Have you ever experienced learning design failure? It’s pretty easy to spot — the primary “tell” being the utterly confused or disgusted looks on the faces of your learners. Or it’s when your stakeholders or learners actively start sabotaging the design and doing whatever they want. Or they just get up and leave. That is a failure of learning design.

Having recently gone through a design failure, here’s some tips for avoiding this gut-wrenching experience.

Tip #1 – Make sure there is ONE owner/sponsor

The hardest thing for an outside consultant (or an inside L&D employee for that matter), is to make sure there is ONE person who owns the design. One person who will give you the sign-off, the go-ahead, the buy-in, the responsibility. If you find yourself in a situation where the owner or sponsor isn’t really owning the project — RUN, don’t walk, in the other direction. Ease your way out, or find a way to address the situation. To be honest, by the time you realize this, it’s often too late.

Tip #2 – Get your stakeholders’ attention

We all lead busy lives and our working lives seem to never let up. Learning initiatives often take a backseat to making the end-of-quarter numbers. So when you have your stakeholders review the information, make sure you are getting them at a point where they can pay attention and really try to understand what’s going on. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a nasty surprise just as you’re ready to launch, and where they will claim to have never been consulted.

Tip #3 – Make sure they understand the what the learning experience will feel like

Remember Tip #2 above — first get people’s attention. In addition, if people don’t do learning stuff every day, they will not easily understand the learning experience. Once you have their attention, do whatever it takes to help them understand the what the learners will be doing in the module, what it will feel like, what they will be doing, how the learning sequence ties together. Help them enter into the experience in your head. Then they will be able to give you honest, and grounded feedback on whether or not your learning design will work.

Don’t design alone

The hardest thing to do is do design alone without feedback. Do whatever it takes to get that feedback from your owner/sponsor, your stakeholders, your learners. Consult other learning designers if available. Do whatever it takes to get involvement and avoid surprises.

But sometimes, you just make mistakes. You make errors and there is no one to catch them. Or your design doesn’t quite fit expectations. Admit your problems and if there’s time and money, fix them. Otherwise, take a deep breath, do some meditation, and move on — and don’t forget the lesson you’ve learned.

Building on the idea of learning through examples, if you provide multiple examples to people learning a new idea, it usually leads to a better understanding of how the abstracted concept was derived. Thus the abstracted concept, or theory is just a way of explaining why the world works as it does.

Perceiving what to perceive: contrasting cases

However, when an individual is new to a domain, how they know what to look for? How do the know what is important? What is relevant to notice? This is where the design idea of contrasting cases comes to bear. Learners are given an example, then asked to derive an explanation of a pattern or what they see in front of them. Then they are given another example — a contrasting case — which is significantly different from the prior case or example. The learner then has to explain both cases. They have to create a model that can encompass both examples.

What the learner is doing is perceiving salient differences through multiple contrasting cases. Or as Daniel Schwartz & John Bransford write an article in 1998 called A Time for Telling: “analyzing contrasting cases can help learners generate the differentiated knowledge structures that enable them to understand a text deeply.” By learning how to perceive salient differences through multiple contrasting cases, and by creating new schema or mental models from learners’ own experience, learners created their own base of knowledge from which to further understand a concept.

A time for telling

After deeply engaging with material through contrasting cases, the learners are then more prepared to receive a lecture on the subject. “Noticing the distinctions between contrasting cases creates a ‘time for telling’; learners are prepared to be told the significance of the distinctions they have discovered” (Schwartz & Bransford.)

Analogies: a special kind of case
Likewise, having multiple, appropriate analogies or examples helps learners incrementally develop increasingly abstract schemas, especially if they are able to apply it to problem soon after learning. An analogy is a particular type of case that compares a concept familiar to a learner (the source) to an unfamiliar concept (a target). For example, comparing a plumbing system to the concept of cash flow, drawing a relationship between cash and the flow of water, between leaks and the loss of cash through bad accounts and interest. Based on this comparison, learners draw inferences about a target that deepens or elaborates their understanding.

Analogies are powerful tools for helping learners understand a new domain. The challenge is choosing an analogy that maps not just surface elements but that also maps relationships between the elements. For example, in the cash flow/plumbing system analogy, a hot water tank could be analogous to accounts receivable, a place where sales/incoming water is held before being transformed into cash bank balance/or hot water for the house. Even in this example, the analogy is a bit strained as water does not fully capture the transformation of cash as an asset as it moves through the system.

