Posted by Allen Interactions on Thu, Mar 04, 2010
by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategistLast week I commented on the idea that "learner interface design" perhaps suggests different strategies than traditional "user interface design"--that some of the user design standards that are in place to facilitate the automatization of standard operations, speed up actions, reduce decision time, etc. may not do much to actually enhance learning.
(I need to be clear that this discussion applies specifically to lesson designs that embrace the concept of instructional interactivity. If the lesson is primarily an information dump with inserted comprehension questions and tests, which is really more about information delivery than about creating learning experiences, then user interface principles may well be sufficient.)
The graphical elements of an interface can be exceptionally powerful in creating a meaningful and memorable experience in the learner's mind, but the more general and unspecific those elements become, the less useful they can be in conveying instructional meaning. Distinctiveness for instruction must be balanced with principles of user interface design to achieve an interface both functional and meaningful. For example, here are two screenshots. One is from the Employee Security modules I’ve mentioned before; the other is a course on Substance Abuse that comes from the same course.
At first glance, these screens look vastly different. The first uses a bird's-eye-view to represent a dynamic environment in which the learner holds great control; the second use imagery to represent filing folders containing employee records, implying a more extended, thoughtful response. The first is symbolic and illustrated in style; the second is realistic and photographic in style. The first uses rollovers and drag-and-drop as the multiple choice answering mechanism; the second uses quite markedly different hot spots and popup menus as the multiple choice mechanism. But learners seem to have no difficulty managing to succeed within the variability of these interfaces. Partly this is because the interfaces share many common conventions, even though they present highly distinctive interfaces. In both cases: the scenario description is found in the upper left corner; the title is found in a distinctive font in the upper right; identically-formatted blue hypertext links provide access to resource materials; font sizes and styles are identical; a curved graphical framing device cradles the learning interaction; a standard menu bar of lesson options anchors the bottom of the screen. But additionally, it is because the actual gestures for each interaction feel like natural responses to the context and challenge established in each case.
I’m not advocating randomness nor abandonment of rigor - but designing learning interfaces requires the same sort of openness that good teaching requires. Learner interface design is really a combination of art and science. I like to look across disciplines and traditional boundaries to find meaning.
There’s an adage that has been part of my consciousness since my earliest memories, and I use it to keep the importance of design balance in mind. I grew up a member of the Grange (or Patrons of Husbandry), a lovely organization with roots in nineteenth century rural America. That is largely irrelevant except that each month the Illinois Granger newspaper arrived in our mailbox, and I would read the masthead slogan “In essentials Unity, In non-essentials Liberty, In all things Charity” regularly, and now it seems to bear curious significance to the design problem. How does this apply to learner interface design?
For me, “In essentials Unity” means that those interface elements that create the core framework of the learner experience need to be uniform so there is no question of how to proceed, how to perform standard operations, how to gather critical information, etc. “In non essentials Liberty” means that some freedom and variety is usually necessary and instrumental in conveying specific contextual elements that will increase the active engagement of the learner. “In all things Charity” simply means that the design must above all be kind to the learner in striving to be both functional and interesting.
It’s an admittedly odd metaphor, but I find it exceptionally helpful as a philosophical guide in addressing the continuing challenge of achieving balance in a learner interface.
Posted by Allen Interactions on Mon, Mar 01, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM CST
In this complimentary webinar, you will learn how Essilor of America, leading manufacturer and wholesale distributor of optical lenses in the United States, leveraged world class custom e-learning and complementary instructor-led materials to launch the largest change initiative the ophthalmic industry has ever seen — to improve customer satisfaction, lab productivity, lab profitability and employee capability.
Hosted by Scott Colehour, Co-Founder & Solutions Architect, Allen Interactions, Scott will share the learning strategy and tactics deployed to reinvent Essilor’s learning initiatives. Fred Dierksmeier, Program Manager, Essilor of America, will share some real ROI and results and how seasoned employees have gained new technical skills and knowledge. From employee, to lab manager, to senior vice presidents — comments such as "fantastic materials and program", "helps employees believe in themselves" and "will bring tremendous value" are commonplace.
