Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Cammy Bean
Read between
July 20 - August 9, 2023
Fake Branching
It’s a different mindset than just providing training. It’s about finding ways to work smarter—which is the business of, well, your business. It’s not just a training team task, and if you want to make sure you stay relevant, it’s important to be involved and use your expertise where it matters. This may mean stepping outside the bounds of the training and development department, putting on that consulting hat, and forging new ground.
However, by keeping aligned to learning science and the evidence for what works, advanced practitioners increasingly have embraced learning as a journey and not an event.
Self-paced e-learning can be one really excellent ingredient in the mix.
We’ve got to think like marketing and salespeople—we are essentially selling content—and convince the learner that it really is going to be worth their precious time and attention.
There's a lot of this sort of vibe in the book. I resist this quite a bit. At the same time, I think she has a point.
moment. John Keller, a professor of instructional systems and educational psychology at Florida State University, developed the ARCS Model of Motivational Design, which defines four categories of motivational variables: attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction.
All those seductive details may end up doing more damage through distraction and learner fatigue than we intend.
We need people to care about the content, not because we want them to like our design, but because we want them to take action. You want them to pay attention, learn a skill, and change their behavior.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip and Dan Heath (2008)
According to Chip and Dan Heath, when we perceive a gap in our knowledge about something, we become curious, thus making the content stickier because we want to close that knowledge gap.
At Kineo, we expect to use about six to seven unique screen types throughout a 20-screen, slide-based e-learning program. Reusing screen types saves time and production costs, and also adds a level of consistency throughout the program. Variability is good, but too much variability can create a chaotic and unordered experience.
AIDA is a classic copywriting model that stands for attention, interest, desire, and action.
In learning you’re not creating a desire to buy, but rather a desire to change behavior, follow the new process, move forward, and learn.
The meat of your program—the knowledge—should reinforce the desire by constantly showing the benefits of changing your ways.
Unfortunately, nothing will get people to yawn more quickly than a list of objectives.
By personalizing the language, changing “I-know-it verbs” into “I-can-change-the-world verbs,” and making the objective more concrete, she presents an objective that the learner can actually understand and do something with.
Figure 9-1. The Spectrum of Interactive Control
Although passive viewing experiences are not interactive because we don’t influence them or click on anything, we can still learn from them.
In fact, in many courses, that's how the bulk of content is presented. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Although I passively watched it, I actively changed my behavior as a result of viewing that program. I interacted with the content in my own mind.
It’s do-it-yourself (DIY) learning and it’s what a lot of your employees are doing already.
more interactivity doesn’t always create better experiences.
Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer, in e-Learning and the Science of Instruction, call “seductive details.”
corporate learning?
Seductive details are “interesting but irrelevant material added to a multimedia presentation in an effort to spice it up” (Clark and Mayer 2007).
“interaction doesn’t equal application or engagement.”
Clark Quinn, Millennials, Goldfish & Other Training Misconceptions (2018)
Quinn notes that “engagement comes from either a cognitive challenge or an intrinsic interest.” Make sure you set up activities that require people’s brains to actively process (that is, think) about the information you’re sharing.
Kevin Thorn of Nuggethead Studioz blames the deluge of CCBB on a lack of real design skills.
Play to Learn: Everything You Need to Know About Designing Effective Learning Games, Karl Kapp and Sharon Boller (2017)
Badges and leaderboards are examples.
Will Thalheimer (2004) analyzed research about the “seductive-details effect” from the late 1980s and 1990s, which found “that the addition of interesting yet unimportant augmentations can divert learners from learning the main points that are being made.”
Tom Kuhlmann, chief learning architect at Articulate, writes the Rapid E-Learning Blog, which is a must read for any instructional designer—accidental or otherwise.
A goal-based scenario can be a great tool for practicing complex problem-solving skills.
This is what David Merrill (2009), in “First Principles of Instruction,” calls the integration principle. He says that “an opportunity for meaningful reflection increases the probability that the skill will be retained and used in the everyday lives of the learners.”
Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer (2003) tell us that using the personalization principle actually yields better learning results than more formal language.
By using familiar language and tying it back to the terminology and ideas people already know, you’re building a stronger learning experience.
In Made to Stick Chip and Dan Heath (2008) name stories as one of the six key things that make ideas stick.
They go on to explain that the right kind of story is a simulation: “Stories are like flight simulators for the brain.”
the story’s arc: context (set the stage for why you should care), conflict (highlight the problem), climax (generate an aha moment), and closure (summarize the lessons learned and include a call to action).
Susan Weinschenk’s fabulous little book, 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (2011),
