Ask, Would you want to learn from this?

It's a simple question—one I sometimes feel embarrassed to ask—would you want to learn from this? (I tend to ask this question of designers when I'm looking at a poor design and floundering to say something respectful and helpful. Even a poor product can take a lot of time and effort to produce. I know that. We grow a bit sensitive to criticism after investing a lot of effort. But effort doesn't necessarily make the product good, does it? We all need to ask ourselves this question of our own work as well as of any e-learning we're thinking of deploying.)

We have research to tell us how to build up from basic skills, combining challenges to learners in ways that develop effective decision-making skills. We know quite a lot about practice, what to practice and when. We know some useful things about imagery and animation. We know the importance of performance confidence and that skill without confidence isn't particularly valuable.

We also know that even the most knowledgeable persons cannot always design learning events that engage learners, optimize the use of their learning time, and produce valuable performance skills. Advanced practitioners and novices alike can find their earnest instructional design efforts falling short in a devastating manner. It's the curse of learner boredom that so often thwarts well-intentioned efforts. And it's so easy to bore learners: A truckload of text. Multiple-choice questions anyone can answer, whether they've acquired intended skills or not. A confusing, effort-absorbing user interface that gets in the way. An attempt to teach learners something they already know, as if their time were of no importance.

We can't list all the potential barriers to success because there are so many ways to create e-learning that no one except its creator could tolerate, let alone love. Even then, I wonder, would the creator really choose to learn in this way if there were options? I doubt it.

The degree to which courseware appeals to learners may be of little interest to learning researchers. I don't actually recall the issue of boredom ever being raised in my graduate school courses, but learner engagement is vital for success with e-learning. Knowing how to engage learners will help you overcome many barriers and increase your odds of success greatly.

To be sure, appeal alone doesn't get you to success. Many well-intended efforts have loads of appeal but are instructionally impotent. Appeal is, however, one essential ingredient for success. Many of the chapters of this book reveal ways to increase the appeal of your e-learning, but it's important to ask yourself continually, and then ask others, would you want to learn from this? Be honest. If you get anything less than enthusiastic yeses, figure out why or just try something different and ask again. It isn't the effort that counts; it's making good design decisions.

Match Instructional Strategy to Outcome Goals

As I sit back in my chair and contemplate recent achievements and disappointments in e-learning, it occurs to me there's often a fundamental mismatch between the instructional strategy applied and the experience learners need to reach their goals. Correcting this common error could make a widespread improvement in the real and recognized value of e-learning, because this error is so prevalent and because it incapacitates so many well-intentioned efforts.

Although any mismatch of strategy to goal will defeat effectiveness, by far and away the most common design mistake made is simply presenting information to learners when instruction is needed to reach performance goals.

Instruction can take many forms, of course, but simply presenting information is by far the weakest—if it should be considered instruction at all.

As shown in Table 7.1, it's common practice to simply present information for all levels of targeted performance goals, increasing the amount of information and adding comprehension and recall quizzes for higher level goals. Awareness goals, as discussed next, are not really performance goals and assume desired performance will happen when people are aware of what should happen, this is a chancy proposition. Better to define exactly what outcomes are desired and then apply an appropriate instructional strategy. Matching strategies are briefly described for three types of performance goals. See Figure 6.3 for more clarification.

Challenge Awareness Goals

Fun to say, but even more important to say: Beware awareness goals. Often in the context of wanting to spend minimal effort and money, someone will defend an undertaking of little instructional effectiveness by saying, We just want people to be aware of…

The question is, why do you want people to be aware? So they can do what? The first response might be an equally evasive stance: We just need people to know… Again, we must ask, why? Why do you want employees to know you have both a Features and Benefits flyer and a User Guide?

With persistence, the underlying assumption will usually come out; it just takes the perseverance of Colombo or the insistence of a child to ask “why” repeatedly. You might eventually hear, We want our people to correctly confirm we do have the product they're looking for. We want people to question an unusual entry on the balance sheet. We want people to select appropriately between the Features and Benefits flyer and the User Guide.

