This article in the Independent suggests that business schools, while not exactly at the forefront of learning technology, are being pragmatic and innovating when they need to. As it says:

"The current generation of college student has never known a time before cell phones and personal computers. They are eager to use technology to enhance their learning."

And there's research to show that students actually learned better using their mobile devices than if they'd sat in a lecture. 

One group attended the live class, the other listened via podcast. When given a test on the subject a week later, the podcast group scored 71 per cent while the in-class group scored 62 per cent. 

The current generation of MBAs from highly regarded business schools like Warwick are likely to be the next generation of senior execs. If they're getting accustomed to "new" learning methods, it can only be a matter of time before they are putting pressure on us to be more innovative. This can only be a good thing, but we'd better be ready...

What really strikes me is that the process is just such damned common sense - albeit very nicely visually articulated. I am asking myself (the webinar is still in progress as I'm writing) why it is necessary to still have this explained to us. But clearly it is necessary when you see most e-learning, overburdened as it is with "stuff" (content). 

There are various reasons why we're overburdened with content, rather than focussing on creating change in people, and these are principally in the areas of SME/client inexperience and inappropriate expectation. Until we overcome these - and Cathy's method is just one tool in our tool-box for this - we'll be stuck where we are. As I've said in various places, clients need educating probably more than learners!

It also occurs to me that this kind of action-focussed approach can only lead towards scenarios/sims/games - or at worst, story-based and case-based "courses". It simply cannot be supported by the current generation of page-based tools and methods...which on the whole is a very good thing. Thanks again Cathy.

For example, I've learned as much about the reality of business decision-making from Dragons Den as I did from my MBA, and my various attempts at property development owe their (admittedly mixed) success to Property Ladder, as to any training I've had or books I've read. Deliberately or not, these TV shows build in many of the "learning functions" and activities that I see so rarely in e-learning, including: paced repetition, goal-setting, emotion, presentation of opposing views, evaluation of options, situation, summaries...and so on. They draw me in and seduce me to be concerned about what's going on, at least for a short while. Above all, they proceed from the specific (the story) to the general (theory), not the other way round. And not an "interaction" in sight. 

Specifically, Design for Life reflects some important facets of design process and thinking that I don't see very often in the e-learning field:

• Design is about getting under the user's skin: in the episode I've linked to, one designer tapes up his eyes and goes for a walk in the middle of Paris so that he can feel what his blind users experience. How often do learning designers even meet their users, let alone try to get a sense of their feelings?
• Design involves bringing who you are to the party; it's about personal expression. It's not an objective, cold science. We know from many design professions that people who express who they are in their work are better designers.
• Design concepts need to be articulated visually. How much text do these designers produce in their presentations? Not much. There are no weighty specification documents, but visual boards and prototypes instead - right from the start.
• Design is about creating experiences, not "content". I've said enough on this elsewhere... 
• Design is a messy, troubled, unpredictable process, not a mechanistic flow of predictable steps.

If we're interested in learning from other design professions (whose members are, on average more highly qualified, better paid and have access to larger budgets than we do), then I suggest Design for Life is a worthwhile piece of CPD.  

Most e-learning production companies appear to have settled into organizing themselves in ways that resemble 19^th or 20^th century industrial production. Learning (instructional) designers write words, graphic artists do the visuals, technical developers build final products, project managers…er…well in theory they’re supposed to tie it all together, (although I do often wonder what value they would be adding if most of the time if the rest of the team would just take responsibility…but enough of that). Roles are clearly separate and do not overlap, (somewhat like a Subway outlet during busy periods).

The evidence from other design and software industries suggests that this isn’t necessarily the best arrangement. In many cases such an industrial, Taylorian approach leads to miscommunication, disassociation from client and user needs and, somewhat ironically, higher cost. People in such teams are swapped in and out, like cogs in a machine, each seeing only a small part of the process and often never really understanding what they’re contributing to. It’s the kind of teamwork that management writers in the 90s mocked mercilessly (look at anything by Rosabeth Kanter on this).

An alternative approach, and one that’s increasingly being shown to offer clients better value, is to establish smaller, stable teams in which more highly trained people overlap their roles. Overlapping is the critical characteristic. So the learning designer is also an IA (information architecture) expert, who understands graphical interfaces; the graphics person produces a technical working prototype that can evolve into the final product without needing a technical builder; the technical person, if they’re required at all, edits the copy…and so on.  Each transgresses substantially onto the territory of the other. Such teams are more responsive, more capable of delivering what the client needs, and more able to manage themselves.

