Pace? An appeal
One thing that really gets me down about so much current e-learning is a lack of consideration of pace; that is, the ebb and flow of events, energy levels, personal involvement and investment. The kind of thing that radio, TV, play and film writers are brilliant at.
So much e-learning that I review is one-paced. It moves along without any great forethought about how quickly a learner will move through it, whether they're interacting or not, how deeply (or not) they need to be engaged, and above all, how this changes over time, in relation to the general flow of events.
This is partly a symptom of the learning object/atomisation/fragmentation disease that infects a lot of learning design thinking, but it's also a misunderstanding about the nature of interactivity. A lot of the debate about interactivity assumes that it is Necessarily A Good Thing. "We'd like our learning to be interactive" I hear so many clients request. Well - interaction is just one part of the jigsaw. Completely non-interactive digital stories can be supremely engaging and wonderfully educational, as of course, can good documentaries. Interactivity is just one way of manipulating pace.
So - here's the appeal. A while ago I produced this simple tool, based on the work of Mark Iliff at PwC in the late 90s. But I think it's out of date now, and too simple. What I'm looking for is a more visual tool of some sort that I can use to help learning designers map out flows - learner journeys - through e-learning offerings more clearly.
Does anyone know of anything? Would anyone like to work with me on producing one?
Am I barking up the wrong tree? Again.
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4 Comments
Reader Comments (4)
Covering familiar ground, review, extrapolation of past content / Entering unfamiliar terrain, new topic, start fresh
Oriented by conformity to expectations / Disoriented by reversal of plot, devil's advocacy, contrarian antagonists
Acting compliant, procedural, conformist / Acting creative, inventive, non-conformist
Assimilating an authority, SME, one track mind / Exploring a discursive presentation, dialogue, debate
Staying on track, in sequence, orderly / Venturing off into detours, dead ends, derailments
Refining comprehension, execution, accuracy / Developing applicability, contextual fit, diagnostic regimens
Identifying with the heroics, protagonists, one right answer / Empathizing with outcasts, underdogs, minority positions
Perhaps these parameters, or something similar could upgrade your "representation of the learner's state" to design pacing into the delivery of content. Rather than tracking media, interactivity and challenge, additional parameters would unpack the "challenge" category into more nuanced treatments.
Many of us work in environments that do not take into account "the ebb and flow of events, energy levels, personal involvement and investment." We have to continually build faster and faster. And we work in environments that expect our students to "learn" faster and faster (or at least get through the tutorial faster and faster).
Is it any wonder that we expect our learners to interact at the same steady breakneck clip within which we are supposed to create?
I'm suspecting that there might be a cultural-change element that needs to be considered within any model. You are definitely on the right track. Can't wait to see what you come up with.
Actually, I think the shift is from *not learning* to *learning*. The breakneck approach is what I often call "learning prevention"; you can pretty much guarantee that "getting through the tutorial faster and faster" correlates directly with learning less and less.
That's not to say we *can't* help people learn faster; of course there are all sorts of clever ways of doing that - Accelerated Learning, performance support, mobile devices etc.etc. But simply making more tutorials that people have to race through is no kind of answer.