You can have confidence people are assuming desired performance will arise from awareness; otherwise, why would anyone make any training effort at all, even a minimal one? They are, conscious of it or not, assuming the effort will get learners to do the preferred thing—the right thing.

Goals for awareness, knowledge, and understanding are based on the notion that when people are aware, informed, and comprehending, they will do correct, helpful, beneficial things. This is a risky assumption. You may have knowledge and not know how to apply it, just as you can understand how something is done, but not be able to do it.

No education or training program is likely to be effective in achieving behavioral outcomes if only awareness, knowledge, and understanding are addressed. I dare say these are never appropriate training goals, although they may be useful intermediate learning objectives. The link between awareness and ability to perform does exist. The assumption that awareness will yield significant performance outcomes, however, is a poor one and usually leads to wasted efforts. So, avoid awareness goals. Pretty much always.

Design Backward

Perhaps Yogi Berra was thinking of instructional design when he said, “If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.” It's easy to lose your way designing instruction and end up not achieving your primary goals.

There's an easy, simple success strategy to prevent this problem: start with the final course content; make sure it will have learners practicing the skills they really, truly need post-training. And then work backward one step at a time. If you should run short on time, at least the content you still need to develop will be the most introductory, simplest content to work with.

Think Context, Challenge, Activity, and Feedback (CCAF)

Perhaps the most helpful discovery in my endeavors to help e-learning realize its potential was the identification of the four components of impactful, interactive, instructional experiences. CCAF is not to be confused with the phases of learning, by the way, or with other theories that help us understand and promote human learning. The components of CCAF define and comprise learning events. In my experience, we have been able to do many of the things researchers and theorists prescribe for optimal learning events just by structuring learning events on these four interrelated components: context, challenge, activity, and feedback. I think you'll experience this as well.

What's been particularly gratifying is that the CCAF framework leads so readily not only to effective e-learning experiences, but also to powerful Serious Learning Games (SLGs).

Later in this book, you will find a full review of CCAF with a more extensive discussion and helpful examples. But here are the basics of how to use the CCAF concept to create learning experiences that improve performance:

1. Identify the Target Proficiency (Activity)

   You can start with any one of the components, actually. For me, it often feels natural to start with activity, but you should start with whichever feels most comfortable to you. Following this Simple Success Strategy, ask yourself or your team what is the final performance you want learners to demonstrate proficiency in before completing their training. This is usually pretty easy because it's what the whole training program is being built to produce. You need to determine how learners will demonstrate their abilities such that they can be assessed.

2. Identify the Context(s)

   What are the contexts in which this activity will actually occur? We want the skills learned in training to transfer to performance in real situations, so we want the context, one or many situations, to be representative of what the learner will actually see, feel, hear, and experience when performing the target proficiency in real life. We call those authentic contexts.

3. Create Challenges

   Given the authentic contexts in which learners may find themselves, what should they be able to achieve? That is, what problem should they solve or what decisions should they make? Learners address the challenges through the actions they take, as identified and enabled in design task 1 above.

4. Show Consequences (Feedback)

   Experience-focused learning emphasizes use of consequences as a primary form of feedback. While novice learners are likely to need both explanatory and judgmental feedback as well, advanced learners may gain the most simply from seeing the consequences of their actions. It can be particularly impactful to suggest learners deliberately take wrong actions to see the consequences.

Employing CCAF in design, as well as in documenting and communicating about instructional design, helps keep focus on essential elements of successful e-learning. Many of the examples you will see in this book are documented for you by calling out these four components.

Think Emotion-Arousing Experiences (Not Presentations)

For performance outcomes, presentations don't cut it. Instead of putting great amounts of time and energy into the preparation of information for presentation, it's best to think in terms of experiences we can enable—meaningful, memorable, and motivational experiences.

The computer—desktop, laptop, or mobile device—is an active platform and a platform we come to with the purpose of doing things. Together with its media-capable display and mouse, touchpad, stylus, camera, and/or microphone, the delivery platform sets user expectations for action. Simply putting static information on the screen is wasting the potential of the technology and a disappointment to learners. And worse, although we tolerate it, static information presented on such devices is likely to be poorly absorbed and quickly forgotten, whereas activity-charged experiences are remembered much longer.

