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Nuancing Engagement

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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?

3 C’s of Engaging Practice

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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?

Engagement

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I had the occasion last week to attend a day of ComicCon. If you don’t know it, it is a conference about comics, but also much, much, more. It covers movies and television, games (computers and board), and more. It is also a pop culture phenomenon, where new releases are announced, analysis and discussion occur, and people dress up.   And it is huge!

I have gone to many conferences, and some are big, e.g. ATD’s ICE or Online Educa, or Learning Technology (certainly the exhibit hall).   This made the biggest of those seem like a rounding error.   It’s more like the SuperBowl.   People camp out in line to attend the best panels, and the exhibit hall is so packed that you can hardly move.   The conference itself is so big that it maxes out the San Diego Convention Center and spills out into adjoining hotels.

And that is really the lesson: something here is generating mad passion.   Such overwhelming interest that there’s a lottery for tickets! I attended once in the very early days, when it was small and cozy (as a college student), but this is something else.   I haven’t been to the Oscars, but this is bigger than what’s shown on TV.   It’s bigger than E3. Again, I haven’t seen CES since the very early days, but it can’t be much larger. And this isn’t for biz, this is for the people and their own hard earned dollars.   In designing learning, we would love to achieve such motivation.   So what’s going on?

So first, comics tap into some cultural touchstone; they appear in most (if not all) cultures that have developed mass media.   They tell ongoing stories that resonate with individuals, and drive other media including (as mentioned) movies, TV, games, and toys.   They can convey drama or comedy, and comment on the human condition with insight and heart. The best are truly works of art (oh, Bill Watterson, how could you stop?).

They use the standard methods of storytelling, strip away unnecessary details, have (even unlikely) heroes and villains, obstacles and triumphs). And they can convey powerful lessons about values and consequences.   Things we often are trying to achieve. It’s done through complex characters, compelling narratives, and stylistic artwork.   As Hilary Price (author of the comic Rhymes with Orange) told us in a panel, she’s a writer first and an artist second.

We don’t use graphic novel/comic/cartoon formats near enough in learning, and we could and should. Similarly with games, the interactive equivalent, for meaningful practice.   I fear we take ourselves too seriously, or let stakeholders keep us from truly engaging our learners. We can and should do better.  We need to understand audience engagement, and leverage that in our learning experiences.  To restate: it’s not about content, it’s about experience. Are you designing experiences?

Engage, yea or nay?

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In a recent chat, a colleague I respect said the word ‘engagement’  was anathema.  This surprised me, as I’ve been quite outspoken about the need for engagement (for one small example, writing a book about it!).  It may be that the conflict is definitional, for it appeared that my colleague and another respondent viewed engagement as bloating the content, and that’s not what I mean at all. So I thought I lay out what  I  mean when I say engaging, and why I think it’s crucial.

Let’s be clear what I  don’t mean.  If you think by engagement it’s adding in extra stuff, we’re using a very different definition of engagement.  It’s not about tarting up uninteresting stuff with ‘fun’ (e.g. racing themed window dressing on knowledge test).  It’s not about putting in unnecessary unrelated imagery, sounds, or anything else.  Heck, the research of Dick Mayer at UCSB shows this actually hinders learning!

So what do I mean?  For one thing, stripping away any ‘nice to have’ or unnecessary info.  Lean is engaging!  You have to focus on what really will help the learners,  and in ways that they get.  And they do.  And then help them in the ‘in the ways they get’ bit.

You need contextualized practice.  Engaging is making the context meaningful to the learners.  You need contextualization (e.g research by John Bransford on anchored cognition), but arbitrary contextualization isn’t as good as intrinsically interesting contexts.  This isn’t window dressing, since you need to be doing it anyway, but do it. And in a minimal style (as de Saint-Exupery said: “Perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away…”).

You want compelling examples. We know that examples lead to better learning (ala, for instance John Sweller’s work on cognitive load), but again, making them meaningful to the learners is critical. This isn’t window dressing, as we need them, but they’re better if they’re well told as intrinsically interesting stories.