You will learn:
- Effective instructional design approaches and principles
- Deployment strategy
- Measurement approaches with resulting data metrics
Additionally, get the following takeaways:
- Access to an e-learning portion of the course
- Case study download
Posted by Allen Interactions on Wed, Feb 24, 2010
by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategistI’m often struck by the decisions that seem to occupy an organization’s collective attention when it first embarks on an e-learning strategy. Before the details of a single lesson are contemplated in any detail, innumerable standards are usually set—standards like: the NEXT button must appear on every screen at position X, graphic images can only be photographs, all text must be in Arial 14 pt, a perpetual sidebar menu must be active at all times, any movies must have a “skip” button, screens can only use a specified color palette, the company logo must appear on every screen in position Y, multiple choice questions must have 4 options, etc.
Now I’m not saying there shouldn’t be standards, but we need to realize that these common standards have little to do with the actual instruction, but are mainly useful as a way to streamline production or force e-learning components into corporate standards already set by IT departments for informational web pages. But the purpose and functional requirements of a web page are quite different from an e-learning application, and in many cases, misapplying these web standards works directly against achieving the desired learning outcomes.
It’s important to make a distinction between user interface design and learner interface design. A common principle in user interface design is to seek “transparency.” A transparent interface is one where the user is almost unconscious of the interface and its required actions. Once the underlying rules are understood, uniformity and minimalism in the interface allows the information to flow through without interference. And that’s the goal of web-pages: provide an unhindered path to content. Learner interface design, on the other hand, is designing the context (interface) that will best support learning, and the confusion arises when one fails to realize that e-learning is not just a conduit for “telling” information to the learner; it is an opportunity to engage the learner in a meaningful “experience.” Unlike a web-page structure where hyperlinking makes the idea of “sequence” irrelevant, the instructional designer’s goal is often to create and lead the learner through a very carefully designed sequence. While transparency is still a valuable goal, it has to be balanced with making actions and gestures meaningful and significant, which in some sense is almost akin to removing transparency.
For example, simulations are so compelling because you can’t coast through them; the interface is often varied and is meant to evoke links to actions in the real world. The backgrounds are distinct from other parts of the lesson; illustrations are often stylized or exaggerated to communicate specific messages, actions are sometimes even made intentionally more difficult to require that the learner specifically attend to the choices associated with a particular action. Even in interactions that aren’t strictly simulations, you actually get some benefit out of creating an interface that requires the learner to think about what they are doing --reduce transparency but enhance meaning.
I’m going to continue this strand in a subsequent entry because there are too many issues left open here, but I do want to be clear that I’m not advocating abandoning standards. What I’m saying is that the standards we set should be to enhance the opportunities for meaningful engagement, not just to create an environment where thoughtless activity can masquerade as active learning.
Stay tuned…
Posted by Allen Interactions on Thu, Feb 18, 2010
by Ethan Edwards, chief instruction strategist I came across a really encouraging post in an e-learning forum this week with a great example of a point I try to often to get across when talking about e-Learning design. New designers and developers say with great regularity that they can’t do much except page-turners because of the tools at their disposal. My response is that with enough creativity and cleverness you can implement a good design in nearly any tool, to which I usually get some nods of agreement but also some skeptical rolling of the eyes. Well, check out this little screencast at http://screenr.com/DK1. It’s a short presentation from Tom Kuhlmann of the Rapid E-Learning Blog in which he describes a solution he built entirely in PowerPoint/Articulate that recreates one of Allen Interactions’ most well-known and engaging examples: the Employee Security supervisor training piece.
Is the recreation as good as the original? Well, not really. As Mr. Kuhlmann, himself, points out, limitations in drag-and-drop functionality and lack of variables forced some minor adjustments in the design. But does it still create an engaging piece of e-learning that embodies all aspects of the Context-Challenge-Activity-Feedback model? Absolutely! It’s hard to put a value on specific contributions of any given elements within a design, but I’d say, even with the compromises, the PowerPoint piece still has 90% of the impact of the original or more.
Now clearly, creating that interaction entirely within PowerPoint took very deep knowledge of the rich functionality in that ubiquitous tool, left pitifully unexplored by most of us. And the critical part of the piece, more than the actual construction of it, was the instructional design insight that came up with the idea in the first place. The lesson for me in this, though, is that great, engaging e-learning is really available to all of us. And if we only produce boring, ineffective e-learning, it isn’t because the tools force us to, but that we or our organizations as a whole are choosing to do less than we are capable of.
Posted by Allen Interactions on Thu, Feb 11, 2010
by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist
I am spending most of the day in airports returning from a completely unexpected (but delightful) business trip to Netherlands Antilles. I'm trying to be productive during all this waiting and sitting time that is consuming my day, but I am struck by how really inconvenient mobile technology can be in human terms.
