2. Anxiety &
The Adult Learner • Most organizations fail at transformational
learning
• Rarely fundamentally change behaviors
• Equates adult learning with brainwashing
• Must deal with anxiety
• Adult learners feel forced to “unlearn”
What is Edgar Schein suggesting?
Think of a time you were in a training and felt
the ‘learner anxiety.’ How did it affect your
learning?
3. The Challenge:
• We want our courses to be engaging and interactive
• Content and/or time pressures don’t make that easy
Default Position:
• Push information out to learners
• End result = course is heavy on information & light on interaction
Re-think your approach:
• Clear objectives
• All information to meet
course objectives
4. The Push Approach
• Generally, all courses seem to follow a similar structure
• Objectives, Course Content and Quiz
• Knowledge checks sprinkled throughout sometimes
• Typical “product factory” approach
• Nothing inherently bad about this
• Assuming good content design and product
is visually engaging
• Easy to build – focus on the information
• Downside: pushing all information the same
to all learners no matter background
5. The Pull Approach
• Just like previous approach, we’ll
assume you have the content the
learner needs
• Do not focus on designing the
content
• Create reasons to use the
content
• Get the learner to pull the content
he needs.
• Each learner has access to same
information, yet the experience is
unique to the learner
9. How do you get the learners to pull the information?
• Spend time figuring out how the
learner would use the course and
set them up to pull the content
• Ask yourself the question above
when authoring a course
• Present simple questions or
problem-solving techniques that
require a solution
• Create a need for the information
• If there is a need, they will be
motivated to fill it
10. Current Course: PCI Compliance
Let’s take a look at a
current course out there for
the field.
Click the graphic to play.
• What did you notice in
this training that you would
now change? Why?
11. Future Course: PCI Compliance
Let’s take a look at an
updated interactive course.
Click the graphic to play.
• What did you notice in
this training?
•What made this different?
12. Gamification
Two interpretations of the term:
1. Using games to teach material to
learners
2. Incorporating simple gaming techniques
• Authoring tools for gamification already
exist; for example in Lectora – pre-built
Flash games
• Instead of using an entire game, use
game mechanics; achievements, points,
badges, quests, leader boards and more
• Create a game-like feel without adding
literal games
14. 7 Ways Games Reward the Brain
1. Experience bars measuring progress
2. Multiple long and short-term aims
3. Reward for effort
4. Rapid, frequent, clear feedback
5. An element of uncertainty
6. Windows of enhanced attention
7. Other people!
15. Setting Goals and Objectives
• Players have various “layers” of goals
• Long term: completing the game
• Medium term: completing the level
• Short term: completing the missions in the levels
• Generally, each goal “layer” in game set gets harder toward long-
term
• Leads to final challenge to demonstrate mastery
• Flip this into designing eLearning courses
• Keeps the learner within the linear “flow state”
19. Provide Frequent Feedback
• As a designer, your job is to make users feel smart or clever
• If learner feels lost or confused – you’re telling them they are
stupid
Navigation:
• Users should know exactly what to do next
• Provide links back to previously mentioned
material or supplemental material
• Forget the “next” button
• During assessments provide feedback for both correct and
incorrect answers. Never just say, “That’s wrong. Try again.”
20. Measure Progress
• Let them know how much
progress they’ve made
• Graphically with progress
bars
• Do not use percentages or
fractions
22. Reward Effort (not just success)
People generally want to be acknowledged for their work &
proportionate to the work
• Progress bar
• Animated graphics (fireworks)
• Virtual Coin or Currency
• Point system
24. • More improved understanding
• Gain of 89% for those learners who studied with pictures
• Theory called “Dual Encoding”
• Feeds two codes; verbal and visual
Design Techniques: Linking Graphics to Words
25. • Refers to the severe limits placed on working
memory
• Working memory is not very efficient
• Can only hold seven (plus or minus two) facts or
items at a time
• When working memory is overloaded – learning is
depressed
Design Techniques: Seven Plus or Minus Two
26. • Explaining graphics with audio and
redundant text can hurt learning
• Seems like a good way to present
information
• Research indicates that learning is
actually depressed when using this
method
Design Techniques: Redundancy
27. • Findings state it prompted better learning when
socially engaged by an informal learning agent
• Works best when:
• The appearance of the agent is made little
different (cartoon or human cartoon)
• Words are presented in audio rather than
text
• Conversational style rather than formal
Conversational language stimulates unconscious
social conventions that lead to deeper learning.