Finally, we need to introduce the learning.  Too often we do this in ways that the learner doesn’t get the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me).  Learners learn better when they’re emotionally open to the content instead of uninterested. This may be a wee bit more, but we can account for this by getting rid of the  usual introductory stuff.  And it’s worth it.

Now, let’s be clear, this is for when we’ve deemed formal learning as necessary. When the audience is practitioners who know what they need and why it’s important, then giving them ‘just the facts’, performance support, is sufficient.  But if it’s new skills they need, when you need a learning experience, then you want to make it engaging. Not extrinsically, but intrinsically.  And that’s not more in quantity, it’s not bloated, it’s more in quality, in minimalism for content and maximal for immersion.

Engaging learning is a good thing, a better thing than not, the right thing.  I’m hoping it’s just definitional, because I can’t see the contrary argument unless there’s confusion over what I mean.  Anyone?

The Grail of Effective and Engaging Learning Experiences

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There’s a considerable gap between what we can be doing, and what we are doing.  When you look at what’s out there, we see that there are several way in which we fall short of the mark.  While there are many dimensions that  could be considered, for the sake of simplicity let’s characterize the two important ones as effectiveness of our learning and the engagement of the experience.  And I want to characterize where we are and where we could be, and the gaps we need to bridge.

GrailEffectiveEngagingLearningIf we map the space, we see that the lower left is the space of low engagement  and low effectiveness.  Too much elearning resides there.  Now, to be fair, it’s easy to add engaging media and production values, so the space of typical elearning does span from low to high engagement. Moving up the diagram, however, towards increasing effectiveness, is an area that’s less populated.  The red line separates the undesirable areas from the space we’d like to start hitting, where we begin to have some modicum of both effectiveness  and  engagement, moving towards the upper right.  This space is relatively sparsely populated, I’m afraid.  And  while there are instances  of content that do increase the effectiveness, there’s little that really hits the ultimate goal, the holy grail, with a fully integrated effective and engaging experience is achieved.

How do we move in the right direction? I’ve talked before about trying to hit the sweet spot of maximal effectiveness within pragmatic constraints.  Certainly from an effectiveness standpoint, you should be looking at the components of the Serious eLearning Manifesto.  To get effective learning, you need a number of elements, for instance:

  • meaningful practice: practice aligned with the real world task
  • contextualized practice: learning across contexts that support transfer
  • sustained practice: sufficient and increasingly challenging practice to develop the skills to the necessary level
  • spaced practice: practice spread out over  time (brains need sleep to learn more than a certain threshold)
  • real world consequences providing feedback  coupled with scaffolded  reflection
  • model-based guidance: the best guide for practice is a conceptual basis (not rote information)
  • appropriate examples: that show the concepts being applied in context

Some of these elements, also contribute to engagement, as well as others.  Components include:

  • learning-centered  contexts: problems learners recognize as important
  • learner-centered contexts: problems  learners want to solve
  • emotionally engaging introductions: hooking learners in viscerally as well as cognitively
  • adapted challenge: ramping up the challenge appropriately to avoid both boredom and frustration
  • unpredictability: maintaining the learner’s attention through  surprise
  • meaningfulness: learners playing roles they want to be in
  • drama and/or humor

The integration of these elements was the underlying premise behind Engaging Learning, my book on integrating effectiveness and engagement, specifically on making meaningful practice, e.g. serious games.  Serious games are one way to achieve this end, by contextualizing practice as decisions in a meaningful environment and using a game engine to adapt the  challenge and providing essentially unlimited practice.

Other approaches achieve much of this effectiveness in different ways. Branching scenarios are powerful approximations to this by showing consequences in context but with limited replay, and so are constructivist and problem-based learning pedagogies. This may sound daunting, but with practice, and some shortcuts, this is doable.

For example, Socratic Arts has a powerful online pedagogy that leverages media and a constructivist pedagogy in a relatively simple framework. The learner is given ‘assignments‘ that mirror real world tasks, via emails or videos of characters playing roles such as a boss.  The outputs required similarly mimic work products you might find in this area. Scaffolding is available in a couple of ways. For one, there are guidelines about Videos of experts and documents are available as resources, to support the learner in getting the best outcome.  While it’s low on fancy visual design,  it’s effective because it’s closely aligned to the needed skills post-learning.  And the cognitive challenge is pitched at the right level to engage the intellect, if not the aesthetics.  This is a cost-effective balance.