Analogical reasoning also depends on some prior knowledge of the source. However, even if the source is not completely understood by the learner it can still be helpful in learning. It is the comparison of the two cases, the source and the target, and examining their similarities that facilitates the creation of abstract concepts and schema.

Learning a complex new subject matter often takes extensive practice. Development of expertise requires many hours of practice. Malcolm Gladwell in his recent book Outliers emphasizes how it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. The research behind this claim comes  from studies done by John Hayes who found that geniuses in various fields produce their best work after 10 years of apprenticeship (which works out to about 10,000 hours); and by Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Romer (1993) which found that the best violinists practiced 7,000 hours before coming to a Berlin music academy, whereas the good violinists practiced only 5,000 hours. It takes about 3 years for London taxi drivers to acquire the “knowledge” of London in order to expertly navigate through the streets. It takes time to learn to learn the patterns, rules and problem-solving strategies for a domain of knowledge.

Deliberate practice – feedback

It is not any kind of practice that will help you become an expert – but deliberate practice. In this type of practice you are not just performing, but trying to learn how to do it better. Learners are usually highly motivated so when given feedback on their performance, and they carefully monitor their work to reduce differences and master the performance.

Julia with mallet - beware!

Part of deliberate practice is making mistakes and adjusting. I put this picture of Julia Child here as an inspiration. She is someone who learned to cook and become and expert in her field, through trial and error — doing it over and over again. And every meal was a test, and her diners without doubt gave her feedback. We should all be so fearless.

Test at regular intervals with feedback

Learners forget new information with time, very rapidly within the first day, and then less so over time. Testing learners has shown to help improve retention and recall. Therefore tests can be used not just for assessment, but as a study mechanism.

In studies by Landauer and Bjork (1978) they found that testing individuals  after a delay creates a sufficient level of difficulty that requires learners to work harder, thus improving their recall of an series of items. However, this was followed up Karpicke and Roediger (1979), who found that yes, creating a delay helped, but what helped more was giving people feedback after testing, therefore one could test at regular intervals, and provide feedback, and it would have the same effects.

It should be remembered that many of these experiments were done in the laboratory, on recall and retention of word pairs, so although likely useful in the “real world”, I have not seen field research verifying these experiments.

Practice, give feedback, test, give feedback and practice again. This guideline, like many of the others I have written about, should intuitively make sense. Perhaps in a context where compliance is an issue, the testing, practice, feedback cycle will be helpful (hopefully one can make it fun and not too onerous!) But being motivated, deliberate practice is the key to deep learning and expertise.

Happy Brains

Last night I uploaded a slidecast of Learning Design for the Brain – Multimedia Learning Principles.

This is a deck that I’ve been working on for some time — I created it back in August to better understand all those rather confusing and repetitive multimedia principles. It’s rather technical and academic in nature, but I’m hoping it will be useful, if only for the checklists at the end.

You can view the slidecast at my portfolio page or at SlideShare.net. Also available is a Checklist (PDF download) of  multimedia principles – this is helpful when designing.

Some notes  on creating slidecasts:

• if you’re doing this for the first time, use a short slide deck
• creating a separate audio file and synching online via the slidecast feature takes time! it’s a Flash-based system – very cool and easy to use but a little slow and painful for large files
• Slideshare does not export your animations – it flattens them. I realized this AFTER creating the audio. What a pain and workarounds to get that they way I imagined. Still not quite right.

So enjoy.

• Keep it simple
• Remove extraneous detail
• Pare the learning down to essential components
• Clearly explain how these components relate to one another
• Help learners focus on what’s important.

The capacity for the brain to hold new information is limited.