Design Techniques: Use Pedagogical Agents
That’s me!
Psychologist Edgar Schein, Coutu suggests that more often than not, organizations fail at transformational learning. They rarely fundamentally change behaviors within the organization. He equates adult learning within organizations with that of brainwashing techniques he observed while studying prisoners of the Korean War. Organizations must find a method to deal with the anxiety adults experience when they are forced to “unlearn” what they know and learning something new.
Here’s the challenge for many of us. We want to make our courses engaging and interactive, yet sometimes the content or the time pressures of work don’t make that easy.
The default position for many elearning courses is to merely push the information out to the learners. The end result is that the course is heavy on information and light on interaction. By changing the way you structure the information, you can quickly build the framework for more engaging and interactive courses. It’s just a matter of rethinking how you approach the course design.
Let’s assume you do all of the front end analysis and you’re ready to build the course. You have clear learning objectives and all of the information you need to meet those objectives. You also want to assess the learner’s understanding. So regardless of which approach you take you basically start with the same content and goals
I get to look at a lot of courses. Generally, they all seem to follow a similar structure. They start with the objectives, jump into the course content, and then end with a quiz. Some of them will sprinkle knowledge checks throughout the course content to test the learner’s progress. So a typical course might look like this:
This approach is kind of like how you’d build a product in a factory. You design something that generally meets the needs of most people. Then you push it out to all of the learners.
There’s nothing inherently bad about this approach. Assuming good content design and a product that is visually engaging, this works fine. This is especially true if all you need is tracked completion and there are no real performance requirements for the course. And the reality is that’s the case for a lot of elearning, no matter how different you want it to be. Plus, it’s really easy to build courses this way because you can focus just on the information.
The downside to pushing your content to the learners is that it assumes that all of the information is equally relevant to the learners and meets their learning needs.
Just like the previous approach, we’ll assume that you have all of the content that the learner needs. However, in this approach, you’re not focusing on designing the content as much as you are creating reasons to use the content. What you want to do is get the learner to pull the content he needs.
This allows each learner to have access to the same information, yet the learning experience might be unique to the learner. So instead of focusing on creating a universal design that pushes the content, you focus on crafting the right types of reasons a person needs to pull the content. With this approach you can still provide all of the same information. All you’re doing is changing how the learner gets it.
A while back I was doing some home remodeling and decided to put up some crown molding. The problem with crown molding is that it has two surfaces, one on that rests on the ceiling and one that rests on the wall. This means that it requires a special cut. Having hung up other types of trim I was used to just cutting simple angles.
Not thinking about the crown molding’s compound angle, I proceeded to cut the molding at a 45° angle (which I learned wasn’t correct when I put the molding up on the ceiling). I tried to guesstimate the next cut and got that wrong, too. Now I had wasted two expensive pieces of crown molding and convinced my wife that if stranded on a deserted island she should plan to care for her own survival.
Since I obviously didn’t know how to cut the molding, I went online and did a search for the right technique. I found one site that had everything you could possible learn about crown molding. After clicking through pages of information, I finally found what I needed. Unfortunately, I needed to brush up on calculus to figure out what all of the math symbols were. I tried another site that in four simple steps showed me how to cut the molding the right way.
Now let’s look at the learning experience. We’ll consider both sites “courses” on crown molding. They both addressed how to cut crown molding and they were both built oblivious to me. The courses were just pushed out on the Internet.
They only became relevant when I had a need and pulled the content to meet my needs. At that point, my need was to cut crown molding. So the simple four-step cutting information was all I needed. It didn’t make the other information less valuable. It just wasn’t relevant at that time. However, if my need was to learn more about the styles of crown molding, then the other information would have been more relevant.
When you push the information out, you spend your time trying to figure out the best way to get it to the learners and make it stick. On the other hand, when you design the course for the learners to pull the information, you spend your time figuring out how they would use it and then set it up for them to pull the content.
In either case, you work with the same core content, you’re just changing up how you get it to the learners. And that’s where you want to make the change in the way you approach the course design. Instead of creating an outline of content, start by asking, “How do we get the learners to pull this information?”
This doesn’t have to be overly complicated. Well designed case studies or scenarios can create a need for the learners to pull the information.
