The Accidental Instructional Designer: Learning Design for the Digital Age

by Cammy Bean

Use questions and interactions to present information (questions aren’t just for tests), allowing the person to learn through discovery.

help consolidate their learning with case studies or stories that exemplify this content

This is where many learners truly begin to get it, especially those who struggle with pure concepts.

provide opportunities t...

“tell them what you told them” part of the process. Summarize the key learning points, but also leave space for the learner to reflect.

learn through observation (show me), then practice it on their own with guided prompts and feedback from the program (try it).

ARCS Model of Motivational Design, which defines four categories of motivational variables: attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction.

Remember, it’s training, not entertainment.

Keller breaks attention down into three subcategories: perceptual arousal, inquiry arousal, and variability.

Making it emotional doesn’t mean creating a tear jerker e-learning program à la Gone With the Wind. It means getting people to care—which is the heart of identifying the what’s in it for me. When we put forth the WIIFM, we help people make a truly emotional connection:

What stories can you tell on your opening screen to get people to notice? What surprising facts or stats can you spring on them? What can you do to create an unexpected scene in your e-learning program?

AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire, and action, and can be used to describe the sequence of events that goes into making someone want to buy your product or service.

not creating a desire to buy, but rather a desire to change behavior, follow the new process, move forward, and learn.

Don’t think of AIDA as a checklist—it’s not “as long as I cover those four I will be OK”, but rather a well-structured linear sequence that taps into the hearts and minds of your audience.

What exactly are you trying to teach? Will Thalheimer, who created a new taxonomy for learning objective, labels this type of objective an instructional-design objective, which is “a statement developed by and for instructional designers to guide the design and development of learning and instruction” (2006). So, we do need them, but most people find them painful to read. One could argue that most learners don’t even bother reading them. Michael Allen states that lists of learning objectives aren’t motivating. However, he also says that “measurable behavioral objectives are, indeed, critical components to guide the design of effective training applications” (2003, 160). Unfortunately, there’s nothing that will get people to yawn more quickly than a list of them. More often than not, learning objectives sound like they were written by robots. How about you? Do you take the time to read those objectives? Really?

How can this be accomplished in education where standards are the life's blood of face to face instruction?

emotionally charged events are more memorable than neutral ones.

To keep people engaged and focused, we need to re-hook them every 10 minutes. The brain needs those breaks, so consider chunking a program into short 10-minute chapters or sections.

Human to human communication is my favorite kind of interaction.

What an interesting question - what is your favorite type?

templates as a way to streamline development,

templates for classroom teachers streamline dev

If you’re coming up with your own template set, design with care. If you’re buying off-the-shelf templates, please buy with caution!

Games that the corporation forces on its poor employees? Not fun. Not fun at all. In fact, they are often annoying and highly mocked by the people who are subjected to them.

“that the addition of interesting yet unimportant augmentations can divert learners from learning the main points that are being made” (2004, 5).

You set up the situation, give her a challenge or problem, and then provide choices and decisions along the way that direct the outcome. Tom Kuhlmann calls this the three Cs: challenge, choice, and consequence.

“an opportunity for meaningful reflection increases the probability that the skill will be retained

make it human, keep it light, cut it out, give it spirit, treat them like grown-ups, find your flow, and be on brand.

To be clear here, keeping it light doesn’t mean unprofessional or flippant, and you certainly have control over how light you go.

Try building a few screens of a course in two different ways and getting their input. Ask them, “Which would you prefer?” Better yet, take those sample screens in front of some real people who would actually be the recipients of this learning program and ask them, “Which would you prefer?” Collect the data and take the proof back to the stakeholders.

In a slide-based e-learning program, try aiming for one idea per slide, instead of cramming in 14 ideas on one slide just because you can get the font that small.

#elearning #onlineteaching

What if instead of telling your learners what they must do, you try to sell them on why it will be a valuable use of their time?

“In this section, you’ll learn the three things you need to do to run an effective meeting,”

the right kind of story is a simulation: “Stories are like flight simulators for the brain” (2008, 213).

We learn from mistakes, our own as well as the mistakes of others. When deciding what stories to use in your e-learning programs, start there.

Think of it as using the power of gossip to instruct.

What they’ve given you is all of the information and none of the stories behind it.

What mistakes do people typically make? What stories do you tell people to illustrate this concept? What questions do people ask you? Where are their gaps in understanding?

In essence a brand is about the personality of the organization and its products or services. This personality creates thoughts, feelings, perceptions, images, experiences, beliefs, and attitudes. The sum of all the points of contact with the brand is generally known as the brand experience.

A truly branded learning experience goes beyond the visual identity guidelines to influence every aspect of the design. It’s about finding the tone and messaging that effectively reflects your company’s brand.

So often forgotten in the visual department, the LMS is the front door, so it better be on brand, too, because this is where the real first impression begins. Sadly, most LMSs have the company logo in the top left corner and lists of boring text links.

John Medina’s Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School,

read

Connie Malamed writes a wonderful blog called The eLearning Coach. She’s also the author of Visual Language for Designers—a

Google “e-learning templates” and you’ll find a number of sites with template packs for sale.

The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve plots how information is lost when there is no effort to review or retain the material. The curve represents the average learner and can be influenced by a number of things.

your best bet as a learning professional who wants to help people remember better, is to use three proven methods:

Kohn suggests reconnecting with the learners three times. Two days after the session, he says to quiz them on a piece of critical information. For example, “According to the instructor, what was the most important first step?” This question focuses on fact-based recall. Two weeks later, ask a question to elicit elaborative recall: “Hey, according to that lecture on XXX how can you imagine using that information in our organization?” He suggests having the student provide a written response, but you could bake this strategy into your learning program in a lot of different ways, including social media tools (I’m thinking Facebook groups or a forum on your internal platform). After two months, Kohn says to reconnect with them yet again. This time ask, “Can you give us examples of how you’ve used this in your organization?” This point really helps the learners see how they’ve transferred this information or skill back to the workplace and into their performance.

If you really want to change behavior, don’t start from the position of event-driven, adult-to-child enforcement—as is so often the way of the self-paced e-learning program.

we’ve moved from the old order of corporate training, where materials were packaged in big binders (think “stocks”) to a new world that no longer receives well-structured assets (think “flow”). Knowledge is fluid and evolving and to participate in the flow, well, we need to go with it.

Five Stages of Workplace Learning, which lays out the evolution of the modern workplace: stage 1: classroom training stage 2: e-learning stage 3: blended learning stage 4: social learning stage 5: collaborative learning/working.

By showing our work, and encouraging our peers and employees to do the same, we create a culture that goes with the flow and helps people reflect more on their own experiences.

Reflection ensures better integration knowledge transfer to our jobs and means that we share that tacit knowledge with others.