Just to show how on the ball I am, I’ve only just come across this paper from 2004 by Ravi Krishnan on the design of e-learning experiences. It supports a simple point I’ve made in various places on this site and elsewhere: as e-learning designers, we don’t deliver content, we try to create experiences that people can learn from. It also gives some nice examples of the difference between what Ravi calls “layout” and “experience” (once again, using architecture to illustrate the issues – this is becoming an important theme in terms of explaining what we do; here’s a posting of mine on this.)

If you’re not familiar with the idea of experience design, have a look at the Wikipedia entry or this article from the UK’s Design Council. For a more learning-focussed source, if rather wide-ranging, have a look at Brian Alger’s Experience Design Network or read his book.

Reading some of the stuff out there in the blogosphere, you’d think that the idea of learning designers having to cultivate experiences for people is an old issue that’s been resolved. Believe me – in the real world of e-learning content devleopment it hasn’t. My experience (!) of a wide range of e-learning developers is that the notion of experience design is regarded as dangerous New Age idealising, disconnected academic speculation, or both. The technologies used by most e-learning content developers show only a few signs of moving beyond crude, atomising template systems that “deliver content interactively”. And their business processes and models, de-emphasising early design stages in order to rush into large-scale production, deflect attention away from considering the learning experience. (Of course, most rapid e-learning tools, in the hands of non-designers, do nothing more than delivering content, but that’s another story…).

A key problem is that many of those responsible for designing learning experiences – usually called “instructional designers” – are somewhat under-skilled and inexperienced, even to do what they’re currently being required to do. Although most are at least familiar with some learning theory, usability design, accessibility issues and so on, they’re often not great when it comes to narrative, action, flow, characterisation, managing emotional states and so on – the kinds of things advertisers and film writers do well. I guess they could be trained up, but most e-learning companies, being relatively small, are stretched enough as it is when it comes to training their people.

At the moment, I think the best candidates to occupy the learning experience designer space are employed by serious games companies. Games designers of course understand how to design experiences – that’s at the core of what they do. Interestingly, in this paper Kurt Squire points out that some serious/learning games companies spread the role currently occupied by instructional designers across a number of other roles. This reminds me of a report from around 1998 by Forrester Research that predicted the professional demise of instructional designers by about 2003 (I’ve not provided a link as I can’t find it on their site). Certainly, traditionally trained instructional designers have their work cut out if they’re to survive in the medium term.

Finally, there’s an argument along the lines of: in the Web 2.0/UGC era, why not just let users get on and create their own experiences? How about just relinquishing control? Possibly. I think this slightly misses the point, but that’s for another posting.