Not all experiences are alike. It's not just any activity that fills the bill. Clicking the Next button is hardly a memorable activity. Although in instruction we're definitely trying to stimulate cognitive activity, we achieve even greater impact when we also evoke an emotional response. Many studies confirm that emotional stimuli enhance learning retention and without it, memories fade much faster (McGaugh, 2013).

Perhaps nothing is as emotionless as blocks of text or pages of bullet points. It isn't just the formatting we're talking about. It doesn't matter if you have to press keys, touch a screen, or click a button for information to be revealed; just requiring an input to reveal information adds no emotion unless there's a context, a purpose, and maybe a challenge.

I've written much about the many means of engaging learners both cognitively and emotionally. In my book Successful e-Learning Interface: Making Learning Technology Polite, Effective, and Fun (Allen, 2011), I've gathered together bunches of ways designers achieve both cognitive and emotional learner engagement, such as by having learners imagine themselves in a high-ranking position with great authority or having the chance to be a hero if they can solve a tough problem quickly. This approach is an example of using the context of a story to get learners to care about outcomes—a story in which the learner plays a key role. Whatever the stimulus, it's much more than an embellishment. It is a powerful technique to be sure learner emotions are involved.

Use the Successive Approximation Model (SAM)

SAM is an iterative, agile process for the design and development of e-learning. It's a much simpler process than what's been traditionally used; it's faster and more effective too. Figure 7.1 illustrates the basic iterative process of the model, in which evaluation, design, and development are interwoven and performed multiple times.

Some see SAM as the latest incarnation of the legacy ADDIE model (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation), although to me this perspective suggests critical aspects of SAM haven't been understood. Let's be clear about this: all processes include analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation, but that doesn't make them ADDIE. It's when you do each of these things, to what extent, and for what purpose that are critical to process definition. In these aspects, there are great and important differences between SAM and ADDIE.

The good news is that we've moved beyond the question of whether e-learning can be effective; we know it can be. In truth, it doesn't matter how one sees the relationship between SAM and ADDIE or any other model used to manage how instructional design and development happen. What's important is that we have new, faster, and more effective methods to create effective e-learning. SAM is one of them. SAM and agile concepts, in general, have really raised the level of what's possible without raising costs or extending time lines. This is very good news.

The bad news? We now focus so much on production efficiency and production cost reduction, we often sacrifice learning effectiveness in the process. For some inexplicable reason, organizations continue to think of training as a cost rather than as an investment made for identified gains—revenue and profit gains—and with the expectation of achieving those gains. They all but eliminate opportunities for potentially huge competitive business advantages in order to spend less on training development. It's more important now than ever to build the best learning events possible within given constraints—sometimes ridiculous constraints considering what's at stake. And SAM is one proven method of doing that.

Covered in more depth in Chapter 14 and as the entire focus of the book Leaving ADDIE for SAM (Allen and Sites, 2012) and the associated Field Guide (Sites and Green, 2014), SAM recognizes the importance of the Simple Success Strategy 1 question (Would you want to learn from this?) and integrates it into the process. By iteratively, quickly, and inexpensively building prototypes and examining them, designers and stakeholders can consider whether they'd want to learn in a proposed manner. The process takes quick steps to envision a possible instructional treatment. It then asks, Why wouldn't we do this? Considerations include those listed below.

Why wouldn't we do this (proposed instructional activity)?

• Would it engage a sufficiently broad spectrum of learners?
• Would it lead to proficient performance?
• Does it focus on what's truly important?
• Are the delivery methods used to full advantage?
• Would it provide enough practice?
• Is it confusing or boring?
• Does it relate to previous and subsequent learning?
• Would it cost too much?

These are just a few of the questions under the very constructive inquiry, Why not do what's just been proposed? Within the context of the process, there's no expectation you would actually do what is proposed initially. The purpose of the exercise is to narrow in on a good design by beginning with what might seem desirable and then questioning it. After taking stock, the cycle repeats by proposing something that would seem to have more strengths and fewer weaknesses and then scrutinizing it similarly. Generally three repetitions do it.