Sure, it is amazing that connectivity is POSSIBLE nearly everywhere, but it takes considerable resources and determination to actually connect. 
I'm only halfway home, and if I really wanted to have had Internet access for my possible work time today, so far it could have cost me $35 spread across several providers to co be connected as many opportunities as I wanted, and also meant sitting in corner of the floor for awhile to get the signal and also crammed uncomfortably into a coach seat with a my laptop on an undersized tray table. The better, yet actually pretty horrible, alternative is that I'm tapping this out with my thumb on my iPhone.
I'm not writing this as some kind of "woe is me" plea for sympathy, but I can't help but think how I might be feeling if I were trying to complete e-learning modules as a student under these conditions. In this odd marriage of human and computer activity, I feel like I'm compromising my natural inclinations to the uncomfortably contrived constraints of technology. It's almost a cliché to talk about how great it is that mobile devices and universal network access can make anytime/anywhere e-learning possible.
Perhaps that's true from a human perspective it's hard to imagine a situation less conducive to learning. It accentuates how the design elements that create meaning, context, and motivation in a learning activity are absolutely essential to counteract all the factors getting in the way of my attention and thought in this situation -- yet so often, those are exactly the design aspects that are scrapped first when designers start simplifying and stripping features of e-learning programs to make the learning compatible with universal access.
As we move more and more toward this paradigm for e-learning deliver, I hope we don't continue in the same mistaken idea that ACCESS = LEARNING.
Posted by Brittany Dengerud on Fri, Feb 05, 2010
Are you attending the Learning Solutions Conference & Expo?
205LS10
March 22-26, 2010
Disney Hilton Hotel
Posted by Allen Interactions on Thu, Feb 04, 2010
by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist
“It’s impossible to make software training interesting” is one of the most frequent complaints I hear from designers.
At the risk of sounding like Mrs. Robertson, my 7th grade speech teacher who repeated “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” way too many times, when I say that software training provides a unique opportunity to create especially engaging instruction in e-learning—if we’d only take advantage of it. One of the biggest hurdles in e-learning is that usually you can’t recreate actual performance activities within the limits of keyboard and mouse input. Software training is the one domain where we can actually have the student do in training precisely what must we want them to do in the performance environment.
Further, most software training is procedural in nature, and we know pretty confidently what has to be done to teach a procedure: let learners practice both the individual steps and also practice chaining the steps together without interruption. So a lot of our design decisions are already taken care of for us, which should really let us focus on creating more engagement rather than less.
This is not to say there isn’t a great deal of repetition and tediousness surrounding software training that’s hard to avoid. Our failure comes, though, in being too focused on the uniformity and not enough on the variety within the context of software use. Real life scenarios that drive software processes are where interest in the e-learning can be excavated. For example, years ago at Microsoft I was designing training for database functionality within the Microsoft Works for the IBM-PC product. Instead of just organizing the lessons as a list of arbitrary tasks, the whole training course was centered on an evolving story told through newspaper articles. Each article provided additional clues that the learner needed to use to drive searching and sorting actions within the database to ultimately identify a criminal. This “pulp fiction” context served the general audience in that case well, but there are similarly juicy scenarios we can draw from in our work environments in order to create meaning, memory, interest and elevated significance for what is too often treated as irrelevant drudgery.
Click to see an example of contextual software simulation training.*
*You must register to view.
Posted by Allen Interactions on Fri, Jan 29, 2010
by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist
Writing this week from ASTD TechKnowledge 2010 Conference in Las Vegas
Conferences are a great time to renew our focus, reconnect with colleagues, absorb new ideas, and take time to reflect on the possibilities in our field. This year’s TechKnowledge Conference has lived up to all those expectations and then some. In particular, I was especially fortunate to be able to spend two days leading a great group of e-learning professionals through ASTD’s Advanced Instructional Design for e-Learning Certificate program.
Las Vegas is an interesting location for a conference where the participants are primarily engaged in the pursuit of achieving lasting change in the performance of their workforce. This is a city focused much more on creating fleeting impressions over building experiences of lasting value--the appearance of luxury, the appeal of unbridled pleasure, the thrill of instant gratification, and the guilty pleasure (or hope) of winning something that wasn’t quite earned. With relatively little planning or investment, anyone at all can believe for a few days that they are basking in luxury--living the high life--drinking from the fire hose, if you will. (I don’t mean this in any moralistic way; pleasure and joy are commodities far too rare in this world to begrudge anyone free pursuit of harmless entertainment.) The city’s own tourism motto, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” underscores the implicit assumption that nothing here really should count for much in the “real” world.
