Search Results for: engag

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!

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!

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.

 

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!

 

 

I‘ve talked in the past about the importance of engaging emotionally before beginning learning. And I‘ve talked about the importance of understanding what makes a topic intrinsically interesting. But I haven‘t really separated them out, as became clear to me in a client meeting. So let me remedy that here.

I‘ve argued, and believe, that we should open up learners emotionally before we address them cognitively. Before we tell them what they‘ll learn, before we show them objectives, we should create a visceral reaction, a wry recognition of “oh, yes, I do need to know this”. It can be a dramatic or humorous exaggeration of the positive consequences of having the knowledge or the negative consequences of not. I call this a ‘motivating example‘ different than the actual reference examples used to illustrate the model in context. In previous content we‘ve used comics to point out the problems of not knowing, and similarly Michael Allen had a fabulous video that dramatized the same. Of course, you also have a graphic novel introduction of someone saving the day with this knowledge. It of course depends on your audience and what will work for them.

Another story I tell is when a colleague found out I did games, and asked if I wanted to assist him and his team. The task was, to me and many, not necessarily a source of great intrinsic interest, but he pointed out that he‘d discovered that to practitioners, it was like playing detective. Which of course gave him a theme, and a overarching hook. And this is the second element of engagement we can and should lever.

Once we‘ve hooked them into why this learning is important, we then want to help maintain interest through the learning experience. If we can find out what makes this particular element interesting, we should have it represented in the examples and practice tasks. This will help illuminate the rationale and develop learner abilities by integrating the inherent nature of the task into the learning experience.

Often SMEs are challenging, particularly to get real decisions out of, but here‘s where they‘re extremely valuable. In addition to stories illustrating great wins and losses that can serve as examples (and the motivating example I mentioned above), they can help you understand why this is intrinsically interesting to them. They‘ve spent the time to become experts in this, we want to unpack why this was worth such effort. You may have to drill a bit below “make the world a better place”, but you could and should be able to.

By hooking them in initially by making them aware of the role of this knowledge, and then maintaining interest through the learning experience, you have a better chance of your learning sticking. And that‘s what we want to achieve, right?

In thinking through what makes experiences engaging, and in particular making practice engaging, I riffed on some core elements.   The three terms  I came up with were  Challenge, Choices, & Consequences. And I realized I had a nice little alliteration going, so I’m going to elaborate and see if it makes sense to me (and you).

In general, good practice is having the learner make decisions in context. This has to be more than just recognizing the correct knowledge option, and providing a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ feedback.  The right decision has to be made, in a plausible situation with plausible alternatives, and the right feedback has to be provided.

So, the first thing is, there has to be a situation that the learner ‘gets’ is important. It’s meaningful to them and to their stakeholders, and they want to get it right. It has to be clear there’s a real decision that has outcomes that are important.    And the difficulty  has to be adjusted to their level of ability. If it’s too easy, they’re bored and little  learning occurs. If it’s too difficult, it’s frustrating and again little learning occurs.  However, with a meaningful story and the right level of difficulty, we have the appropriate  challenge.  

Then, we have to have the right alternatives to select from. Some of the challenge comes from having a real decision where you can recognize that making the wrong choice would be problematic. But the alternatives must require an appropriate level of discrimination.  Alternatives that are so obvious or silly that they can be ruled out aren’t going to lead to any learning. Instead, they need to be ways learners reliably go wrong, representing misconceptions. The benefits are several: first, you can find out what they really know (or don’t), and you have the chance to address them. Also, this assists in having the right level of challenge.  So  you must have the right  choices.

Finally, once the choice is made, you need to have feedback. Rather than immediately have some external voice opine ‘yes’ or ‘no’, let the learner see the consequences of that choice. This is important for two  reasons. For one, it closes the emotional experience, as you see what happens, wrapping up the experience. Second, it shows how things work in the world, exposing the causal relationships and assists the learner understanding. Then you can provide feedback (or not, if you’re embedding this single decision in a scenario or game where other choices are precipitated by this choice). So, the final element are  consequences.

While this isn’t complete, I think it’s a nice shorthand to guide the design of meaningful and engaging practice. What do you think?