The work I did with the Wadhwani Foundation hit a slightly different spot in trying to get to the grail.  I didn’t have the ability to work quite as tightly with the SMEs from the get-go, and we didn’t have the ability to simulate the hands-on tasks as well as we’d like,  but we did our best to infer real tasks and used low-tech simulations and scenarios to make it effective.  We did use more media, animations and contextualized videos, to make the experience more engaging and effective as well.

The point being that we can start making learning more effective and engaging in practical ways. We need to make it effective, or why bother?  We should make it engaging, to optimize the outcomes and not insult our learners. And we can.  So why don’t we?

Challenges in engaging learning

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I’ve been working on moving a team to deeper learning design.  The goal is to practice what I preach, and make sure that the learning design is competency-aligned, activity-based, and model-driven.  Yet, doing it in a pragmatic way.

And this hasn’t been without it’s challenges.  I  presented to the team my vision, we worked out a process, and started coaching the team during development.  In retrospect, this wasn’t proactive enough.  There were a few other hiccups.

We’re currently engaged in a much tighter cycle of development and revision, and now feel we’re getting close to the level of effectiveness  and  engagement we need.  Whether a) it’s really better, and b) whether we can replicate it yet scale it as well is an open question.

At core are a few elements. For one, a rabid focus on what learners are  doing is key.  What do they need to be able to do, and what contexts do they need to do it in?

The competency-alignment focus is on the key tasks that they have to do in the workplace, and making sure we’re preparing them across pre-class, in-class, and post-class activities to develop that ability.  A key focus is having them make the decision in the learning experience that they’ll have to make afterward.

I’m also pushing very hard on making sure that there are models behind the decisions.  I’m trying hard to avoid arbitrary categorizations, and find the principles that drove those categorizations.

Note that all this is  not easy.  Getting the models is hard when the resources  provided don’t include that information.  Avoiding presenting just knowledge and definitions is hard work.  The tools we use make certain interactions easy, and other ones not so easy.  We have to map meaningful decisions into what the tools support.  We end up making  tradeoffs, as do we all.  It’s good, but not as good as it could be.  We’ll get better, but we do want to run in a practical fashion as well.

There are more elements to weave in: layering on some general biz skills is embryonic.  Our use of examples needs to get more systematic.  As does our alignment of learning goal to practice activity.    And we’re struggling to have a slightly less didactic and earnest tone;  I haven’t worked hard enough on pushing a bit of humor in, tho’ we are ramping up some exaggeration.  There’s only so much you can focus on at one time.

We’ll be running some student tests next week before presenting to the founder.  Feeling mildly confident that we’ve gotten a decent take on quality learning design with suitable production value, but there is the barrier that the nuances of learning design are  subtle. Fingers crossed.

I still believe that, with practice, this becomes habit and easier.  We’ll see.

Engagement, people!

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I’m working on a project with a partner, and have this really sharp ID working with me.  My role is to be guiding the design, not doing it, and it’s working well.  The thing I see, however, is emblematic of what I’m seeing much more broadly: the dissociation between the designer and the learning experience.

Ok, so not many ID theorists are talking about the emotional engagement.  Keller and his ARCS model is really the only one. And some folks are touting it for elearning.  Michael Allen and his mantra of “no more boring elearning” has been at the forefront for a long time.  Julie Dirksen covers it in her recent book, and it’s also implicit in Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping  &  Roger Schank’s Goal-Based Scenarios.  Yet somehow the message isn’t getting through.

The output, however, is at arm’s distance from the learner.  It’s got comprehensive coverage.  It’s got stories, and animations (I’m having  some effect :), but they’re so abstract. So overwritten. So impersonal.  It’s not the ID’s fault. Where, in most programs in ID, in most settings, do you see a focus on learner experience?  Not clicky-clicky bling bling, as Cammy Bean so aptly coined it, but really engaging learning.  It’s harder to find than you think.

