezily entertaining. But I want to make a distinction between such trivial attention and engagement. For instance, I would argue that a movie like Schindler’s List is wholly engaging, but I’m not sure I would consider it ‘fun’. And even ‘entertaining’ is a stretch. But I think it’s compelling. Similarly with even reading books for entertainment: many aren’t ‘fun’ in the sense of light entertainment and humor, but are hard to put down. So what’s going on here?

I think that cognitive (and emotional) immersion is also ‘engagement’. That is, you find the story gripping, the action compelling, or the required performance to be a challenge, but you persist because you find it engaging in a deeper sense.

Raph Koster wrote A Theory of Fun about game design, but the underlying premise was that why games were ‘fun’ is that they were about learning. The continually increasing challenge, set in a world that you find compelling (we don’t all like the same games), is what makes a game fun. Similarly, I’ve written about engagement as a far more complex notion than just a trivial view of fun.

The elements of the alignment between effective education practice and engaging experiences demonstrate that learning can, and should, be hard fun. This isn’t the trivial sort of ‘fun’ that apparently is what Donald and Patti were concerned about. It is all about ‘desirable difficulty’, having a challenge in the zone that’s Czikszentmihalyi’s Flow and Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development.

I agree that just making it fun (just as putting high production values on under-designed content dump) isn’t the answer. But just making it ‘work’ doesn’t help either. You want people to see the connection between what they’re doing and their goals. Learners should have a level of challenge that helps them know that they’re working toward that goal. You want them to recognize that the tasks are for achieving that goal. It’s about integrating the cognitive elements of learning with the emotional components of engagement in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The synergy is what is needed.

I think fun and engagement aren’t the same thing. So while I agree with the premise that learning shouldn’t be the trivial sense of fun, I think the more rigorous sense should be the goal of learning. We want learning to be a transformation, not just a trudge nor a treat. I’ll argue that the athletes and the readers and the others who are learning are engaged, just not amused. And that’s the important distinction. This is, to me, what Learning Experience Design should be, designing hard fun. And I think we can do this; my upcoming workshop at Learning Solutions is about doing just that. Hope to see you there!

Why Engaging Learning?

24 October 2018 by Clark Leave a Comment

Someone asked me what I would say about my first book, Engaging Learning. And, coincidentally, my client just gave some copies to their client as part of our engagement, so I guess there’s still value in it! And while I recognize it’s now about 13 years old, I really do believe it has relevance. Since they asked…

I saw the connections between computers and learning as an undergraduate, and designed my own major. My first job out of college was designing and programming educational computer games. Long story short: I went back for a Ph.D. in what was effectively ‘applied cognitive science’, but games continued to play a role in my career. And I reflected on it, and ultimately what started as a research agenda manifested as a model for explaining why games work and how to do it. And then when I started consulting, Pfeiffer asked me to write the book.

To be clear, I believe engagement matters. We learn better when our hearts and our minds are engaged. (That’s the intent of the double meaning of the title, after all.) Learning sticks when we’re motivated and in a ‘safe’ learning situation. Learning can, and should, be ‘hard fun’. However, if we can’t do it reliably and repeatedly, it’s just a dream. I believe that if we systematically apply the principles in the book, we can do it (systematic creativity is not an oxymoron ;).

One of the concerns was that things were changing fast even then (Flash was still very much in play, for example ;). How to write something that wouldn’t be outdated even before it came out? So I tied it to cognitive principles, as our brains aren’t changing that fast. Thus, I think the principles in it still hold. I’ve continued to check and haven’t found anything that undermines the original alignment that underpins designing engaging experiences.

And the book was designed for use. While the first three chapters set the stage, the middle three dig into details. There you’ll find the core framework, examples, and a design process. The design process was focused mostly on adding to what you already do, so as not to be redundant. The final three chapters wrap up pragmatics and future directions.

While ostensibly (and realistically) about designing games, it was really about engagement. For instance, the principles included were applied backwards to branching scenarios, and what I called linear and mini-scenarios. The latter just being better written multiple choice questions!

The book couldn’t cover everything, and I’ve expanded on my thinking since then, but I believe the core is still there: the alignment and the design process in particular. There have been newer books since then by others (I haven’t stayed tied to just games, my mind wanders more broadly ;) and by me, but as with my other books I think the focus on the cognitive principles gives lasting guidance that still seems to be relevant. At a recent event, someone told me that while I viewed mobile as a known, for others it wasn’t. I reckon that may be true for games and engagement as well. If we’re making progress, I’m pleased. So, please, start engaging learning by making engaging learning!

PS, I wrote a Litmos blog post about why engagement matters, as a prelude to a session I’ll be giving at their Litmos Live online event (Nov 7-8) where I talk about how to do it.

Engagement

11 October 2018 by Clark 1 Comment

In a meeting today, I was asked “how do you define engagement”, and I found it an intriguing question. I don’t know that I have a definition so much as steps to enhance it. Still, it made me think.