• By the capacity of working memory (sometimes called short-term memory)
• By the how complex the material is to the learner

So, when learning try to communicate new knowledge:

• no more then 2-4 elements at a given time (i.e. per slide)

Knitted Brain

Some background information and research in case you want to know:

• When introducing new knowledge, the constraints of working memory limit how much information can be processed in a given time frame. Miller, 1950′s discovered the rule of 7 — no more than 7 items could be kept active in short term memory.
• However, when you’re trying to understand something, relate components of an concept, compare and contrast, then you want no more than 2-4 elements in working memory. (Sweller’s cognitive load theory).
• Interference  can limit recall of information. Recall is worse the more facts you learn about a concept. Interference literally knocks the old information out of your brain when attaching new facts to a concept, if the facts have no intrinsic relationship to each other. It interferes when the memory one is trying to create. This is why extraneous information is often not advised. (Anderson, 2006).
• Fan effects – the more facts or links associated with a concept, the longer it will take to recall any one fact.
• Redundancy effects, as opposed to interference,  can help with recall. Especially when the pieces are linked appropriately.

• • Example of irrelevant facts that INTERFERE:
    • Locke was unhappy as a student at Westminster.
    • Locke felt fruits were unwholesome for children.
  • Example 2 of REDUNDANT facts that help in recall.
    • Mozart made a long journey from Munich to Paris.
    • Mozart was intrigued by musical developments coming out of Paris.
• People use redundant facts to infer the target concept.

For more information, read up on Sweller’s cognitive load theory, and Mayer’s theory of Multimedia Learning.

Example: Ways of framing a problem (from IDEO – The Art of Innovation book p.57):

• Spill-proof coffee cup lids - to narrow and assumes an answer
• Bicycle cup holders – too dry and product focused
• Helping bike commuters to drink coffee without spilling it or burning their tongues – GOOD framing – does not unduly limit the possible solutions

from christophniemann.com

The cognitive concept of functional fixedness is about how we develop a narrow view of the objects and tools in our environment. The classic example of functional fixedness is the “candle problem” used by Duncker in a 1945 experiment (see Wikipedia). We create a tool for a specific purpose and we cannot see other purposes for the tool. Or as Marshall McLuhan observes (borrowed from Christopher D. Sessums blog.):

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us – Marshall McLuhan

So when we encourage people to think outside the box to solve a problem, be aware of how you describe the box, and how you position all the things inside of the box.

Boxing in people – a story: I once suggested to a senior executive that our company only promotes people with MBAs or PhDs. He quickly reframed the issue and asked “Do we only promote people with advanced degrees or is there something about people who seek advanced degrees that get them promoted?” He succinctly reframed the issue from one of having the right credentials to an individual’s innate abilities, shifting the problem space from organizational issues to individual issues. Therefore, in seeking solutions, an individual looks within themselves rather than to the organization as a whole. (For the record, the answer pissed me off because I felt the shift in problem space at the time, although I could not articulate it.) As result, if one could not get promoted, it was because you could not demonstrate the abilities required — such as reframing your skills. Therefore, one becomes pigeon-holed.

How you frame a problem, and how you frame yourself, matters. Be aware of the box.

I’m creating a series of Guidelines posts based on my reading of cognitive brain research — specifically taking about the underlying research and theories, so you can see how I extrapolated into a learning guidelines.

Help learners imagine a specific context

• The learning context matters – people remember things better when you create a learning context similar to the context where the knowledge or skills will be used.
  • For example, research into teaching divers terms taught the memorization of terms either on dry-land or underwater. Then, when learners were asked to recall the terms underwater, those who learned the terms underwater had significantly better recall of terms (Godden and Baddeley, 1975). Wet learning, wet recall performed better – imagine implications for diver training.
  • The flipside is that those who learned in wet environments performed much worse when recalling in dry environments (compared to dry learning/wet recall)
  • Others had inconclusive results when looking for context dependence.
  • However, further research suggested that learners did better when asked to imagine the context in which terms would be used. (Eich, 1985)
  • How well the learners encodes context depends on how much the learner is able to imagine and thus integrate the context with memories.
  • Simulations can be effective if they make it easier to imagine where the learning takes place.

Help learners create meaningful interpretations by asking why

• Understanding why one is learning a concept allows learners to create meaningful elaborations.
  • Answering why questions about the learning, the better the recall (Pressley, McDaniel, Turnure, Wood, & Ahmad, 1987).
  • The more a learner elaborates or embellishes on a concept when trying to remember an item, the better the recall.
  • The more a learner generates their own elaborations, the better.
  • However, sometimes it helps to create elaborations that constrain the material being learned (B.S. Stein & Bransford, 1979).
  • In general, the more a learners engages with an concept, defines or limits the concept in their memory, the better they will be able to remember it.

Next post – frameworks.