Seriously Challenging eLearning?

I spent an informative hour in the company of Michael Allen (Allen Interactions) the other day. To add some context (and to show that I am not name dropping a man who doesn’t know me from Adam) we were in the company of around 500 others who were listening to his presentation e-Learning: Are You Serious? (I was John 3, in case you were looking out for me on the webinar). Let me extend the context of our meeting. I had previously (well five days earlier) come across the Serious e-Learning Manifesto, which is a set of principles defined and proposed by Michael Allen, Julie Dirksen, Clark Quinn and Will Thalheimer “to elevate elearning to the height of its promise.”

Having read through the 22 principles, I quickly (they are quite short) came to the conclusion that they were pretty much common-sense comments on designing learning content. Have a look yourself and flip them, turning negatives to positives and positives to negatives, and you will see what I mean. It called to mind the almost ludicrous obviousness of that part of the Hippocratic Oath that says doctors should “do no harm”. Of course a doctor should do no harm and clearly an instructional designer should target improved performance (#4). Why would doctors make people more poorly on purpose or IDs make people worse at their jobs? Ridiculous…but…there is considerable virtue to be had from making us think about whether we are doing what we set out to do (sorry about the tongue-twister there).

The talk was interesting and Mr Allen made a number of compelling points. He was, of course, right when he said that everybody like demos and hands-on exercises best in any course. He proved this by demonstrating one of his own company’s e-learning courses. The course content is unimportant to this blog. The two points that he made are critical. Firstly, he prefixed the demo by apologising that he was using an old course and commenting that his team felt that the graphics were rather dated and newer courses were more attractive. (That is not a quote but the gist of what was said). Secondly, he showed that asking people to make challenging decisions based on the information available in the course makes for far more memorable learning; the character in the course was faced with some managerial decisions on staff absence.

(Was that it? Two points in an hour? Of course, not. He made lots of other points, but these are the two that stuck with me. Like all courses or lectures that you attend, there are always a couple of things that really leap out at you, and these are mine).

Let’s look at them in reverse order. We all put assessments or knowledge checks or quizzes in our courses. If we don’t there is normally a really good reason why not, because we, the student and the person commissioning the course expect them to be there. But how often are these simply memory tests to see if the student has bothered to actually read or listen to the content, or true/false, yes/no answers where the student is either right or wrong? These represent the type of questioning that makes our learning didactic; we have a lesson or a point and our course ensures people learn that lesson. But does remembering a magic, “right” answer for a few minutes mean that the lesson is really learnt? I am afraid not. 

However, the demonstrated course fed the student some information in the form of a scenario, gave opportunities to research options, and even let them phone a friend (or at least ask an expert avatar for some advice), so that they could decide on the best answers that they could give. A lot of people would describe it as a sort of game; it had animated graphics, bright colours, and lots of buttons to press, so it looked like a computer game. I call it play. There was a challenge but no rules, just some basic guidance on how to navigate the screens. You could make bad choices and the ramifications of these could have a compound effect, but you could always start again, learning from past choices and maybe making more informed ones second or third time around. There were still right (or at least righter) answers, but there were degrees of rightness; solutions came in shades of grey rather than black and white. The effort it took to come up with an answer that the student was happy with could make it a real, rather than a rote, learning event.

That brings me to the second point. The aesthetic beauty of the course. If these were old-fashioned graphics then the new stuff must be Pixar-esque. And there is the problem. For most of us, the budget to develop potentially an hour of complex, branching graphical scenarios is a pipedream. Even if we have the money and time, we may not have the necessary skills. We have to buy in graphical design experts or farm it out to companies who have the skills to do this sort of thing; not educationalists, but graphic artists.

But that is where Michael Allen is right to be demonstrating a course that has less sophisticated graphics. In fact, I would prefer that he demonstrated one with no animated graphics, avatars or whatnot at all. The story is the key to engagement. The course set a challenge and then said to the student, “Go and develop your solution.” I didn’t need faces. I didn’t need avatars. I didn’t need bright colours. I do all of that better I my head. I had a challenge and some resources to help me work out a solution…my solution…and then I am told the consequences of my choices. They may be bad, they may be good. My bad may be your good. Now that is real learning.

If you want to see what minimalist graphics can do, have a look at SPENT from the Urban Ministries of Durham. No avatars, no collaboration, four colours (with black being predominant) but a compelling challenge; can you survive? (No you don’t have to kill anything. If you have read my other blog you will know that I don’t get much motivation out of slaying orcs). This is, arguably, a highly didactic game or play scenario; there is a moral lesson to learn and you have any number of ways of learning it. The key point is that you choose your way to learn their lesson. A neat piece of design if ever I saw one.

You could, at a stretch, do most of it in PowerPoint; lots of branching and I would not be keen on trying to make changes later, but it could be done. Or, as is done in Spent, you could use Flash. I don’t really care; use HTML5 or anything else. The important thing is that you don’t have to be Michelangelo to create the images it uses. In fact, you could have any shape or symbol to replace the graphics; they are not important. The story and the fact that you have to make choices and eat or starve based on these choices is the point.

Michael Allen was very keen on the whole idea of consequences. You don’t just give an answer that has a binary value; right or wrong. You give an answer that reflects the nuances of real situations. The choices themselves become actors on the story. Just as in real life, the choices that we make have implications for the next set of choices we will have to make. 

All of this sounds wildly complex. Well, it is certainly more challenging to design, but isn’t that the point. We are all learning to develop learning and if we don’t challenge ourselves, how can we expect to challenge our students?