At the heart of the team is what I’d call an “e-learning producer”, a role that should evolve from our current learning (instructional) designer role. This person designs the learning experience, manages the project and plays a key part in actually building the final product; they have technical build skills. Learning designers are doing this increasingly anyway, using rapid authoring tools. This is going to become more and more productive as such tools increase in sophistication.

There is an increasing number of small e-learning companies, and in-house facilities building themselves around this kind of person, and I’m going to be monitoring their progress carefully. What our e-learning producer now needs is a flexible, sophisticated design and build tool, which I'll write about elsewhere. Neither the current generation of rapid tools, nor higher-end tools such as Flash, are quite right for this role.

It seems to me that if there was a tool that allowed a multi-skilled learning designer (ID) to conceive, prototype and largely deliver a final product, this might move us towards a more fluid, creative situation – and potentially a lower cost one.

That’s where rapid authoring tools come in. Using Articulate, or most other rapid tools, I can do the whole lot, from start to finish. The trouble is, these tools are – or have been until recently – too restrictive to generate anything more than the most basic interactive learning experiences. So although I can experiment, try things out with learners and clients and evolve my design as I’m building my final application, I can do so only within the tightest of constraints. 

I got a bit excited when I read what Clive Shepherd said about Adobe Captivate a few months ago. His implication, which I’m picking up from lots of sources now, is that Captivate has moved on from its previous positioning as the rapid systems trainer’s efficiency tool of choice. Apparently I can do some pretty ambitious things in Captivate now, and not just in the area of systems sims.

So a few days ago, when I had a few hours spare, I tried it out. I set out to replicate some of my favourite MCQ structures (“favourite MCQ structures” isn’t a phrase you see often…) in Captivate to see how far I could stretch it in a very short time, without getting drawn into coding, Actionscripting or similar. I wanted to see if I could use workarounds (following Tom Kulman’s lead) to produce more interesting MCQ-type interactions than Captivate has built in.

I also set myself the constraints of having to originate or source all the assets (backgrounds, photos, videos, music, voiceover etc.) in the time I had available, (between just before lunch and picking up my son from the the childminder at 4.30pm) just to see if I could, even loosely call the process “rapid”. You can see the results via the links below. It’s worth pointing out that none of this is optimized (pre-loaders, compression etc.). 

• Video-based MCQ - watch 3 videos then choose which one answers the question.
• Simple scenario - two versions of a basic scenario including alternative feedbacks, consequences etc.; the second one also has rollover resources to help the learner make decisions.
• "Are you sure" MCQ - answer a question; before reading feedback, you're prompted to have a re-think; then you get feedback/consequences

Captivate clearly isn’t my dream tool yet. But I’m happy now that I could produce, in a few hours, with help from a graphic artist, what I’ve often been told could take days, and involve developers, project mangers and so on. 

Getting back to the main point, I’m convinced that using a tool like this, I can offer better value to clients and learners, because I’ll not get tied up in over-complex development processes and lose sight of why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’ll offer more creative solutions because I’m in control of the whole thing, while not being overly constrained, as I am when I use more basic rapid tools. 

A tool like this is – potentially – the basis for very different development processes; processes that can professionalise our industry and offer far better value to clients. NOT because they’re cheaper and quicker, but because they produce better results.

Although these samples are very rough, they taught me some important things:

• All interactions are trackable and scorable, so they could be assembled into a scored scenario, or sequence of scored events. I don’t need to use Captivate’s built in quiz mechanisms, which look a bit crude. So I can build courses, scenarios, games even that have scored and un-scored sequences interchangeably. When I’ve asked this of developers, they’ve tended to suck in their teeth and reach for their code books…
• I can add pretty decent accessibility features very quickly.
• I don’t have to use Actionscript at all, just a few slightly clumsy workarounds. This is important because various sources (including Kineo) have pointed out that Captivate’s Actionscript implementation isn't perfect.
• Now I’ve done these, I could professionalise them in a couple of hours and customize or re-skin them in minutes. That’s rapid enough for me.

This approach – pushing a rapid tool to do things it’s not entirely comfortable with – clearly has its limitations. There are all sorts of things I can’t do: video-driven multi-select MCQs, ratings, decent-looking drag and drops, and so on…But if Adobe could fill in the gaps a bit, improve on the SCORM functionality, and support the product better, I’m sure they’d find a ready market. 