What engagement is not, let’s be clear, is tarting content up. It’s not just flashy visuals, stereotypes, and cute prose. Those things add aesthetics (or, done poorly, undermine same), but that’s not where to go.

Instead, I’m looking for an experience that has certain characteristics. One way of looking at it is through the ‘flow’ phenomenon, with cognitive immersion at a level that finds the sweet spot between frustration and boring. Similarly, for learning, it’s the Zone of Proximal Development, between what you can do with one hand tied behind your back, and what you can’t do no matter how much support you get. And it’s both.

You there by exploiting the alignment between the elements of practice and engaging experiences. So just as the above diagram can represent either Czikszentmihalyi or Vygotsky, there’s the alignment I highlighted in Engaging Learning between the elements in greater elaboration. It’s goal, context, challenge, meaningfulness, and more all aligned to create that subjective feeling. And in case you say “you’re extending engagement to learning”, I will note that Koster, in his book A Theory of Fun, explicitly tied what makes games work is that it’s about learning. So, yeah, that’s the type of engagement I’m interested in, regardless.

One of the simple ways I like to characterize it (and it’s not original with me), is ‘hard fun’. I think, if nothing else, that’s a great heuristic. It may be like the famous quote about pornography: “you know it when you see it”. Or maybe you can coin a concise definition. And you can attempt to quantify it through objective criteria like galvanic skin response or adrenalin levels. However, I’m perfectly happy to use subjective criteria. If people say they found it challenging but fun, I’m happy. If they say it’s the best way they can see to learn it, my job is done.

I don’t really yet have a good way to define engagement in a concise specification. Do you have a definition of engagement you like? I’d welcome hearing it!

Extending Engagement

24 August 2017 by Clark 1 Comment

My post on why ‘engagement’ should be added to effective and efficient led to some discussion on LinkedIn. In particular, some questions were asked that I thought I should reflect on. So here are my responses to the issue of how to ‘monetize’ engagement, and how it relates to the effectiveness of learning.

So the first issue was how to justify the extra investment engagement would entail. It was an assumption that it would take extra investment, but I believe it will. Here’s why. To make a learning experience engaging, you need some additional things: knowing why this is of interest and relevance to practitioners, and putting that into the introduction, examples, and practice. With practice, that’s going to come with only a marginal overhead. More importantly, that is part of also making it more effective. There is some additional information needed, and more careful design, and that certainly is more than most of what’s being done now. (Even if it should be.)

So why would you put in this extra effort? What are the benefits? As the article suggested, the payoffs are several:

First, learners know more intrinsically why they should pay attention. This means they’ll pay more attention, and the learning will be more effective. And that’s valuable, because it should increase the outcomes of the learning.
Second, the practice is distributed across more intriguing contexts. This means that the practice will have higher motivation. When they’re performing, they’re motivated because it matters. If we have more motivation in the learning practice, it’s closer to the performance context, so we’re making the transfer gap smaller. Again, this will make the learning more effective.
Third, that if you unpack the meaningfulness of the examples, you’ll make the underlying thinking easier to assimilate. The examples are comprehended better, and that leads to more effectiveness.

If learning’s a probabilistic game (and it is), and you increase the likelihood of it sticking, you’re increasing the return on your investment. If the margin to do it right is less than the value of the improvement in the learning, that’s a business case. And I’ll suggest that these steps are part of making learning effective, period. So it’s really going from a low likelihood of transfer – 20-30% say – to effective learning – maybe 70-80%. Yes, I’m making these numbers up, but…

This is really all part of going from information dump & knowledge test to elaborated examples and contextualized practice. So that’s really not about engagement, it’s about effectiveness. And a lot of what’s done under the banner of ‘rapid elearning’ is ineffective. It may be engaging, but it isn’t leading to new skills.

Which is the other issue: a claim that engagement doesn’t equal better learning. And in general I agree (see: activity doesn’t mean effectiveness in a social media tool). It depends on what you mean by engagement; I don’t mean trivialized scores equalling more activity. I mean fundamental cognitive engagement: ‘hard fun’, not just fun. Intrinsic relevance. Not marketing flare, but real value add.

Hopefully this helps! I really want to convince you that you want deep learning design if you care about the outcomes. (And if you don’t, why are you bothering? ;). It goes to effectiveness, and requires addressing engagement. I’ll also suggest that while it does affect efficiency, it does so in marginal ways compared to substantial increases in impact. And that strikes me as the type of step one should be taking. Agreed?

3 E’s of Learning: why Engagement

16 August 2017 by Clark 1 Comment

When you’re creating learning experiences, you want to worry about the outcomes, but there’s more to it than that. I think there are 3 major components for learning as a practical matter, and I lump these under the E’s: Effectiveness, Efficiency, & Engagement. The latter may be more of a stretch, but I’ll make the case .