There are several important components:

Making it meaningful: focus on changes that will impact the workplace and help convey to the learner that this is real and really needed.  If it’s not tied to impacting a business metric, it’s probably not the right topic.

Making it personal: this includes several things.  One is writing like you’re talking to the person. Another is having them connect it to their own practices, either retroactively or proactively.  Give them an assignment about what to do in the workplace that they bring back.

Making it visceral: this means introducing and using examples that go beneath the merely informative, and tap into basic instincts. Learners should be connected in a very emotional way, using fear or empathy or other hook that appeals directly to their personal needs in ways that cause them to resonate in their core.

Minimalizing: going through and slashing your verbiage.  Most elearning is grossly overwritten, and can be trimmed at least 40%, and usually can be trimmed down 60% or more.  You want to use rich media (I’m pushing graphic novel formats in the project) and animations, but much less prose and production than you think you need.

Putting it into practice: this means having the learner perform the way they’ll need to perform outside the learning experience.  Get them making the decisions in practice that you want in the workplace.  It’s not about knowing, it’s about  doing.  Until they can’t get it wrong.

Making it  flow: think about not just the individual bits, but also the segue between them.  What’s the emotional trajectory the learner goes through?  How are they intrigued, and how do we lead them from apathy and anxiety to motivation and confidence?

These are the top level categories, but they map out into more practices. And you should be working on these in your teams. And I can state from experience that just workshops by themselves aren’t sufficient, and what really helps are an exposure to the principles and the practice, then feedback on a series of attempts until satisfied that the principles have been internalized  in  the practice.  Please, go beyond content, and get into real experience design.  Systematically, reliably, and repeatedly.  For your learners, and for the industry.  We need to lift our game.

Engagification

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The latest ‘flavor of the month’ is so-called gamification. Without claiming to be an expert in this area (tho’ with a bit of experience in game design), I have to say that I’ve some thoughts both positive and negative on this.

So what is ‘gamification’? As far as I can tell, it’s the (and I’m greatly resisting the temptation to put the word ‘gratuitous’ in here :) addition of game mechanics to user experiences to increase their participation, loyalty, and more. Now, there are levels of game mechanics, and I can see tapping into some deeper elements, but what I see are relatively simple things like adding scoring, achievements (e.g. badges), etc.   A colleague of mine who released a major learning game admitted that they added score at the end to compensate for the lack of ability to tune further and needing to release to appease investors. I get it; there are times that adding in gamification increases bottom lines in meaningful ways. But I want to suggest that we strive a little bit higher.

In Engaging Learning, I talked about the elements that synergistically lead to both better effectiveness of education practice, and more engaging experiences. These weren’t extrinsic like ‘frame games’ (tarted-up drill-and-kill), but instead focused on aligning with learner interests, intrinsic elements of the task, and more. This means finding out what drives experts to find this intriguing, a role that learners can play that’s compelling, meaningful decisions to make, appropriate level of challenges, and more. That’s what I’m shooting for.

The benefits of intrinsic motivation instead of extrinsic have been studied since the late 70’s in work by Tom Malone and Mark Lepper. In short, you get better outcomes when people are meaningfully engaged rather than trivially engaged. Dan Pink’s book Drive lays out a wealth of related research that suggests we need to avoid rewards for rote performance and instead should be focusing on helping folks do real tasks. I can’t remember where I first heard the term ‘engagification’, but that’s just what I’m thinking of.

To me, it’s the right way take gamification, focus on intrinsic motivation. If we’re gamifying, we’re covering up for some other deficiency, I reckon. Yes, there may be times that intrinsic motivation is hard to find (e.g. to get fit), but that probably means we haven’t tried hard enough yet. I recall recently hearing about gamifying kids math problems; yes, but rote problems are the wrong thing to drill. Can’t we find the intrinsic interest in math, solving real problems (like the ones they’ll see in the real world, not on tests)?  I reckon we could, and should. It would take more effort initially, but the payoff ought to be better.

Perhaps gamify if you have to, but only after you’ve first tried to engagify. Please.

Engaging Learning

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How do you systematically design learning experiences that effectively engage the learner?