And we could all stop driving poor old e-learners nuts by offering them such dull rubbish. 

PS – having re-read this posting, parts of it read like an advert for Captivate. I promise you it isn’t. I don’t care what tool I use, as long as it does what I need it to do.

The replies have been really useful. I'm going to do a full summary in a few days, but briefy so far it's things like:

• Storytelling skills (including dialogue writing)
• Knowledge of gaming patterns
• Creative thinking skills
• Knowledge of scoring devices and mechanisms

What's come up in the conversation is that the role of e-learning ID/LDs in the design of SGs should, fairly obviously, be to input "learning expertise" into the process; to ensure that the "interleaving" of learning and gaming is effective.

But here's the problem: I'm not convinced that most ID/LDs - I'm talking about the foot-soldiers in the large agencies and the writer/producer/trainers in large organisations, not the bloggers and gurus - really know enough about learning to help much. The skills that the e-learning industry, as currently constituted, has taught these people, centre around client management and content processing, not learning experience design. These people are very highly skilled - don't get me wrong. But they don't know much about learning, because the endless swathes of systems training, product knowledge, procedure and compliance courses don't need learning expertise. Most IDs/LDs can squeeze a manual into a set of powerpoint slides, drag 'n drops and MCQs...but has their work taught them how to change people and improve performance? I don't think so. 

I'll push my point further. Firstly, many types of SG demand that designers shift from a content processing mindset towards one based around experience design. But tools and methodologies in the e-learning mainstream have very widely militated against experience design, in favour of ever more efficient content processing. Most rapid tools, as I've written elsewhere, are aimed at allowing monkeys to write dull rubbish. Again, don't get me wrong: you can use rapid tools to produce fantastically creative stuff, but that's not what they're aimed at. They're efficiency tools, and they've tended to push our already inappropriately skilled IDs/LDs further down the efficiency (as opposed to effectiveness) dead end.

Secondly, a critical problem is that, at least until the last few months, the e-learning industry have been commercially successful. So the feedback that e-learning designers are receiving from clients is "we like you...more of the same please". This is a little different from what many learners are saying, but in the great majority of cases, e-learners are not consulted on their views. A consequence of this dubious success is that I have sometimes observed, when trying to train e-learning designers in sophisticated (i.e. change oriented) learning methods, they are resistant; "our clients don't need this". (OK - but your learners do, and if you just bothered to measure effectiveness, I think your clients' minds would change pretty sharpish). This contrasts strongly with games designers, ad agency "creatives" and other non-e-learning design professionals, who I love working with, not just because of their creativity, but because of their open approach to learning about learning. I was once forced by a senior ad executive to stay behind after a workshop until 2am (no booze involved!) just talking about problem-based learning...

So I think the Serious Games community has to answer some "serious" questions:

• who's going to design the convincing, commercially-viable, performance-oriented SG's of the future? Is it the current generation of e-learning designers?
• how are we going to cultivate these designers? 
• are the e-learning agencies the gateway into SGs? Or are marketing/advertising/design agencies, who tend to be more customer/solution oriented, likely to be more responsive? Or specialist SG agencies, which is the current model? We shall see...

Given my focus on learner engagement, I was particularly taken by this list:

• Keep it quick
• Make it short
• Be really creative
• Make something that actually affects behavior (marketers want people to change their behavior – drink pepsi not coke, drink coke not pepsi)
• Make it truly memorable

Don’t just need IDs on your staff – get some creatives in there who look at things a bit differently.

Understand gaming theory and gaming design. 

Put the customer/consumer/learner first.  We say we do…but we don’t often do it.

I reckon the really tough one here is "be really creative". I'm not convinced that a lot of people in e-learning are particularly interested in creativity. Indeed I reckon many (most?) are fearful that the conditions necessary to stimulate creativity (lack of structure, "not knowing", playing not planning etc. etc.) will lead to loss of business. Indeed, the phrase "Don't just need IDs on your staff - get some creatives..." is particularly damning - isn't it!?

For me - and for many long-term learning designers - the act of designing a learning experience is deeply creative. It's why I do what I do.

Today there are entries about the effectiveness of serious gaming, and alternatives to conventional 2D page-turning methods for e-learning courses.

This blog will continue to rant occasionally on other themes....