Search Results for: engagement

Changing behavior is hard. The brain is arguably the most complex thing in the known universe. Simplistic approaches aren‘t likely to work. To rewire it, one approach is to try surgery. This is problematic for a several reasons: it‘s dangerous, it‘s messy, and we really don’t understand enough about it. What‘s a person to do?

Well, we do know that the brain can rewire itself, if we do it right. This is called learning. And if we design learning, e.g. instruction, we can potentially change the brain without surgery. However, (and yes, this is my point) treating it as anything less than brain surgery (or rocket science), isn‘t doing justice to what‘s known and what‘s to be done.

The number of ways to get it wrong is long. Information dump instead of skills practice. Massed practice instead of spaced. Rote knowledge assessment. Lack of emotional engagement. The list goes on. (Cue the Serious eLearning Manifesto.) In short, if you don‘t know what you‘re doing, you‘re likely doing it wrong and are not going to have an effect. Sure, you‘re not likely to kill anyone (unless you‘re doing this where it matters), but you‘ll waste money and time. Scandalous.

Again, the brain is complex, and consequently so is learning design. So why, in the name of sense and money, do we treat it as trivial? Why would anyone buy a story that we can achieve anything meaningful by taking content and adding a quiz (read: rapid eLearning)? As if a quiz is somehow going to make people do better. Who would believe that just anyone can present material and learning will occur? (Do you know the circumstances when that will work?) And really, throwing fuzzy objects around the room and ice-breakers will somehow make a difference? Please. If you can afford to throw money down the drain (ok, if you insist, throw it here ;), and don‘t care if any meaningful change happens, I pity you, but I can‘t condone it.

Let‘s get real. Let‘s be honest. There‘s a lot (a lot) of things being done in the name of learning that are just nonsensical. I could laugh, if I didn‘t care so much. But I care about learning. And we know what leads to learning. It‘s not easy. It‘s not even cheap. But it will work. It requires good analysis, and some creativity, and attention to detail, and even some testing and refinement, but we know how to do this.

So let‘s stop pretending. Let‘s stop paying lip-service. Let‘s treat learning design as the true blend of art and science that it is. It‘s not the last refuge of the untalented, it‘s one of the most challenging, and rewarding, things a person can do. When it‘s done right. So let‘s do it right! We‘re performing brain surgery, non-invasively, and we should be willing to do the hard yards to actually achieve success, and then reap the accolades.

OK, that‘s my rant, trying to stop what‘s being perpetrated and provide frameworks that might help change the game. What‘s your take?

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?

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.

If 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?