Learn. Show. Repeat.

Category: Reflections

  • From Instruction to Experience

    Recently, I’ve noticed a shift happening within the learning field. The role of Instructional Designer (ID) is evolving into a Learning Experience Designer (LXD). So, what’s the difference? Ceren Korkmaz1 offers a distinction between the two terms that resonates with me: “instructional design emphasizes the source of knowledge – in other words the planning of the teaching activities. However, learning experience design concentrates more on the destination of knowledge, or the learner.”

    Having worked as an ID in the eLearning space for several years, much of the focus of my work has been on the design of content – the source of knowledge. The organisation and breaking down of information. The placement of text and images. The use of interactive elements – clicking, dragging and hovering. The creation of scenarios. The addition of resources and hyperlinks. The creation of assessment questions. This was always designing for the end user. However, LXD is about designing with the end user.

    What I’ve also come to realise is that I’ve been an experience designer for some time. I never really thought about it that way. When I created an eLearning module, I was also creating an experience for the end user. I just wasn’t involving them in the design process. And it’s not just eLearning modules that create an experience. All types of learning solutions do – classroom sessions, curated content, social learning, videos, scenarios and job aids. If they’re not useful and relevant to the end user, then the experience will be poor no matter how beautiful they look or how much time they took to create.

    The move from ID to LXD means I’ll need to develop new skills and mindsets. My wanting to find out more about designing experiences has led me to field of User Experience (UX) design and design thinking. I’ve joined the Interaction Design Foundation and have completed one of their online courses User Experience: The Beginners Guide (they have a large selection of online courses and you can take as many as you’d like as part of your membership). I’ve started to expand my personal learning network by following some UX groups and people on Twitter:

    Interaction Design Org @interacting | UX Links @uxlinks | UX Collective @uxdesigncc

    Doug Collins @DougCollinsUX | Sarah Doody @sarahdoody | Danny Seals @thedannyseals 

    I now find myself thinking more broadly about user experience in many everyday things like using websites and products. My workplace has adopted Human-Centred Design (HCD) further fuelling my curiosity and desire to integrate this way of thinking and working into the design and creation of learning experiences.

    LXD presents an opportunity to better understand the problem that we’re trying to solve. To find out about the context of the work end users do. To prototype and test ideas. To use feedback to make improvements. I’m not suggesting that LXD is about creating whatever the end users want. It’s about involving them to ensure we create experiences that are what they need in order to perform.

    1 Korkmaz, C., (2018), Driving Educational Change: Innovations in Action eBook, Chapter 3: ID 2 LXD” From Instructional Design to Learning Experience Design: The Rise of Design Thinking.

    Image source: Death to Stock photos

  • Outcomes over outputs

    In learning and development, we’re eager to tell others what it is we do, the services we provide, how we’re unique and who we serve. We do a good job of describing and counting our activities and the number of people who use them. We speak in terms of outputs.

    Outputs are what we produce.

    But our organisations are less interested in these things. What’s more valuable to them is the impact of our activities. They want outcomes.

    Outcomes are the differences we make.

    How can we measure the outcomes of our activities? How do we know we’ve made a difference?

    Image source: Morguefile.com

  • At the coalface

    I’ve said before that the role of learning and development is to support the people in our organisations who do the actual work. This isn’t to dismiss our work as unimportant but:

    We’re not on the phones speaking to clients.

    We’re not working outside in all weather conditions.

    We’re not growing the number of new customers to our business.

    We’re not on the production line in a factory.

    However, we’re attempting to create learning experiences and support tools for them. Our goal is to improve their performance, but we often don’t understand what their job is like because we work at a distance from them. At the security of our desks. Behind our computers.

    Working in an L&D team within an organisation presents an opportunity for us to find out more about what our end users do. More importantly, how they do it in the context of their day-to-day.

    Let’s step away from our desks and spend some time with those at the coalface. If we invest our time with the people in our organisations, we might better understand how effective our ‘solutions’ really are.

    Image source: Morguefile.com

  • Labels

    e-learning. Social learning. Game-based learning. Mobile learning. eLearning. Experiential learning. Micro learning. Just-in-time learning. Gamified learning. Self-directed learning. elearning.

    The learning field loves a label.

    But does it really matter?

    The organisations we work for aren’t interested in our labels, they care about one thing: Impact.

    If our solutions to business problems lack impact, then it doesn’t matter what the solution is labelled because the problem will remain. So, we can keep throwing more ‘types’ of learning into the mix and hoping for the best or we can invest time into examining the impact our solutions have made.

    To be continued…

    Dymo label maker
    Image source: Morguefile

  • Happy New Year!

    Another year begins.

    A fresh start.

    A new page.

    I’ve always liked this time of year because it feels like so much is possible. Looking back and last year is done and like the years before we can’t change what has happened. The past is in the past as they say. But this year is just getting started and I’m feeling optimistic about the coming year because to a large extent what I want the year to be is up to me.

    Last year was a quiet one for me on the blogging and sharing front (I’m feeling rusty writing this post). This was partly due to having a young child which brings about a shift in priorities in a good way. The need for sleep becomes way more important. Despite this, I tried to stay in touch with the happenings in the learning field when I could by reading articles/posts and listening to podcasts here and there. There still seems to be a lot of people talking about what L&D needs to do, with far fewer sharing the how.

    My other reason for less blogging was that I felt flat, lacked motivation and that I’d lost my purpose for writing. I was tired of the constant content focus in learning – the course as the default. I was tired of creating eLearning content dumps where more meaningless interactivity was the goal. Unfortunately, the content design approach is still widespread and as a result we’ve conditioned stakeholders, SME’s, clients and decision makers that this is what we do. The people that suffer are those taking the modules.

    I’ve said before that our role is to support the people in our organisations who do the actual work. Working in learning presents an opportunity to get closer to our organisations and find out what people do, how they do it and what their challenges are. Then we’ll be better placed to offer solutions and experiences that have real impact rather than focusing on the number of objects we produce.

    Nothing will change if we keep doing the same thing. So that’s my goal for this year, to do things differently, evolve my practice and to reflect and share via this blog.

    Happy 2019!

    Image source: Canva