CHAPTER 21

The Journey to Learning Experience Design

George Hall

While learning experience design (LXD) may appear to be an expression of a new definition for an evolved mindset, improved practices, and a broader perspective, it is not new. In fact, this evolved mindset, while not widely understood as a coordinated and integrated set of design principles by many people, has been recognized by some innovative educators for decades.

Some try to define LXD using well-worn phrases such as “LXD is learner centered,” “LXD acknowledges that training is not always the answer,” “LXD offers a meaningful user experience,” or that “learning is a journey, not an event.” But those platitudes have been around for 30 years. Others say that experiential learning is at the heart of LXD, but it has been valued since John Dewey advocated for it in the 1920s and others such as Bloom, Gardner, Lewin, and Kolb followed. LXD has received lots of attention as the new way to shape learning experiences. Is it new and where do the roots of LXD lie?

At a certain level of educational practice, we can agree that definitive prescriptions are not possible. Elliot Eisner (1998) has persuasively argued that:

Although a few ambitious talent development professionals claim to have invented LXD, several highly creative pioneers have been incorporating LXD design principles into their courses since the late 1950s.

Starting the Journey

Following Eisner, I started my journey not by identifying gaps in the literature, but rather by finding a real-world situation that seemed to be worthy of studying. I am a traveler on a lifelong journey, walking through fields and forests, looking at the scenery, and trying to decide what path to take next. I do not know exactly what the path will be like. I can see some places I would like to go—there, that mountain off in the distance—but I do not know exactly how to get there or if I will get there at all. And of course, when I get closer, I might decide it is not as appealing as it seemed, and another destination is more worthy.

Project Outreach and Wilbert McKeachie

In 1985, as an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, I stumbled upon a particularly well-designed course called Project Outreach. This course provided thousands of Michigan students a unique service-learning experience unlike any other available at that time. I was able to simultaneously learn about psychology-in-action, explore myself and my interests, and provide a meaningful service to the Ann Arbor community. Clearly, someone was a master designer and ahead of the time. What had I stumbled upon? How can I unravel this mystery?

I began to research my professor and our program director, Wilbert McKeachie. In 1945—after serving in WWII’s Pacific Theater as a radar and communications officer on a destroyer—McKeachie enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan to study psychology. At Michigan, he participated in a crucial formative experience as a teaching fellow in an introductory psychology course led by Harold Guetzkow. Guetzkow, who had also earned his doctorate at Michigan, was fascinated by the fields of psychology, sociology, and political science. A pioneer in education, he built simulations incorporating many of the learning experience design principles we now focus on as “new.” He studied the pedagogy involved in designing such simulations and used what he learned to design new simulations. His most famous was the Inter-Nation Simulation, which uses simulation to study relations among nations, similar to war games, for chiefs of state and foreign ministers to learn skill from games.

The Project Outreach class was a crucial, formative experience for me—just as Harold Guetzkow’s section had been for McKeachie. Project Outreach involved volunteering as a crisis counselor at Ozone House, a shelter for runaway teenagers, and then reflecting on the experience itself, guided readings, and the pedagogy behind the designed learning experience. This immersive class had it all and more. It was human-centered and inclusive, provided positive and meaningful learning experiences, emphasized that learning is a journey, relied on research-based findings to make design decisions, sought input from students and participants, used real-world metrics to measure performance improvement, emphasized sharing and social engagement, and was innovative and flexible. Ozone House, a nonprofit working with University of Michigan students, was a special place as well. It has won numerous awards since 1960. Project Outreach continues to thrive, currently delivering innovative training programs as well as a leadership institute.

McKeachie, a longtime faculty member at Michigan, taught until 2005. He was innovative and a true force at Michigan’s famous School of Education (SOE). In 1950, he started to distribute a manual he had written to his teaching assistants to provide proven educational strategies and techniques. This informal manual of best practices evolved into McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers. Initially published in 1951, the book’s 14th edition was released in 2013.

McKeachie was later involved in the collaborative founding of a combined program in education and psychology that became one of Michigan’s first joint PhD programs. These programs created select groups of outstanding scholars and researchers who studied, collaborated, and worked in interdisciplinary environments, such as psychology, education, sociology, anthropology, political science, and social work. McKeachie also established the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT), which helped translate teaching and instructional design best practices across interdisciplinary environments.