When you typically talk about learning, you talk about two goals: retention over time, and transfer to all appropriate (and no inappropriate) situations. That’s learning effectiveness: it’s about ensuring that you achieve the outcomes you need. To test retention and transfer, you have to measure more than performance at the end of the learning experience. (That is, unless your experience definition naturally includes this feedback as well.) Let alone just asking learners if they thought it was valuable. You have to see if the learning has persisted later, and is being used as needed.

However, you don’t have unlimited resources to do this, you need to balance your investment in creating the experience with the impact on the individual and/or organization. That’s efficiency. The investment is rewarded with a multiplier on the cost. This is just good business.

Let’s be clear: investing without evaluating the impact is an act of faith that isn’t scrutable. Similarly, achieving the outcome at an inappropriate expense isn’t sustainable. Ultimately, you need to achieve reasonable changes to behavior under a viable expenditure.

A few of us have noticed problems sufficient to advocate quality in what we do. While things may be trending upward (fingers crossed), I think there’s still ways to go when we’re still hearing about ‘rapid’ elearning instead of ‘outcomes’. And I’ve argued that the necessary changes produce a cost differential that is marginal, and yet yields outcomes more than marginal. There’s an obvious case for effectiveness and efficiency.

But why engagement? Is that necessary? People tout it as desirable. To be fair, most of the time they’re talking about design aesthetics, media embellishment, and even ‘gamification‘ instead of intrinsic engagement. And I will maintain that there’s a lot more possible. There’s an open question, however: is it worth it?

My answer is yes. Tapping into intrinsic interest has several upsides that are worth the effort. The good news is that you likely don’t need to achieve a situation where people are willing to pay money to attend your learning. Instead, you have the resources on hand to make this happen.

So, if you make your learning – and here in particular I mean your introductions, examples, and practice – engaging, you’re addressing motivation, anxiety, and potentially optimizing the learning experience.

If your introduction helps learners connect to their own desires to be an agent of good, you’re increasing the likelihood that they’ll persist and that the learning will ‘stick’.
If your examples are stories that illustrate situations the learner recognizes as important, and unpack the thinking that led to success, you’re increasing their comprehension and their knowledge.
Most importantly, if your practice tasks are situated in contexts that are meaningful to learners both because they’re real and important, you’ll be developing their skills in ways closest to how they’ll perform. And if the challenge in the progression of tasks is right, you’ll also accelerate them at the optimal speed (and increase engagement).

Engagement is a fine-tuning, and learner’s opinions on the experience aren’t the most important thing. Instead, the improvement in learning outcomes is the rationale. It takes some understanding and practice to get systematically good at doing this. Further, you can make learning engaging, it is an acquired capability.

So, is your learning engaging intrinsic interest, and making the learning persist? It’s an approach that affects effectiveness in a big way and efficiency in a small way. And that’s the way you want to go, right? Engage!

Extending engagements

9 November 2016 by Clark Leave a Comment

In a couple of recent posts, I’ve been telling tales of helping organizations, and I wanted to tell at least one more. In this case, I’m extending the type of work I’ve done to have a real impact, still with a low overhead. The key is to include some followup activities.

Serious eLearning

In one instance, a person who’d attended my game design workshop wanted to put it into practice. With a colleague, they were wanting to improve their online learning to better support their stakeholders, and wanted to deepen the experience. The goal was to provide their learners opportunities to practice success skills.

We knew they were were going to be developing scenarios, so the key was the develop the skills of these two. Consequently, we arranged a series of meetings where they’d deliver their latest work, and I’d not only critique it, but use it as opportunities to deepen their understanding. This occurred over a period of a couple of months, on calls for an hour or so. Each call would occur a short time after they delivered their latest version.

It took several iterations, but their outputs improved substantially. When we were comfortable with their progress, the engagement was over.

Learning Strategy

In another instance, a company was moving to a ‘customer experience’ focus, and wanted to workshop what this meant for the training function. They had already planned on using a particular process that involves a team of stakeholders on a week-long meeting, and in particular that process called for one outsider (yours truly). Beforehand, I got up to speed on their business and current status.

During that week, I found my role to continue to advocate for taking a bigger picture of meeting customer learning and performance needs. They found it easy to slip back into thinking of courses, but continued to ‘get’ that they should look at augmenting their work with performance support. Given that their product was complex, it became clear that ‘how to’ videos were a real opportunity.. They were particularly excited about the concept of ‘spacing’ practice, and loved the spacing diagram originated by my colleague Will Thalheimer.

What’s more important is that we also built in several ongoing reviews. So, their process had a few subsequent deliverables, and we worked out that they would come through me for feedback. In general, new ideas can backslide if not reinforced, and this process helped them cement in several new features, including a new emphasis on the videos.

consulttaleslogo The point being, extending engagements with a few simple followups provides a much higher likelihood of improvement than just a one-off. It doesn’t take much, and the outcome is better. It is a spaced practice, really, and we know that works better. I reckon the marginal extra investment yields a much bigger benefit. Does that make sense to you?