What if the learner’s experience was ‘hard fun’: challenging, but engaging, yielding a desirable experience, not just an event to be tolerated, OR what is learning experience design?
Can you imagine creating a ‘course’ that wins raving fans? It’s about designing learning that is not only effective but seriously engaging. I believe that this is not only doable, but doable under real world constraints.
Let me start with this bit of the wikipedia definition of experience design:
the practice of designing…with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience…, with less emphasis placed on increasing and improving functionality
That is, experience design is about creating a user experience, not just focusing on their goals, but thinking about the process as well. And that’s, to me, what is largely ignored in creating elearning is thinking about process from the learner’s perspective. There are really two components: what we need to accomplish, and what we’d like the learner to experience.
Our first goal still has to look at the learning need, and identify an objective that we’d like learners to meet, but even that we need to rethink. We may have constraints on delivery environment, resources, and more that we have to address as well, but that’s not the barrier. The barrier is the mistake of focusing on knowledge-level objectives, not on meaningful skill change. Let me be very clear: one of the real components of creating a learning experience is ensuring that we develop, and communicate, a learning objective that the learner will ‘get’ is important and meaningful to them. And we have to take on the responsibility for making that happen.
Then, we need to design an experience that accomplishes that goal, but in a way that yields a worthwhile experience. I’ve talked before about the emotional trajectory we might want the learner to go through. It should start with a (potentially wry) recognition that this is needed, some initial anxiety but a cautious optimism, etc. We want the learner to gradually develop confidence in their ability, and even some excitement about the experience and the outcome. We’d like them to leave with no anxiety about the learning, and a sense of accomplishment. There are a lot of components I’ve talked about along the way, but at core it’s about addressing motivation, expectations, and concerns.
Actually, we might even shoot for more: a transformative experience, where the learner leaves with an awareness of a fundamental shift in their understanding of the world, with new perspectives and attitudes to accompany their changed vocabulary and capabilities. People look for those in many ways in their life; we should deliver.
This does not come from applying traditional instructional design to an interview with a SME (or even a Subject Matter Network, as I’m increasingly hearing and inclined to agree). As I defined it before, learning design is the intersection of learning, information, and experience design. It takes a broad awareness of how we learn, incorporating viewpoints behavior, cognitive, constructive, connective, and more. It takes an awareness of how we experience: media effects on cognition and emotion, and of the dramatic arts. And most of all, it takes creativity and vision.
However, that does not mean it can’t be developed reliably and repeatably, on a pragmatic basis. It just means you have to approach it anew. It take expertise, and a team with the requisite complementary skill sets, and organizational support. And commitment. What will work will depend on the context and goals (best principles, not best practices), but I will suggest that with good content development processes, a sound design approach, and a will to achieve more than the ordinary. This is doable on a scalable basis, but we have to be willing to take the necessary steps. Are you ready to take your learning to the next level, and create experiences?
What Does All This Have to Do With The New Group Coaching Programs at VirtualMeetingStartup.com?
Let me briefly explain. For the past three years, Clark Quinn’s thinking has been of enormous value to me while I’ve been researching and testing virtual meeting tools. I stumbled across this piece today through a pointer in Harold Jarche’s blog and I have to say that this post describes in the most eerily synchronistic way the assumptions that have been driving me as I’ve been building my new coaching programs for VirtualMeetingStartup.com.
The Madhatter’s Tea Party Group Coaching Programs are, precisely, experiential learning programs. And as I design them, I’ve been focused much more on creating quality user experiences than on increasing or improving functionality.
Why? Because the kinds of people I’m most interested in supporting are already experienced teachers, trainers, coaches, and consultants who have developed high levels of functionality. They just don’t know how to take the things they’re best at and move their interaction with others into cyberspace. They’re subject matter experts (SMEs), but that’s not what’s most precious about them. It’s their compassion, their creativity, their curiosity, and the depth of their empathy for others that make a real difference in others’ lives. Like they say these days, “information is free, experience is expensive.”
Out of my extensive research and testing experiences, it seems to me the best way for teachers, trainers, coaches, and consultants to learn to SHARE THEIR LIVING PRESENCE WITH OTHERS across space and time is to set up situations in which they just DO it. And then fail to connect. And then learn from their failure. And then do it again. And fail to connect in another way. Learn from the failure. And do it again. Etc…
And, since adults really don’t enjoy failing – especially when they’re sitting in a room all by themselves in uncomfortable chairs, staring at a monitor, wearing a headset that pulls their hair and makes their ears hurt – I’ve designed the learning experience to provide regular high-energy interaction, in real-time. And what they’re doing is learning to dump their fear, worry, embarrassment, and self-consciousness as quickly as possible.
Because of this, the Madhatter’s Group Coaching Programs focus on the Madhatters un-learning how to act like subject matter experts – especially at a distance – more than on any deliberate, staged learning about pumping their expertise through the computer into someone else’s mind.
I’m documenting every step of the process so that the design can be repeated, quite pragmatically. But I’m definitely seeing that what I’m doing is creating an experience design that I’ll be replicating, not a traditional “instructional design.”
Fascinating work for me! Hard, hard fun!
Join us, if this interests you…
I’ll be writing more about all this in the days and weeks ahead. What do you think about all this?