Frederick Goodman and the ICS

Frederick Goodman was a colleague of McKeachie’s and another education giant. He was later named a professor of education emeritus at the SOE and taught there until 2005. Goodman pioneered the design of teacher-training residency programs and internship models. He was deeply inspired by the work of John Dewey, who spent 10 years at Michigan (1880–1890) and left an indelible imprint on the SOE. Goodman worked to embody Dewey’s idea that “experience is education.”

Toward that end, Goodman was foundational in the creation of the Interactive Communications and Simulations (ICS) group at Michigan, which specialized in experiential education, game design, authentic assessment, and entrepreneurial education. The team designed experiential education, developed new game design principles, and gleaned insights from expertly designed service-learning projects that embodied modern human-centered design principles, obtaining thoughtful answers to questions such as:

•  What are good problems for human-centered design?

•  What problems do not require human-centered design?

They learned that human-centered design is most useful if you are working on problems that are open ended and ill defined, where cause and effect are not clear and have many interrelated components that operate as a complex system. Human-centered design is useful when the problem is new and you find myriad human perspectives.

Human-Centered Design

At ICS, Goodman’s core team pioneered human-centered design techniques, philosophies, and methods decades before the field would begin to move in this direction. Essentially, they saw LXD as a variation of UR/UX (client-centric creation of user research and user experience), where the users are learners. What is the difference between UXD and LXD? Although these terms started to be used widely 10–20 years ago, this group was early to recognize the importance of UX for learning and education. When you are designing for learning and using human-centered design, they believed that you should consider the needs of the user from the users’ perspective, asking:

•  What sort of problem or challenge does the user have?

•  How can learning design help them meet that challenge?

This group was quick to observe that learners may have many different needs. In other words, while learners have unmet needs, they might not be the only needs that matter. The learner, for example, might need to get a good grade, be placed on the dean’s list, or get accepted into a graduate program, and these needs are not strictly learning related. There might also be other needs or even competing needs. For example, a company may believe that employees have a certain set of skills, yet because there are many different stakeholders, the actual learning need may be buried. The learners’ primary goal may not be learning, despite their participation in a learning program.

Perspective Taking

The team at ICS pioneered learning experience design principles by intuitively practicing them, starting in the 1990s. Although the group now practices these principles more intentionally, they came to realize that the most important part of the design process was defining the problem or framing it in a way that looks at the world from the users’ perspective. In that sense, the perspective-taking parts of the service learning projects they designed prepared them to embrace what we now see as the ideas of human-centered design, the design mindset, and design thinking.

The team discovered that you can create experiences that generate further experiences and encourage the practice of perspective taking. These experiences can even be artificial, taking form as a simulation, social simulation, or games. Although these scholars may not have even heard of LXD, they were already designing through perspective taking and designing for people’s needs.

Story-Based Learning

The team’s learning designs were typically grounded in well-conceived stories with a clear beginning, middle, and end. A recurrent theme was the notion of designed provocation. In the content they designed, in the characters selected, and in the kinds of exchanges fostered, one of the team’s prime tasks was to keep it interesting by making the learning experience as interactive and provocative as possible. These designed provocations were enacted in a strategic and coordinated way. As a central aspect of the choice architecture, they empowered learners, altering their behavior in predictable ways without forbidding or foreclosing any options or significantly changing their incentives.

Rapid Prototyping

I believe that you are unable to reach great LXD from simply reading about the history of instructional design. It will not happen. A leap of imagination is required to bring all the necessary pieces and perspectives together with skill. Goodman, who was always able to attract talented people to his service-learning projects at ICS, was a famous connector. He liked to introduce two people by saying, “I do not know what you have in common, but you will figure it out; go talk.” He was always right. He had a design mindset from the beginning. Such a mindset involves trying something in a low-stakes environment, prototyping it by taking your users’ perspective into consideration, attempting to define your problem, and then identifying things to try.

A Radical Research Methodology

What was truly radical about the ICS group in the 1990s was its approach to conducting educational research. At that time, the classic way to do educational projects was to get a substantial grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), build a piece of software, launch the project at a dozen schools, collect test data, write a paper, and then write your next grant. What this classic method fails to recognize is that the investment in the project’s infrastructure influences the researchers’ openness to feedback. Researchers want the feedback but cannot do much with it because they already built an infrastructure, and spent money, time, and human effort building this software. In other words, their ability to systematically apply design-thinking principles may be compromised by the structures they built, had invested in, and needed to maintain.