It’s hard not to recognize some ironic parallels to this in how investments are made in e-learning. Otherwise intelligent business leaders somehow think that e-learning is some kind of amazing treatment that can automatically achieve change with comparably little effort. Superficial glitz and pizzazz are plastered on materials that are already known to be ineffective. Sums of money are consumed in quick, high-profile purchases (like LMS or flashy templates) dreaming of successes without investing in the substance of instruction that is necessary for those elements to have real value. Immediate successes are expected (and demanded) even when basic investments in tools and design and development skills are ignored. Unfortunately, the result is too often a world where “What happens in e-learning, stays in e-learning.” Learners spend a brief moments immersed (willingly or not) in these quick-hit applications and then go back to work, with no more expectation of bringing value back from the learning experience than one hopes to bring something lasting home from Vegas.
Let’s reject this as a way to use our skills and resources in training and development. E-learning can provide unparalleled opportunities for growth and creativity IF we realize that lasting value requires time and investment.
Posted by Allen Interactions on Wed, Jan 20, 2010
by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist I was just reading an insightful white paper by Allison Rossett and Antonia Chan, Engaging in the new e-Learning. The authors lay out a compelling case for the fully-engaged, participatory learning that we anticipate becoming common in the e-learning 2.0 world--learning where the participant is immersed in engaging environments, where support and guidance is integrated into performance settings, where the learner is an active creator of eLearning resources, and where both teacher and student, mentor and apprentice, are integrated through direct contact and through technology into a vibrant learning community.
The authors go on to list 12 design strategies that will create successes in these online experiences. In a nutshell, e-learning 2.0 must convey and embody perceived usefulness, convincing value, opportunities for success, real contexts, modeling, thoughtful activity, emotional and successful communication, tracked progress, blending with other approaches, collaboration, attention-grabbing media, and self-evaluation. The discussion is great and I encourage you to explore the full article.
I think the potential for transforming e-learning through Web 2.0 technology is tremendous. I also think a lot of designers of e-learning are still going to be operating in pre-e-learning 2.0 environments for some time yet, and these principles are equally important to those designers. Just because you’re not developing your next course in Second Life doesn’t let you off the hook. These strategies are essential for creating learning, no matter what level of technology we are currently operating at.
It seems to me that e-learning has been plagued by a tradition of accepting sub-par training while waiting for the next technology to arrive that will save the day. Unless we as designers take these design ideas to heart now and change the basic way we think about technology-based training, we will very likely miss, once again, the potential that is waiting out there for us.
Posted by Allen Interactions on Fri, Jan 15, 2010
by Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist
Students in my ASTD Workshops are often just embarking on their first e-learning efforts, and a commonly-asked question is, “What is the best content for e-Learning?”
The inclination of most people is to first apply e-learning to teach the uniform, low-level, base content knowledge that is part of nearly every training program and then reserve the more open-ended soft-skills and problem solving training to instructor-led environments. But this is an area where I think conventional wisdom is wrong.
It seems e-learning can best be used to teach things that require problem solving, trial-and-error, practice, and activity. These are things that are particularly difficult to do equally-well for all students in a classroom environment, but are naturally suited for the individualization, adaptive branching, and the simulated environments possible online.
Instructional design traditions of teaching by telling often lead us in the wrong direction to begin with, but part of me fears that the tools available for creating e-learning are also largely responsible for this thinking. The tools are optimized for presenting content and then asking simple-minded questions about it.
Even Lectora, which I think is actually one of the better options on the market right now for authoring, holds out the promise of drag-and-drop functionality (an interaction style very handy in creating engaging instruction) but limits the author to using targets that must match the size of the moved object exactly—which makes the activity not very useful except for building matching exercises.
The result of “conventional wisdom” thinking in this case is that we completely miss the enormous opportunity to transform learning offered by the capabilities of e-learning, and instead, are bound by trivialities. Next time you think about what should go into e-learning, pick something powerful, something important, and even something that has been difficult to teach in other modes. I think you may surprise yourself in what content is “right” for online delivery.