You don’t even need to have big case studies. You can present some simple questions or problem-solving activities that require a solution. Essentially, you want to create a need for the information. Once the learner has a need, then they’re motivated to fulfill it. And that’s how you get the information to them.
By changing your focus from push to pull, you can share the same information and at the same time create a learning experience that is somewhat unique to the learner.
You’ve probably heard the term “gamification” in recent e-Learning discussions: at conferences, in training articles and blogs, and even across the web on your favorite social media sites. Your first instinct may be to associate this word with adding interactive games to e-Learning courses. Although this is one way to interpret it, gamification has multiple definitions and includes a number of possibilities for interweaving training with gaming.
Like you, we were curious to learn more about gamification and see how it can be used in an e-Learning context. Today’s entry provides two interpretations of the term and lists multiple ways that you can apply gaming techniques to your e-Learning courses and training.
For definition 1: In the context of e-Learning, you too can supplement training by adding games to courses. Specifically, Lectora® Inspire comes with interactive Flash games such as Bowling, Climb the Mountain, Golf and more that allow you to quiz learners in a fun way. The games are pre-built so they’re super easy to use, and you can add your own questions.
For definition 2: In Bersin and Associates’ report “Strategic Human Resources and Talent Management: Predictions for 2012,” gamification is defined in a different way. Instead of using “an entire game, you can “gamify” any learning program using the well known techniques of game mechanics.” In other words, you can apply gamification to e-Learning by incorporating simple gaming techniques into your courses.
According to Bersin and Associates’ report, examples of such gaming techniques include achievements, points, badges, quests, leaderboards and more. Keeping these examples in mind, there are endless possibilities for weaving these game mechanics throughout your courses to create a game-like feel without adding literal games.
Begin video at the 8:30 marker.
Recap the 7 ways from the video.
Games are generally structured so that players have various "layers" of goals. That is, they have the long-term goal of completing the game, the medium-term goal of completing the levels in the game, and the short-term goal of completing the missions in the levels. (Sometimes these missions are even broken up further into additional tasks.) Generally, the requirements of each goal "layer" in a game get increasingly harder as you move from short-term to long-term goals. That is, the final challenge in a game (sometimes called the "boss battles") will always be harder than the short-term missions. This allows players in games to learn and practice skills, prior to having to demonstrate mastery of those skills in the most challenging parts of the game.
Similarly, when designing eLearning material to minimize cognitive fatigue, instructional designers should break up their products into short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals. For instance, before completing a course learners must complete several modules. To complete a module, several topics must be completed. In order to complete a topic, several objectives must be finished. And finally, each objective requires several goals to be completed. Structuring your eLearning this way, allows users to learn new skills incrementally, and then practice those skills before demonstrating mastery of those skills in assessment exercises. This increases the likelihood that learners will remain in the "flow" state.
If your eLearning material is setup for your users to navigate through it linearly, you could visualize your goal structure this way.
With the exception of casual games, most modern games follow a nonlinear progression. Casual games, such as Angry Birds or Plants vs. Zombies (PvZ) are typically distinguished by simple rules and a lack of required commitment. Nonlinear progression gives the player choices in how they proceed through the game. In many cases, these games are setup in what's called a "hub" system. The reason for this name is because if you imagine a wagon wheel, the center, or hub (sometimes referred to as the overworld, a carryover from "dungeon crawlers" like Diablo where players emerged from underground to access other dungeons), represents the area where all other areas are accessed. The spokes of the wagon wheel represent the connections to all other areas. In some cases, the areas represented on the rim of the wheel can be used to access other adjacent areas. In some games, if players progress from area to area around the "rim" of the wheel, rather than returning to the "hub" between areas, the experience can actually feel rather linear. You could visualize this type of nonlinear structure this way.
In the illustration, any of the solid lines could be eliminated, as long as there is some other line connecting to a point.
Giving your learner choices by designing nonlinear eLearning can help engage your user. However you'll need to be aware that designing software that allows for this type of flexibility drastically adds to the complexity of the development.
Generally in games, players are given goals and objectives that get increasingly more difficult as they approach a boss battle (analogous to a test), which occur at the end of levels (similar to modules or sections in eLearning). The challenge of the boss battle is almost always higher than any of the challenges presented prior to it. After a boss battle, the challenge of the goals and objectives that the player is given don't ramp up, rather the player is given the opportunity to master their skills before the challenge ramps again prior to the next boss battle. This keeps the player in the flow channel, thus engaging them in the experience.