This was the question I set out to address more than 5 years ago.   Based upon years of deep investigation into learning & instruction theories and design processes, and practical experience in designing games, I wrote Engaging Learning: Designing e-Learning Simulation Games.

The book was based upon work I’d published as an academic, but was focused very pragmatically.   There were already a few books out about the value of computer games to support learning, notably Marc Prensky’s prescient Digital Game-Based Learning, and Clark Aldrich’s Games and the Future of Learning was also already out.   Subsequently, books by Gee, Shaffer, and others have highlighted the opportunities.

However, I thought and think that my book had a unique contribution, being quite specific around:

  • the principles that underpin why games are the best learning
  • how to modify your design processes to successfully design games

Having looked at the books out there, I still feel it does the best job of making the case.

ElementsAt core was an alignment between what makes effective learning practice, and what makes engaging experiences.   Looking across educational theories, repeated elements emerge. Similarly with experience design.   It turns that they perfectly align.   If you recognize that, and can execute against it, your learning will be greater than the sum of the parts, and will both seriously engage and truly educate.   Learning can, and should, be hard fun!

The workshops I’ve run based upon the book have been very well received, reinforcing the value of the book.   Similarly, the content has been solicited as a component of both Silberman’s Handbook of Experiential Learning, and the Guild’s Immersive Learning Simulation report.   I’ve now heard Tony O’Driscoll talk about the design principles for learning experiences in Virtual Worlds (in his and Karl Kapp’s coming book on the topic), and they’re the same principles!

So why hasn’t the book penetrated corporate learning more than it has?   There are several contributing factors.   First, the work I published as an academic didn’t hit the mainstream.   I was part of the international society on computers, and a member of the group specifically about learning through computers (IFIP WG 3.3). They’d just started their own journal, and I wanted to support it (and get a publication). In retrospect, it would’ve been better to publish in one of the more recognized journals on the topic.   As I was overseas, the work never hit the US academic awareness.

Second, I didn’t really understand book marketing then, and trusted that the publisher did.   At the time, they weren’t very pro-active in developing a joint understanding of responsibility (that’s changed), and my book fell through their cracks (and I’m not a marketing person).   (Still, I’m going to be a bit more proactive on the mobile learning book, and they have promised likewise.)

I still firmly believe that the book is the best guide to designing meaningful learning experiences that are centered on deep practice, and a guide for everything from better multiple choice questions to full on simulation-driven serious games.   I’ve tracked the rest of the books out there, and they do a good job of arguing why games are a powerful learning environment, why they make business sense, and more.   However, Engaging Learning is still the best book out there that tells designers how to go about making them.   Sure, I recommend having the workshop to actually get a chance to practice the skills (you know, get your whole team to lift their game), but many who have read it have told me they found value in the book on it’s own.

I don’t say this to generate sales; I get so little it’s not going to make a difference.   I say this because I really worked hard to ensure there is a lot of value in it for you.   I’m just trying to make sure there’s better learning out there, and there’s a lot more need than I can service individually.   There are other good books, Michael Allen’s Guide to eLearning being one, but my book focuses specifically on helping you make more meaningful practice, and that’s a big area of needed improvement, and a major opportunity in making your learning more meaningful.

Please, wherever you draw inspiration, however you figure it out, make more engaging learning. Align the elements of effective practice and the elements of engaging experiences, and make your learning rock. For your learners’ sake, please!

Engaging Interactions

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BJ Schone contacted me and I sent him some feedback on a document he was preparing. He’s now finished with his Engaging Interactions For eLearning, and making it freely available at the site. It’s in the form of an eBook (PDF), and he’s also promised to blog each interaction at the site, to support discussion around them.

It’s compendium of 25 activities for learning that map to various learning goals. There are the familiar things like drag-and-drop, and more complex activities as well. The activities aren’t academically categorized, but it is focused on the learning outcome, not just different interaction modality. The interactions cover a range from simple exercises such as re-ordering steps, to more complex activities like virtual labs.

It’s a useful resource, and if you’re looking for some inspiration it’s worth a look. Thanks, BJ!