Agile Team Dynamics

By design, the ICS team was agile, nimble, and unencumbered by methods ill suited to their purpose. They mastered the process of rapidly prototyping learning experience designs. “Let’s see if we can put together a website in a weekend,” they’d say. “We acknowledge that it might not be that great, it might crash a lot, and maybe we’ll have to do some behind-the-scenes-stuff, but let’s try it, and see how it works.”

This team rapidly prototyped their designs, did so at an extremely high skill level, gathered feedback, and then incorporated it into the design to improve it. They were incredibly modest and able to collaborate, and lacked any ego or intellectual investment in the designs they prototyped.

Ironically, one reason the group was able to last and flourish was because they were not funded by major grants. Instead, they work with minimal resources, which forces them to figure out how to design on a shoestring, advertise by word-of-mouth, and incorporate LXD service-learning projects into existing courses and programs. The courses they designed, however, became masterpieces, which were built over several years by a diverse team of learning professionals constantly prototyping new designs. Their skill sets covered a wide variety of areas including classroom teaching, online teaching, game design, pedagogical theory, instructional design, learning experience design, graphic design, and web design.

Brilliant—But Not Mainstream

Expertise in these areas is hard-won—the ability to integrate insights uncovered across disciplines is only the result of a lifetime spent focusing on these topics. That said, as powerful as these innovative LXD projects were, they did not easily fit into existing school structures or even appeal to the mindsets most teachers had at the time. They were more in the long tail of educational practice; in other words, they were amazing, but not mainstream. However, they were able to succeed despite the lack of strong institutional or financial support. The ICS team’s primary focus was, and continues to be, to inspire more people in the world to run their own games or start their own projects or activities that incorporate these powerful LXD principles.

The Journey to Learning Experience Design

My journey to learning experience design has come full circle. After graduating from Michigan in the late 1980s, I went on to focus on a career as an instructional designer and project manager at Walt Disney and other companies. Most recently, I returned to Michigan—33 years after my enrollment in Project Outreach but still affected by it—to start a master’s degree in learning experience design. Not surprisingly, I found a vibrant intellectual community and was quickly drawn to the evolved mindsets evidenced in the educational simulations designed by students and tenured faculty, many of whom were Goodman’s and McKeachie’s doctoral students.

Final Thoughts

Like so many of the “new” developments we see in learning and development, LXD isn’t all that new. McKeachie and Goodman are undeniably seminal figures in LXD thinking. Fortunately, because they led and influenced generations of distinguished educators, it is still possible to follow in their footsteps and embrace the traditions they’ve established. LXD has evolved over decades to be embraced by all of us today.

About the Author

George Hall is a learning solutions architect and instructional designer with extensive experience leading the digital transformation of learning services, developing digital learning products, and managing education and learning services for global Fortune 500 companies, US government agencies, state governments, and nonprofits. In his spare time, he volunteers as a learning industry advisor to a nonprofit educational charity that actively supports schools, government organizations, and other nonprofits. When not teaching, writing, or developing his EdTech superhero skills, George loves spending time traveling, cooking, and laughing with his wife and wonderful family. He can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about George at driveontheocean.org.

References

Alter, A. 2018. Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. New York: Penguin Books.

Anderson, S.P. 2011. Seductive Interaction Design: Creating Playful, Fun, and Effective User Experiences. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

Brown, T. 2009. Change By Design. New York: Harper Collins.

Dean, J. 2013. Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick. Boston: Da Capo Press.

Eisner, E. 1998. The Kind of Schools We Need: Personal Essays. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: AnchorBooks.

Goodman, F.L. 1992. “Instructional Gaming Through Computer Conferencing.” In Empowering Networks, edited by M.D. Waggoner, 101–126. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.

Goodman, F.L. 1995. “Practice in Theory.” Simulation & Gaming 26(2): 178–189.

Kupperman, J., G. Weisserman, and F.L. Goodman. 2001. “The Secret Lives of Students and Politicians: Online and Face-to-Face Discourse in Two Political Simulations.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Seattle, WA.

McKeachie and M. Svinicki. 2013. McKeachie’s Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers, 14th ed. First published in 1951. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing.

Ozone House. n.d. “Job Training and Leadership.” ozonehouse.org/how-we-help/job-training-leadership.

Recommended Resources

Collins, A., and R. Halverson. 2009. Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. New York: Teachers College Press.

Facer, K. 2011. Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change. London: Routledge.

Turkel, S. 2017. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.

Wesch, M. 2007. “A Vision of Students Today.” YouTube video, October 12, 2007. youtu.be/dGCJ46vyR9o.