With eLearning, the structure of challenges needs to be different than in games.
With learning, the challenge is ramped up immediately after an assessment with the introduction of new material. The learner is presented with new material, which gets increasingly more complex. They are then given a chance to master those new challenges as their skills increase, and after that they are given an assessment that demonstrates the knowledge of that material.
As a designer, your job is to make your users feel smart or clever. Especially if what you're designing is a learning exercise. If a learner feels lost or confused, you're essentially telling them that they're stupid, and you're not doing your job as a designer.
With navigation users should know exactly what they need to do next, or what options they have available to them at any given moment in an eLearning product. When you're looking at the screen at any point in your product, take a moment to ask yourself, "If my learner walked away from their computer for several hours, would they know what to do when they returned?" If you look at your eLearning navigation in this light, it's a little easier to find systems that keep your user informed of what to do.
To support information transference, provide links back to essential information previously referenced in your learning or links to supplemental material that is prerequisite knowledge for the current learning. During assessments, explain why answers are correct or incorrect, or provide links to where the appropriate information can be found. Never just say, "That's wrong. Try again."
An important part of providing feedback to users in games or eLearning is to let them know how much progress they've made. There are many ways to represent this, but the most effective are always represented graphically. Use progress bars instead of percentages or fractions, and feel free to get creative with the visual representation of the bar. For instance, you could use an outline of a head, and as you complete the eLearning exercises, the outline fills in with a graphic of a brain.
It's also important to measure progress at multiple levels. If your eLearning course consists of several modules, and within each module there are several topics, show progress at each of these levels. This can even be done in the same progress bar. For instance, if your course has five modules, you could initially show five star outlines to represent incomplete modules. As the learner completes the topics in each module, the star representing the current module would begin to fill up to a solid color. That way, you're showing progress within the module with each star, and total progress in the course with each filled star.
Something to note on progress bars, you don't necessarily need to display them continuously. In fact, if you show them only when progress is made (when the progress bar changes) the learner's advancement through your eLearning can feel more like a reward (especially if it's displayed with some fanfare), and ultimately the progress bar is more effective. However, if you do this, users should be able to access the progress bar somewhere at any time (perhaps in a top-level, or pause menu).
One of the most effective ways to show progress in games is through character upgrades. Look at the characters and it's pretty easy to see the general progress that a player would make with these characters.
For now, this isn't as easy to replicate in eLearning, though I'm hoping someday we'll have better tools to take advantage of this powerful measure of progress. I like to use virtual coaches in eLearning. So, I'd love to have a system that allows learners to earn new virtual coach characters, outfits, and accessories, after completing sections or modules; and they are also given the option to choose the virtual coach that is used in their eLearning along with the option to dress that coach. This character upgrade scenario sets up the basis for a system where users are given virtual goods and characters that they want, and they get to change them in the way they like, which as stated at the beginning of this article are the main components of rewards that engage learners. I believe this system would tap into our natural instinct to collect stuff, and would be an effective motivator to engage learners.
Earlier I suggested highlighting progress bars whenever the learner advances through your eLearning—this is a type of reward. Even though it takes no extraordinary effort on the part of the user to make progress, people generally want to be acknowledged for their work. And if it's presented in a way which is interesting, your learners will feel rewarded, and thus, engaged. One hundred small rewards are better than one big one. However, you should try to scale the reward in proportion to the effort, or risk, that it takes to get the reward. For instance, if you used an animated fireworks graphic to congratulate a learner for a perfect score on a test, you wouldn't want to use that same graphic to recognize that they entered their name into a text field. You may have noticed I also mentioned risk. If appropriate, allow your learners to take some risks, and reward them if they're willing to do so. For instance, if you provide some supplementary material, give your learner a special reward if they take the time to go through it.
Launch the gamification example. This is more advanced, however is a good idea.
Click the graphic to demo Pedagogical Agents in the live Field Conflict Resolution Course.
Graphic shows the current housekeeping basics course.
Click the graphic to play the future housekeeping basics course example.
Graphic shows the current planograms course.
Click the graphic to play the future planograms course example.
Click the graphic to play the future planograms course example.
